Institutional imperatives and feeling at home in higher education institutions: Giddens on trust and intimacy

Positioning Home for Resilience on Campus: First-Generation Students Negotiate Powerless/full Conditions in South African Higher Education

“…These "transitional processes" (Ellery and Baxen 2015, 93), when entering a university, have been recognised as causing a state of emotional uncertainty for students (Janse Van Rensburg and Kapp 2014;Zepke, Leach, and Butler 2011) as they negotiate the costs of their assimilation into the institutionalised norms. First-generation students have reduced "point[s] of reference" (Stuart, Lido, and Morgan 2011) on which to draw in order to understand the expectations of this environment and thus may struggle to "feel at home" (Thaver 2010). The families and communities of FGSs, projecting expectations of their own which may be in conflict with that of the student and/or the university, may have limited comprehension of the expectations and experiences students encounter in their daily lives on campus.…”