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Despite the massive global scale of gender-based violence, little attention has been given to its significance in mediating student-victim-survivors' experiences of higher education. We draw on and extend recent feminist theorizations of trauma as 'durational' to consider the significance of gender-based violence as a society-wide problem yet also integral to higher education equity initiatives, where the enduring impacts of gender-based violence for student-survivors is usually absent as an area of concern. In this article we draw on interview data from a qualitative study which explored how university student-victim-survivors of gender-based violence experienced participating in higher education. Participants challenges relating to lasting stress and anxiety, an undermined sense of capability, and difficulties meeting deadlines and academic expectations. These findings show the broader problem of gender-based violence should be viewed as a significant equity issue requiring an expanded approach to current higher education violence prevention efforts (Bacon [2022]. "The Intersubjective Responsibility of Durational Trauma: Contributions of Bergson and Levinas to the Philosophy of Trauma." Continental Philosophy Review 55 (2): 159-175. doi:10.1007/s11007-021-09556-7).

Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure 'what works'. Although evaluation has a 'fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character' (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. "Fourth Generation Evaluation." Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental approach, situated within hegemonic positivist epistemologies, has tended to prevail. In this paper, we argue that it is misguided to pursue evaluation with an apolitical pretext of independence and objectivity. Drawing on Butler's concept of performativity, we explore how hegemonic anti-democratic evaluation practices can potentially re-inscribe and reproduce the very inequalities that WP seeks to address. By critiquing the technologies of evaluation, we lay out one way of understanding how democratic evaluation practices can reclaim evaluation to make possible more diverse and socially just worlds.

While widening participation in higher education for regional, rural and remote (RRR) Australian communities has been a major policy focus in recent years, the pandemic and resulting lockdowns and closures of internal borders between Australian states and territories has impacted significantly upon RRR students who relocate to pursue tertiary education. In this article we draw on intersectional theory and in-depth interview data to understand the experiences, challenges faced by, and related choice-making processes of students during the height of the pandemic period. In the wake of the lockdown and implementation of a study from home university policy, the 27 students interviewed uncovered a new variation of the classic dilemma faced by young people living in rural areas: should I stay or should I go? Drawing on existing insights about student choice in higher education, we analyse mobility decision-making in relation to the participants' classed, gendered and locational identities. We find that although the pandemic impacted upon all of the participants, their experiences differed significantly and were stratified across existing lines of inequalities related particularly to their access to financial resources and practical assistance. We ultimately contend that while the pandemic and resulting public health measures provide an extraordinary context, they nevertheless highlight some of the key challenges and vulnerabilities faced by RRR students who are unable to quickly marshal financial, emotional and practical support when crises occur, providing insights whose utility persists beyond the pandemic.

In this article, we draw from a recent empirical study to consider how a person's classed trajectory impacts students from different class backgrounds in higher education (HE). Students face rapidly evolving social and academic circumstances and must build reasonable strategies to navigate their trajectory from education to work. In these situational processes, social class becomes emotionally exposed as a durable relational social ordering principle. Affinities with educational and labour market norms provide emotional advantages. To explore the classed nature of accumulated being in Australian HE in the context of widening participation, we examine experiences of access to and participation in HE, and strategies towards entry into the labour market. The movement into, through and out of HE orders and organises classed experience, demonstrating the durability of class in the face of doxic meritocratic choice discourse.

Equity and widening participation (EWP) initiatives in Australia are increasingly reimagined in policy as sites where participants are constructed as competitor-individuals, with education considered only in terms of employability, social mobility and nation-state market competition. In the context of EWP outreach, and with school students in particular, this can transpire into demands for narrow forms of 'legitimate' aspirations. Goffman defines obscenity as when (1) the very intimate is forced into the public sphere, while (2) the humanising dimensions or contexts are stripped away, with an example being pornography--where intimate encounters are reproduced as de-contextualised acts while being made public. This article argues that dominant approaches to practicing and evaluating EWP risk obscene consequences if they force community members to present static future-oriented valuations of intimate, fluid aspirations and experiences of education against a backdrop of increasingly individuated, competitive and standardised educational institutions. In this article, firstly we detail the context to establish a foundation for theorising consequences of particular socio-educational discursive practices. Secondly, we engage with notions of frame, keying and fabrication as a toolbox to reveal some of the unintended (obscene) dynamics risked via certain approaches to programmatic practice and evaluation. Thirdly, we review the diversity of approaches to evaluation (and their attendant debates), highlighting the importance of these debates and diversities, making a case against methodological imperialism.

Whilst most social and educational research on friendship focuses on children at school, it remains a crucially important factor for students in higher education -- and can play a key role in the maintenance, exacerbation or subversion of dominant forms of social inequalities. This paper explores the complexities of such dynamics in relation to friendship and social life at university, utilising data from an in-depth qualitative study of HE students at a UK campus university. Students stressed the importance of friendship for comfort and a sense of 'belonging'. Nevertheless, students describe the continuation of cliques, hierarchies, and exclusions that are more commonly linked to sociality at school. Despite the conception that friendship is an individual experience, it is very much influenced by social positionings such as gender, class, age, and ethnicity -- having significant repercussions for students in relation to happiness and wellbeing at university.

Policy and program language in the UK and Australian higher education sectors consistently deploys the term aspiration in ways that adhere to the hegemonic neo-liberal ideal of the entrepreneurial competitor-individual, de-meaning and de-valuing 'other' personhoods. University Equity and Widening Participation (EWP) outreach programs that engage with marginalised groups in school and community settings challenge people to perform particular aspirations from what can be a deeply uncertain present. This paper presents a cautionary tale from the Australian Equity and Widening Participation (EWP) context that emerged from a research-informed practice PhD, spanning two methodologically different phases. The paper argues that the discursive framing of certain aspirations as legitimate works in subtle ways to shape the perceptual horizons of EWP practitioners and participants. Specifically, the work takes issue with policy frames that create conditions for misrecognition(s) that are themselves difficult to re/cognise. A metaphorical pedagogical tool is developed using the Ames Room illusion.

In an era of internationalisation and globalisation, neoliberal agendas have now become important aspects of many institutional and national governments' higher education policy. A major aspect of these neoliberal agendas is their impact on the curriculum. This paper critically examines the impact of neoliberal agendas on curriculum through a postcolonial and decolonising lens, drawing on research conducted in the African context to illuminate the theoretical analysis presented. Drawing on 48 semi-structured interviews and documentary analyses across three public universities in Ghana, we examine the relationship between neoliberal agendas, neo-colonialism and curriculum imperatives in African higher education. The analysis illuminates the ways that hegemonic discourses connected to neoliberal agendas re-privilege Western-oriented values and perspectives and impact the curriculum changes in African higher education institutions.

Concerns about creating greater equity in education are often projected outside of teaching. Yet the creation by teachers of more equitable and inclusive educational experiences and opportunities can play an important part in wider struggles for social justice. We argue that equity must become a central dimension of teacher education to challenge the complex ways that insidious inequalities are reproduced in and through educational frameworks and practices.

In this paper we deconstruct hegemonic conceptions of time in higher education. Drawing on a recent project, we argue that limiting assumptions about time dominate notions of student capability and prospects of success. The paper reveals how the conceptualisation of time is constituted within a framework that individualises and decontextualises difficulties. Within this frame, socio-cultural elitism is left largely unchallenged, with many students left out and misrecognised as purely lacking capability and commitment. Rethinking simple distinctions between 'time' and 'temporality', we consider ways to broaden understandings to enable a more inclusive and 'inventive' system. We apply a Foucauldian analysis to argue that we co-construct the future in the very ways that we react to the present and think about the past. We must recognise that the way we work in the present is how we create the future. Our everyday actions, assumptions and reactions re/produce our futures.

This paper draws on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project on men (aged 18-54) participating in pre-university access and foundation programs in four London further and higher education colleges. Men's educational choices and decisions are analysed and discussed within current policy debates about widening participation and lifelong learning. These choices are placed within a framework which focuses on masculinity in terms of classed and racialised identifications. For working class and ethnic minority students choices tend to be constrained by mix of material, institutional and emotional forces. For middle class ethnic minority students these factors are only partially alleviated. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper draws attention to gendered inequalities in relation to pedagogic participation, the politics of difference and the concept of "shame." I use the term "pedagogic participation" to illuminate the relationship between formations of difference, policy concerns to improve "equity" and higher education participation in and across contested pedagogical spaces. Engaging feminist critiques and analyses of pedagogical practices and "inclusion," I consider possibilities for creating "parity of participation" in relation to the social justice struggles of redistribution, recognition, representation and embodied subjectivities. How might students and teachers create spaces for the parity of participation across and among these three inter-related social justice domains and formations of difference in ways that acknowledge the lived and embodied politics of emotion and shame? Through exploring this question, I aim to re/imagine difference as a critical resource for opening up ethical, praxis-based pedagogical spaces and relations.

This article argues that to better investigate the enduring relationship between social class background and inequalities in post-compulsory education necessitates a more comprehensive approach to thinking with Bourdieu, but also a need to move beyond his seminal, much used concepts. Through meta-analysis, we review how Bourdieusian theory has been used in widening participation research in mainly Anglophone contexts, and consider how including concepts from his wider "toolbox" can aid this pursuit. We consider new theories and concepts that have emerged largely after Bourdieu and their appropriateness for research in Australian higher education. We explore how a "practice-based" theory of widening participation might be developed, drawing on the work of Schatzki and Kemmis which permits researchers to usefully consider the internal goods of a practice and the role of institutions and the non-human. We also suggest that incorporating intersectionality, as both a social theory of knowledge and an approach to analysis, facilitates exploration of routine practices and struggles and reveals the complexities, provisionality and becomingness of social positioning, subjectivities and change. Such theoretical extensions to Bourdieu's legacy enable more nuanced understandings of how complex and intersecting social inequalities in higher education are realised or challenged in countries beyond the global north.

In spite of the relative success of the Widening Participation policy and strategies to increase the numbers of students from Black and Minority and White working-class backgrounds going to university, universities in Britain continue to be White and middle-class-dominated institutions. We found, in our two-year qualitative Higher Education Funding Council England/Higher Education Academy-funded study (2010-2012), the existence of fear and raced, gendered and classed antagonisms, underpinned by White middle-class student attitudes and perspectives towards those they constructed as the Other. In the article, we discuss the development of 'us and them' from the perspective of White middle-class, mainly male, students, and demonstrate dysconscious racism and racialised social segregation, which in some disciplines is replicated in the learning context. The context of the research is that of a highly competitive, neoliberal, British higher education system where competitiveness for individual success is paramount. Within this context, anxieties around success and notions or perceptions of authenticity: the 'authentic university' and the 'authentic student' are palpable. These perspectives combine with White privilege and a sense of 'supremacy' and entitlement leading to a desire for distancing from the 'Other'.

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and "massification" of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour's programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse--of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive--can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.

This article explores work published in "Teaching in Higher Education" that critically engages complex questions of difference and emotion in higher education pedagogies. It considers the ways that difference is connected to gender and misrecognition, and is experienced at the level of emotion, often through symbolic forms of violence such as shaming. Through such processes, some bodies are pathologized through misogynistic discourses that manipulate fear of the "feminization of higher education". Characteristics associated with difference in HE, such as "being emotional" or "caring", are regulated and controlled through a range of disciplinary technologies. Pedagogical relations are thus deeply implicated in the gendered politics of (mis)recognition, and profoundly connected to the impact of the emotional on the body and the self. I conclude by re/imagining difference within feminist and critical pedagogies, aiming to open up interventionist spaces that address our relationality with Others.

In this article, I explore men's educational experiences and aspirations in the context of UK policy discourses of widening participation and migration. Critiquing discourses that oversimplify gendered access to higher education, I develop an analysis of the impact of masculine subjectivities on processes of subjective construction in relation to be(com)ing a university student. Neoliberalism and self-regulation emerge as significant themes by which the men make sense of their educational experiences and aspirations. Widening participation policy discursively constructs the subject as "disadvantaged", "with potential" and responsible for self-improvement through participation in (alternative forms of) higher education (HE). The concept of diaspora illuminates the complex ways the men reconstruct their traumatic experiences in terms of hope and possibility, across different cultural spaces and expectations. A key question is how do the men construct and make sense of their masculine subjectivities in relation to diasporic experiences and aspirations to become HE students?