This paper connects Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, dispositions and capital with a psychosocial analysis of how Winnicott's psychoanalysis and Honneth's recognition theory can be of importance in understanding how and why non-traditional students remain in higher education. Understanding power relations in an interdisciplinary way makes connections -by highlighting intersubjectivity -between external social structures and subjective experiences in a biographical study of how non-traditional learner identities may be transformed through higher education in England and the Republic of Ireland.

This article is based on a comparative study of working-class students' experiences in English and Irish higher education. It highlights the lack of comparative studies on this topic based on qualitative research and why filling this gap is important in understanding access and widening participation. Drawing on biographical interviews with 139 people in a range of elite and non-elite institutions, the article discusses similarities as well as some differences between the data from the two countries in terms of class, identity and how working-class students view and value higher education. It maps out how the research relates to recent debates over social class and outlines the theoretical implications of these findings.

Mezirow's theory of perspective transformation has proved to be a great asset to the scholarship of adult education and has provided a solid theoretical base for understanding complex learning phenomena. However, in the discussions surrounding Mezirow's work, a certain "stuckness" appears which we think is unproductive. Critiques of Mezirow are often repeated, secondhand or thirdhand, causing important issues and tensions to become simplified and dichotomized, which causes complex aspects of the theory to lose the nuance that a good theory provides. This article draws on recent contributions to the literature in order to elaborate on the theory of perspective transformation in light of these recurring critiques. In so doing, we introduce three key concepts to the lexicon of perspective transformation: continuity, intersubjectivity, and emancipatory praxis. For each, we address the underlying omission or weakness in Mezirow's theory and offer revised conceptualizations of the theory.

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Much research on adults in higher education has focused on issues of access and participation. As a result little is known about what happens to working-class students after leaving university even though employability is high on the agenda HE research on this topic in relation to such students is sparse. This research focuses on the voices of working-class students and their aspirations in relation to employability. Using two student narratives this paper draws on the findings of two countries, England and Ireland, from a six-country European project on employability of non-traditional students using biographical research methods. Their stories reveal an awareness of class inequalities in the labour market in relation to cultural, economic and social capital and issues of locality, gender and age. The stories also indicate a sense of precarity in their lifecourse in a society which has become highly reflexive and fluid (Alheit, P., and B. Dausien. 2002. "The 'Double Face' of Lifelong Learning: Two Analytical Perspectives on a 'Silent Revolution'." Studies in the Education of Adults 34 (1): 3-23).