Everyday Mobile Belonging

Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities

Kirsty Finn, Mark Holton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350041097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Études supérieures

This book presents a framework for a new kind of thinking about student mobilities and belonging, which foregrounds the everyday and rhythmic dimensions of students' experiences. Using case studies from a variety of UK higher education contexts, this book develops the concepts of everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness. The authors draw on key ideas about the changing characteristics of UK higher education and of student belonging, exploring the central themes of the sensory, affective and emotional aspects of student mobilities; contested and mobile belongings; and the significance of everyday life, to bring a new dimension to the literature on inter and intra-national student mobilities. This is achieved through an examination of the innovative ways in which social science methods have been (re)imagined through mobility, with a specific focus on youth and education. Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton bring together theory and research from the fields of education studies, geography and sociology, and combine this with a discussion of rich empirical data from three UK-based research projects to set out an explicitly mobility-centred approach to 21st-century student experiences. The findings can be recognised globally because they synthesise debates about travel and transport, students' sense of place and feelings of belonging, and the interrelationship between physical, social and virtual mobilities that higher education brings together. In doing so, this text offers a coherent and grounded campaign for theory and research within studies of higher education that foreground multiple mobilities and diverse feelings of belonging.

Part One

Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: (New) Theoretical Directions for Understanding Student Geographies and (Im)Mobilities

1

Patterns, Policies, Discourse: Transformations in UK Higher Education

Introduction

We open Part One with an overview chapter that provides a sense of how common understandings of student (im)mobilities have emerged in the UK context, particularly since the expansion of the sector became a key priority of government policy in the mid-twentieth century. We are especially concerned with the ways this expansion has subsequently shaped the contemporary neo-liberal higher education landscape, and the patterns of participation that are currently evident. The following chapter examines a number of transformations that have taken place within the UK higher education sector – which have stemmed from both domestic and global shifts – to reveal the ways in which changing patterns of student geographies have been shaped by policies around massification and widening access, the pervasive discourse of the market, choice and value for money and the changing composition of the student body across all levels and modes of higher-level study.

As shall become clear, these patterns, policies and discourses have framed higher education as a site which demands, excludes and, quite often, normalises certain kinds of social and geographical (im)mobilities, simultaneously attaching a hierarchy of mobility practices to different groups of students, depending upon their social position and access to social, cultural, economic and mobility capitals. This has, inevitably, led to particular ‘ways of seeing’ students in the UK and elsewhere, which – as we demonstrate here and also in Chapter 2 – has had implications for the conceptual frameworks scholars have come to rely on to make sense of the ways students move, take up space and, crucially, find ways to belong in various higher education contexts.

In order to map these shifts and changes, this first chapter is divided into two main sections. The first briefly outlines the historical context of policy change in UK higher education since the 1960s – a key period in the story of higher education reform – and links these shifts to a set of mobility practices that have become embedded in the ways student experiences have been routinely discussed and, thus, widely represented for several decades. The second section examines contemporary UK higher education policies, and reflects explicitly on the years since the Browne Review (2010), which marked an important interlude, not only in terms of UK higher education funding and access, but a more general shift in the sociopolitical and economic landscape, following the global financial crises of 2008. Here, we examine how patterns of participation and discourses around student mobility have been (re)framed by government and societal responses to this defining historical moment which triggered swingeing austerity measures, a growing culture of neo-liberal marketisation and an increasingly internationalist focus within UK institutions. The chapter outlines how these transformations have impacted upon the geographies of higher education participation, particularly the emergence of ‘local’ students and regional orientations that, in turn, have implications for post-student mobilities and graduate outcomes. In doing so, we argue this has reframed how and in what ways different students, at different levels and at different stages in the student life cycle, are recognised and therefore (de)valued for their differing orientations towards (im)mobility.

Twentieth-century (im)mobilities: Widening access and the shifting patterns of UK higher education participation

The story of higher education in the twentieth-century UK is one of widening access, increased participation of young adults (as well as mature and non-traditional learners) and, as the new millennium dawned, a radical reorientation of the discourses of higher-level study from a public good, to a private benefit. These changing patterns of participation, supported (and in many cases hindered) by policy interventions and the increasingly powerful narrative of meritocratic aspiration, gave way to particular geographies of higher education at different historical moments, which include classed, gendered and racialised (im)mobilities, the cultural phenomenon of shared living among the young, and, related to this, the rise of studentification in major towns and cities (Smith 2005). Here we consider these changing student geographies against the backdrop of UK higher education policy in the mid-to-end period of the twentieth century that focused specifically on the shift towards a massified and more diverse sector.

We begin with a necessary account of how these policies have in some ways disrupted the normative ideal of the full-time, residentially mobile and unencumbered learner, providing space for new, albeit less symbolically valuable mobilities, to emerge. Indeed, higher education has historically been conceptualised as an elite and exclusive space, which is able to reproduce (and, to a large extent, redraw the boundaries of) its own status and prestige through this exclusive spatiality (Massey 2005). Widening participation has, in many ways then, meant both social and geographical mobility, multiple modes of relocation and absorption, as ‘newer’ (and more traditional) students enter and to some extent redefine these spaces. Thus, massification as a policy project necessarily challenges dominant ways of thinking about higher education as an exclusive and bounded space and indeed, what it means to do student life in an everyday sense within these spaces. What is interesting to us and other scholars, are the tensions which have arisen from the simultaneous stretching and protecting of UK higher education’s borders, and the new/old (im)mobilities that are being created, sustained and held back through this process.

Massification and the normalising of de-location as an authentic dimension of the student experience

This part of the story is concerned with the policy changes in higher education in the 1960s, a period that saw the provision for, and mobilities surrounding, higher education shift considerably, paving the way for a vision of what universities are shaped like today. Prior to the 1960s, university life was primarily a ‘closed shop’ – a fundamentally privileged affair with, in the early 1960s, only 8 per cent of school leavers joining higher education, attending one of just twenty-four universities.¹ As Scott (1988: 45) articulates, such territories of education were home to ‘members of the same national elite [who] shared the same silent allegiance to the same unarticulated values’ – a process of succession that had existed for centuries. Thus, our focus upon the midpoint of the twentieth century is crucial as the spaces of higher education generally (and within Oxbridge in particular) were largely immutable, requiring clear and established routes of entry.

The key turning point here was when the Committee on Higher Education, chaired by Lord Robbins, established what became commonly known as the Robbins Report² (Her Majesty’s Stationary Office 1963). The Robbins Report promoted the idea of massification, a stark move away from the elitism associated with higher education, with the intention of opening universities up to a broader audience. This encouraged a greater propensity for mobility in choosing higher education institutions (albeit often privileging some mobility practices over others) and in many ways transformed patterns of student geographies in the UK. Moreover, the report gave way to the Robbins Principle, which pledged to enable those who had acquired commensurate qualifications opportunities to pursue courses of higher education (HMSO 1963).

This new way of conceptualising higher education – as an inclusive and merit-based experience – established new horizons for the possibilities of student mobilities with many of the nineteenth-century civic institutions, typically located in industrial northern English cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool and Sheffield, attempting to challenge the dominance of the Oxbridge ‘boarding school’ model of term-time residential relocation. These universities offered higher education for those seeking advanced and part-time study in their local area, and for whom de-location was not an option nor a desire. Indeed, the Robbins Report has left a crucial legacy in students’ approaches to higher education, being published at a time when levels of part-time, local participation in higher education were on a par with those of full-time participation (Watson 2014). Hence, the Robbins Report, and the principles that emerged from it, galvanised calls for increased state funding, the further expansion of higher education and a more socially just approach to access and inclusion that continued until the early 2000s.

Lord Robbins’ directives may have paved the way for an exciting new vision of higher education provision and attainment, however, the binary of local (immobile) and residential (mobile) modes of higher education participation remained. This was built upon two key, but largely unspoken, assumptions about the nature and form of student participation and mobility. First, it was expected that a degree should be acquired through full-time study over three years of studentship. Second, and related to the notion that learning happens when one is immersed solely in study end educational experiences, was the continued emphasis on ‘de-location’ – that is of moving away from home for the duration of the degree (Carswell 1988; cf. Thomas 2016: 20). These two strands of the student experience were supported by grants and bursaries awarded to residential students, thus embedding residential mobility into the imaginary of the wider public and within discourses about authentic student transitions.³ As we discuss in this book, this practice is still somewhat dominant; however, for the year 2016/17 the number of full-time students in institutionally maintained and private halls of residence combined (490,590), was lower than the number living in other rented accommodation (536,030) but still more than those living in the parental/guardian home (338,040) (HESA 2018).

It is important to appreciate the influence of existing, and normalised, patterns of mobility, participation and de-location upon this moment of transition for the sector. Thus, even though Robbins set out a vision for something new, the civic universities nevertheless adopted the Oxbridge college model, which, of course, carried certain symbolism and value. These new institutions followed closely the well-established pattern of the ‘finishing school’ model of higher education (Scott 2012), and, as Brown and Scase (1994) have argued, the practices of de-location and linear transition became entrenched in the practices of higher education in post-war England. Although the sector continued to grow and change – notably through the conception of seven new ‘plate glass’ universities built between 1961 and 1965 (the Universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Sussex, Warwick and York), these universities also attempted to emulate the Oxbridge college model that (once again) privileged elitist mobilities centred around living away from home and university study as a self-contained experience (Holdsworth 2009b). In fact, as Thomas (2016: 21) argues, despite the aspirations of plate glass universities to ‘redraw the maps of knowledge’ (Scott 2009: 404), residential mobility continued to be normalised because all were built on greenfield sites, and therefore at a distance from towns and cities.

While it would appear that residential mobility was being further entrenched within the higher education system, the first steps in embedding higher education within the lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: (New) Theoretical Directions for Understanding Student Geographies and (Im)Mobilities
• Part Two Researching Mobile Belonging: Emplacing Students’ Experiences and Identities
• Part Three Empirical Explorations: Students on the Move in the UK
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page