Everyday Mobile Belonging

Abstract

This book presents a framework for a new kind of thinking about student mobilities and belonging, which foregrounds the everyday and rhythmic dimensions of students' experiences. Using case studies from a variety of UK higher education contexts, this book develops the concepts of everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness. The authors draw on key ideas about the changing characteristics of UK higher education and of student belonging, exploring the central themes of the sensory, affective and emotional aspects of student mobilities; contested and mobile belongings; and the significance of everyday life, to bring a new dimension to the literature on inter and intra-national student mobilities. This is achieved through an examination of the innovative ways in which social science methods have been (re)imagined through mobility, with a specific focus on youth and education. Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton bring together theory and research from the fields of education studies, geography and sociology, and combine this with a discussion of rich empirical data from three UK-based research projects to set out an explicitly mobility-centred approach to 21st-century student experiences. The findings can be recognised globally because they synthesise debates about travel and transport, students' sense of place and feelings of belonging, and the interrelationship between physical, social and virtual mobilities that higher education brings together. In doing so, this text offers a coherent and grounded campaign for theory and research within studies of higher education that foreground multiple mobilities and diverse feelings of belonging.

The ‘Mirrored Ceiling’: Young undergraduate student women’s expectations of gendered career opportunities and constraints

“…Recent research about youth transitions to the labour market has highlighted how young people's education-work transitions are becoming increasingly complex in the context of an uncertain economy (Furlong et al, 2011;Naafs & Skelton, 2018;Stone et al, 2014;Valentine, 2003) and challenging higher education landscapes (Bathmaker, 2018;Donald et al, 2018). Younger generations are also growing up with the changing expectation from a 'job for life' to less linear and definable job opportunities (Furlong et al, 2011), whist at the same time under pressure to secure a graduate job as rapidly as possible following graduation (Bathmaker, 2018;Finn & Holton, 2019). These challenges can instil a sense of uncertainty and anxiety among young people when considering their employment prospects (Worth, 2016b).…”

“…Universities are specific, intriguing learning and social spaces. Prestigious higher education institutions are overwhelmingly youthful spaces, notwithstanding some increasing diversity of student populations (Holton, 2019). Prestigious universities tend to socially and culturally reproduce certain sectors of society with relatively high levels of cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979).…”

“…In the UK such geographies tend to be tied to practices of mobility and migration, where young people move away from home and stay in student accommodation to study (Holdsworth, 2009;Kinton et al, 2018;Smith & Hubbard, 2014), although more diverse residential student geographies are emerging (Holton, 2018;Wakeling & Jefferies, 2012). Differentiated student cultures exist even within traditional and seemingly homogenous student intakes (Holton and Riley, 2016; see also Finn & Holton, 2019). In these education spaces, young people come together and socialise, sharing ideas and perspectives in intriguing and specific waysand the informal sociality of students is a crucial arena for the circulation and sharing of ideas and generating students' senses of belonging (Finn & Holton, 2019;Madge et al, 2009).…”

“…Differentiated student cultures exist even within traditional and seemingly homogenous student intakes (Holton and Riley, 2016; see also Finn & Holton, 2019). In these education spaces, young people come together and socialise, sharing ideas and perspectives in intriguing and specific waysand the informal sociality of students is a crucial arena for the circulation and sharing of ideas and generating students' senses of belonging (Finn & Holton, 2019;Madge et al, 2009). Consequently, university spaces provide particular settings in which ideas about how young women's careers might be forged and limited can be shared and reproduced among students.…”

“…Young women undergraduate students' expectations of gendered inequalities and the potential impact on their own career trajectories has been under examined in geography, and is a significant research gap which this paper addresses. These young women are at a stage when they are making momentous and foundational decisions about their careers, and consequently it is important to understand how their gendered outlooks may shape their career pathways and decisions about their working lives, in the specific, youthful, collective, 'educational' spaces of Universities (Finn & Holton, 2019). The young women in this paper were relatively privileged and educationally high achieving, and their lives and experiences were situated within a 'successful girl' discourse (Ringrose, 2013).…”