Conference Program

In this paper we focus on Bourdieu’s concept of illusio. We are interested in its utility for making sense of the ways institutional conceptions of ‘belonging’ have become the ‘go-to’ policy and practice response for managing entrenched inequalities and disparities in student experience in Higher Education. Within different national contexts belonging has a long conceptual history within educational research and it has been considered by sociologists of education with nuance and care (e.g. Hurtado & Carter 1997; Finn 2017; Thomas KC 2018; Gravett & Ajawi 2021). Notwithstanding this longstanding academic engagement, belonging has however, come to represent a codified set of initiatives and discourses that are increasingly taken up and deployed by policy makers and sector leaders as part of a crisis management apparatus that seeks to ‘deal with’ deeply ingrained structural inequalities (e.g. mental health and well being, attainment differentials by race, class and gender). This is particularly heightened within the UK where the commodification and individualisation of HE has continued unabated for thirty years. In this context belonging is misrecognised as an individualised commodity to be acquired through induction to the ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1990, p.66) in the higher education field rather than something that requires deep structural change.

We bring illusio into conversation with institutional conceptions of belonging to offer a theorisation of the processes through which the structural conditions that shape inequalities are silenced and misrecognised in policy and practice responses. Illusio denotes the condition of being so caught up and invested in the game, that the game itself goes unquestioned, and can account for the misrecognition of belonging as a commodity delivered through conformity to existing field structures. This framing of belonging is dressed as a means of delivering change whilst simultaneously maintaining the existing field structure and doxa. We argue that this creates a toxic illusio where the surface appearance of commitment to institutional change obscures the reality of immovable institutionalised structures of inequality. We show that for the maintenance of inequalities not only is it necessary for those directing or implementing policy to be under the spell of the illusio, but for the system to continue to exist and reproduce itself, institutions need the perceived beneficiaries of belonging agendas to similarly recognise, buy into and ultimately conform to the rules of the game. The paper demonstrates that through countless acts of recognition (Bourdieu 1990) - brought about by everyday practices that reproduce the commonsense position that belonging is something to strive for and for institutions to endow – a toxic illusio of belonging is generated. This creates the conditions under which belonging as an agenda goes unquestioned and institutional belonging practices and activities are misrecognised as addressing inequalities when they are all the while obfuscating the structural conditions of their existence.