Class, Students and Place: Encountering Locality in a Post-industrial Landscape

Abstract

Drawing upon qualitative interviews with women students, this article explores the meaning of 'class' and 'studenthood' at a 'new' university in a large post-industrial town in the north of England. Classed experiences were evident in the way interviewees interpreted the locale predominantly in terms of its 'working-classness' and the social problems associated with deindustrialisation. Findings support the accepted notion of a distinct student identity and perceived divides between students and local people based on spatiality, locality, class and student habitus, which also intersected with gender to produce 'locally specific' experiences of space and safety within this setting. However, the article confounds the middle-class student and working-class local dichotomy by exploring accounts from a varied sample of women in terms of age, class, ethnicity and domestic background, which reveal alternative university experiences and shifting class relations as a result of deindustrialisation.

Expanding the scope of studentification studies

“…In fact, studentification began with the piecemeal "HMO-ization" by local landlords supported by the buy-to-let scheme (Bromley, 2006;Hubbard, 2008;Leyshon & French, 2009;Munro & Livingston, 2012), which omitted the cultural capital-led stage (Smith, 2005) under the classic stage-model of gentrification (Bridge, 2001;Ley, 1996). Although Smith (2005) argued that studentification tends to unfold adjacent to or within previously gentrified areas, several studies demonstrated that neighbourhoods' rents and housing stock composition did not hold promise for studentification (Munro et al, 2009;Rugg et al, 2002;Sage, Smith, & Hubbard, 2012a, 2012bUniversities UK, 2006;Wattis, 2013).…”

“…Notably, university graduates are not as middle class as they once were (Wattis, 2013). Sage, Evandrou, and Falkinghom (2013a) analyzed the 5-year postgraduate residential histories of alumni of a Russell Group university.…”

Students’ leisure consumption patterns in cities: Three-dimensional pictures from Lodz and Turin

“…In contrast, restructuring of this type seems to be limited in other areas of both cities. However, this spatial distinction between students' leisure, on the one hand, and their places of residence and education, on the other, might be a phenomenon that is unique to large (Russo & Tajter 2007) or postindustrial cities (Wattis 2013), such as Lodz and Turin.…”

“…As a result of the massification of higher education, cities worldwide have experienced an influx of young people looking for education opportunities. Moreover, student populations have grown not only in historical university towns but also in cities with different pasts, for example former manufacturing centres (Wattis 2013).…”

Examining student's night‐time activity spaces: identities, performances, and transformations

“…These accounts demonstrate how such quasi [non]student spaces may be important in transgressing the traditional student/non-student binary that has been defined previously (Chatterton, 1999;Chatterton & Hollands, 2003;Holt & Griffin, 2005;Wattis, 2013). This transgressive work was evident in their ease of movement between what seemed to be student and non-student spaces while walking around the city and it was also apparent in the ways in which such movement opened up the city for them.…”