Drawing on case studies of 27 working-class students across four UK higher education institutions, this article attempts to develop a multilayered, sociological understanding of student identities that draws together social and academic aspects. Working with a concept of student identity that combines the more specific notion of learner identity with more general understandings of how students are positioned in relation to their discipline, their peer group and the wider university, the article examines the influence of widely differing academic places and spaces on student identities. Differences between institutions are conceptualised in terms of institutional habitus, and the article explores how the four different institutional habituses result in a range of experiences of fitting in and standing out in higher education. For some this involves combining a sense of belonging in both middle-class higher education and working-class homes, while others only partially absorb a sense of themselves as students.

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This article draws on case studies of nine working-class students at Southern, an elite university. 1 It attempts to understand the complexities of identities in flux through Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field. Bourdieu (1990a) argues that when an individual encounters an unfamiliar field, habitus is transformed. He also writes of how the movement of habitus across new, unfamiliar fields results in ‘a habitus divided against itself ’ (Bourdieu, 1999a). Our data suggest more nuanced understandings in which the challenge of the unfamiliar results in a range of creative adaptations and multi-faceted responses. They display dispositions of self-scrutiny and self-improvement — almost ‘a constant fashioning and re-fashioning of the self ’ but one that still retains key valued aspects of a working-class self. Inevitably, however, there are tensions and ambivalences, and the article explores these, as well as the very evident gains for working-class students of academic success in an elite HE institution.

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