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Based on the life and educational histories of sixteen high-achieving, working-class girls applying to high-tariff universities, this paper rekindles debates about the role of agency within the decision-making process of young people who might not otherwise be expected to apply to such institutions. It draws on Margaret Archer's theorising to tease out the interplay between structure and agency in the form of reflexivity and show how this shapes the girls' educational trajectories, rather than pre-determining them. The paper highlights how social class powerfully influences working-class applicants' university plans, in the form of constraints and enablements, but also argues that the girls in this paper are not simply passive young women to whom things happen. As active agents, they are instead becoming increasingly skilled in reflexively navigating their own pathways through education and advance their applications to high-tariff universities in strategic and deliberative ways.

Being a graduate is no longer sufficient to secure a fulfilling and rewarding graduate role. This paper drew on Tomlinson's Graduate Capital Model to analyse the job-seeking narratives of recent computing graduates searching for a graduate job. Participants (n = 38), drawn from a national placement programme, were interviewed up to 12 months after they had graduated. Narrative interviews were analysed using the five graduate capitals of the Model, providing empirical evidence of the acquisition and application of graduate capitals, in particular through experiences of student work placements. The study found strong claims of human and cultural capital, arising from placement experience, while social and identity capital acquisition was found, but to a lesser extent. Fragile psychological and identity capitals were eroded by multiple unsuccessful job applications. This work empirically tested the Graduate Capital Model, contributing to understanding of capitals and their interplay.

Academic conferences have a central role in shaping career trajectories, reproducing or resisting exclusions and moulding relations in and to academia, thus shaping academic networks. In this paper, we consider how precarious academics subvert and navigate conference spaces, including emerging online forms. Particularly, we explore how academic conferences generate and nurture friendship as an enduring political practice that undermines neoliberal economic, political and social structures. This is contextualised in UK higher education amidst mass job losses, increased precarity and the subsequent breaking of academic bonds. In interviews with academics and our own auto/ethnographical experiences, we explore how friendship emerges in and resists the exclusions of the conference space for precarious researchers. Finally, we explore how the nurture of friendship by precarious scholars at academic conferences promotes collective action to resist neoliberalism within the academy.

This paper examines the history of the expansion of educational opportunities in the UK, to understand how different generations of ­working-class students managed to access HE. Based on 23 life-story interviews with working-class students, the study highlights how the changing dynamics of the structure of compulsory education and the labour market have shaped working-class students' views of HE. Exploring the changing structure of opportunity, and how this has shaped working-class students' sense of social position, is key to understanding the uneven pattern of working-class pathways to HE across generations. It is evident that different types of secondary school experience and opportunities in the labour market affected working-class pathways to university with the nature of the school environment and employment shaping various expectations. This article concludes that people's understanding of their social position within the educational and occupational opportunity structure leads to variations in ­working-class transitions to university across different generations.

Academic conferences have a central role in shaping career trajectories, reproducing or resisting exclusions and moulding relations in and to academia, thus shaping academic networks. In this paper, we consider how precarious academics subvert and navigate conference spaces, including emerging online forms. Particularly, we explore how academic conferences generate and nurture friendship as an enduring political practice that undermines neoliberal economic, political and social structures. This is contextualised in UK higher education amidst mass job losses, increased precarity and the subsequent breaking of academic bonds. In interviews with academics and our own auto/ethnographical experiences, we explore how friendship emerges in and resists the exclusions of the conference space for precarious researchers. Finally, we explore how the nurture of friendship by precarious scholars at academic conferences promotes collective action to resist neoliberalism within the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality in students' degree outcomes has been a concern for the higher education sector and the UK government for more than a decade. Since its inception in 2018, the Office for Students in England has prioritised the need for evidence of causality through requiring institutions to evaluate the effectiveness of their initiatives as set out in Access and Participation Plans. This policy development responds to several reports which identify a dearth of evidence-based interventions and scant knowledge of 'what works'. This paper traces the interplay between policy and research, focusing on the assumptions they make about causality. It concludes that unwarranted positions are taken in both spheres of practice, making progress unlikely. A conception of causality situated in extant formal theory on evidential pluralism and that draws on current practices would help us address inequality more effectively. Alternative framings of the problem of inequality in students' degree outcomes is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses speeches made by UK higher education ministers, from the election of the Conservative government in May 2015 through to September 2020. The article uses disruptive innovation as a theoretical framework through which to analyse ministers' perspectives on innovation. The methodology is content analysis with a directed approach. Fourteen speeches are analysed. Innovation is shown to serve an economic agenda, enabling students to transact their higher education quickly and subsequently function without state support. Innovation is also a flexible term offering numerous solutions, from providing economic growth; to militating against the isolationism of Brexit; to providing a route out of the pandemic. Innovation is intended to enhance economic performance and to deliver efficiency, but not to fundamentally disrupt the existing organisation of the UK's higher education sector. Innovation, as articulated by Ministers for Higher Education, comprises sustaining innovation and efficiency innovation, but not disruptive innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon the 2020 review commissioned by the University of Strathclyde in the UK into the sexual misconduct of an academic staff member, Kevin O'Gorman, to examine competing and multi-varied forms of precarity in UK higher education. It considers how precarity as a political condition has the ability to shift and attach to different kinds of structures and bodies, including institutions. The case at Strathclyde helps to illustrate how a claim to precarity can be appropriated by an institution, while simultaneously divesting this term of meaning and attachment to human experience. The article builds on this examination of precarity to investigate the precarious status of knowledge in relation to violence. It argues that despite claims to want to know, institutional failure to understand and act on sexual misconduct is a form of wilful ignorance and an exertion of epistemological power that protects the institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of zero-hours contracts (ZHCs) has been associated with the transfer of risk away from corporate employers and towards individual employees. In universities increasing numbers of teaching staff are employed on such contracts. Academics from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds (BME) are disproportionately more likely to be employed on ZHCs. This article draws on the accounts of 21 BME academics to explore their personal experiences of ZHCs. The research identified a broad range of inequalities fostered by a lack of collegiality on the part of permanently contracted colleagues that materialized at the local, departmental level. Using the concepts of 'risk', 'risk culture' and 'White habitus', this article explores the extent to which race and racism are a feature of collective departmental strategies to manage risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power relationships between undergraduates and academics are frequently overlooked. This article explores the construction of a 'traditional' power relationship between undergraduates and academics, through the theorisation of systemic and constitutive power and considers the prevalence of this dynamic within a higher education (HE) context. I draw from Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis to explore 32 interviews, 12 observations and 12 policy documents gathered from two post-1992 universities in England. Academics and undergraduates in this study perceived the existence of a traditional power relationship, constituted through the behavioural expectations of the established social roles of the traditional learner and teacher, which form the dynamic. I will discuss the behavioural expectations and distributed powers of the traditional learner and teacher roles, before addressing the prevalence of the traditional power relationship within the universities in this study and the barrier this creates for more collaborative dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a typical pathway to becoming a student is a pervasive narrative within higher education, with moving away from home to live at university framed as the "traditional student experience". In response, recent literature has begun to trouble the thinking around student mobilities. Building on this work, this study draws upon semi-structured interviews with students who have moved away from home into university residences in order to surface the multiplicity and diversity of mobilities and transitions. Engaging concepts from posthumanist and poststructuralist theory, we propose a reconceptualisation of students' mobilities and transitions as rhizomatic, and as ongoing becomings. Furthermore, we also surface the materiality of students' experiences, acknowledging the role of the non-human within students' mobilities. As a result, we extend the emerging work attending to more complex depictions of students' mobilities, and examine the implications of acknowledging the heterogeneity, materiality and granularity of students' experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]