Legibility Zones: An Empirically-Informed Framework for Considering Unbelonging and Exclusion in Contemporary English Academia

Abstract

This article introduces a new, empirically-derived conceptual framework for considering exclusion in English higher education (HE): legibility zones. Drawing on interviews with academic employees in England, it suggests that participants orientate themselves to a powerful imaginary termed the hegemonic academic. Failing to align with this ideal can engender a sense of dislocation conceptualised as unbelonging. The mechanisms through which hegemonic academic identity is constituted and unbelonging is experienced are mapped onto three domains: the institutional, the ideological, and the embodied. The framework reveals the mutable and intersecting nature of these zones, highlighting the complex dynamics of unbelonging and the attendant challenge presented to inclusion projects when many apparatuses of exclusion are perceived as fundamental to what HE is for, what an academic is, and how academia functions.

Social class as a blessing in disguise? Beyond the deficit model in working-class and higher education studies

“…Papers devoted to upwardly mobile academics discuss many different kinds of "resource deficits," ranging from poverty (Friedman, 2016;Walley, 2013), low social respect (Adair et al, 2007;Hurst and Warnock, 2015;Butler, 2021), inadequatei.e. non-middle classdemeanor, clothing, language, taste (Skeggs, 2004;Oldfield, 2007;Case, 2017;Lee, 2017;Crew, 2020), lack of cultural knowledge (Mckenzie, 2016;Crew, 2020) or unfamiliarity with academic norms and customs (Oldfield, 2007), insufficient self-confidence (Reddin, 2012;Warnock and Hurst, 2016;Case, 2017), "survival guilt" (Walkerdine, 1994;Walkerdine et al, 2001), to lacking social relations with gatekeepers and key figures in a given field (Crew, 2020).…”