Identity and Difference in Higher Education

Outsiders within

Pauline Anderson, Jenny Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138720022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351763370
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2001. This volume brings together contributions from a group of authors who explore the themes of identity and difference in the context of a range of power relationships within higher education.

1
Identity and Difference: Concepts and Themes

PAULINE ANDERSON AND JENNY WILLIAMS

Introduction

The growth in participation in higher education in Britain over the past four decades has been dramatic. Over 30% of 18 year olds now participate in full-time higher education, together with a huge increase in mature and part-time students (see chapter 2). In the last decade the label ‘mass higher education’ has been an appropriate one. The term encapsulates the shift from a small elite system to one that draws upon a much wider social constituency with many more institutions labelled as universities. The details of this shift are the subject of much debate (for example, see Williams, 1997) but the broad consequences of the ‘massification’ of higher education are clear. Far more entrants are first generation higher education students, there had been an increase in the numbers of academics and there are continuing political and public debates over the purposes of and nature of degree level study (Morley, 1999).

For ‘new’ students and staff entering this much larger and more complex system, questions arise of ‘who are we?’ and ‘why are we here?’ These are both personal and public questions. What it means to be a higher education student at a personal level stems from a complex interplay between public definitions (who deserves to be there), institutional structures (who is allowed in, to do what, and who pays), academic decisions on curriculum and pedagogy (how and what will be taught and by whom?) and individual aspirations and behaviours (is it for me?). For black and/or working-class staff the questioning process has been an even longer one, starting for them as students and continuing as academics. The issue of identity is, then, a crucial one in exploring and understanding the experiences of the increasing numbers of staff and students participating in higher education. In order to claim an identity, for it to be more than simply an aspiration, it has to be endorsed and validated by others (Jenkins, 1996). This endorsement is a complex, social, psychological and interpersonal process. Some individuals can lay claim to a student identity easily, moving at 18 with the appropriate qualifications to elite institutions, their identity publicly endorsed and legitimated. Others are far more uncertain, not sure the system will accept them, or that they have a right to enter, or that the identity ‘student’ fits with other important aspects of their lives. It is this linking of identity and difference that the book is concerned with. In particular, what is it that makes some students and staff the ‘outsiders within’ (Collins, 1990), i.e., individuals with social identities moving into an institutional space that has historically excluded them. They are participants in higher education but uneasy participants, using the standpoint of their own experiences, drawing upon their own epistemologies¹ to critically question its structures. Outsiders within are constituted as the ‘other’ – they are defined in opposition to the ‘norm’. Currently in higher education it is 18 year old entrants in possession of three A levels who are constructed as ‘normal’ students. Other entrants, those who are older, or those who do not possess A levels, for example, are defined negatively in relation to this standard model; they are constructed as the opposite – the ‘other’. Similarly, higher education has traditionally been the preserve of white, middle class, male academics. Those who do not possess these racial, class and gender identities, those who are ‘different’ from the norm, are constituted as ‘other’. The chapters in this book demonstrate that the process of ‘othering’ produces consequences for those so defined; it is not difference per se which is the problem but the meanings attached to difference.

Themes of the Book

The origins of the book stem from conference papers given by a group of feminist academics and researchers.² A larger group of contributors was recruited subsequently. All are engaged in researching and theorising the nature of ‘difference’ and with understanding the changing construction of individual and group identities within higher education. However most of the accounts here deliberately focus upon women as students and as academics. In order to foster coherence across the text, the editors formulated a series of key themes, from which authors were asked to make a selection most appropriate to their own chapter.

• What in higher education are the key signifiers of difference?
• What social, political, ideological, educational and economic processes and discourses maintain differences and inequalities constructing students in particular ways?
• • How do particular social locations, whether constructed on the basis of social class, ‘race’, ethnic origin, disability, sexuality, age, subject specialism or educational status constrain or enable individual gendered identities?
• What forms of creativity and empowerment emerge as responses?
• What conceptual models provide an understanding of changing, shifting, gendered identities and of key moments in individual transitions?
• How are multiple identities experienced and lived?
• Are there different responses to stigmatised identities?
• How are the narratives of difference constructed by feminist researchers?
• What forms of power and resistance to power are manifest in higher education contexts and how are personal identities constructed through such power relations?
• What aspects of racialised, gendered, classed identities are experienced as incompatible with an academic identity?
• Is higher education experienced as an enabling or disempowering space?

If we examine these key themes carefully, there are particular assumptions built into them and these consequently shape the authors’ contributions and the book.

The Production of Narratives

The first assumption is a claim to the legitimacy of experience as a source of knowledge. All the contributors draw upon the educational experiences of higher education participants. Each chapter utilises either a qualitative study involving interviews with groups of students or academic staff, or a reflective autobiography looking at the experience of becoming or being an academic. Such methods are variously labeled in the chapters as sociological autobiography, reflexive biography, in-depth interviews, personal accounts or life histories. Thus the research presented in this book is rooted in everyday experiences, in the living identities, of respondents and authors. As Avtar Brah (1992) argues, experience is important as a practice of making sense, both symbolically and narratively, as a struggle over material conditions and over meaning. When authors talk about ‘situated knowledges’, this is what they mean; an understanding that stems from particular social locations and lived experiences.

All knowledge is situated knowledge, reflecting the position of the knowledge producer at a particular historical moment, in a particular culture, of a certain colour, gender and sexuality. (Lennon, 1995, p. 135)

As ‘outsiders within’ they use their lived experiences of difference, or that of others, as a valid source of knowledge. Everyday experience then is a base from which we can analyse everyday realities and use these analyses to create alternative epistemologies; alternative ways of understanding and knowing.

However, to present personal accounts of experience as an unmediated ‘truth’ would be too simplistic. We all retrospectively make sense of our changing identities. Past experiences are revisited and reinterpreted from a particular ‘now’ position, providing a story, a probable coherence that is in part justificatory. We use our present understandings of ‘who we are’ to reshape past understandings; we reconstruct our biographies in an effort to bring them into greater congruence with our current identities. Past and present experiences are given meaning and a context which illuminates current identity conflicts and their resolution. Therefore the second assumption underpinning the book is that autobiography, whether self-authored or provided through an interview, is part of a process of identity construction and reconstruction. This is what is meant when authors talk about a ‘narrative’; an account of experiences which makes sense, which fashions a coherent story that links episodes in one’s life and explains where one is now together with an understanding of why one is there. Narratives are the bricks with which we construct our identities and as such are the raw material of qualitative research processes.

There is one further step involved in presenting narratives. The authors themselves select from the vast amount of material made available to them. They are central to the process of prioritising certain experiences and of, interpreting and re-interpreting these. So academic researchers, add another level of interpretation, influenced by the data they collect, the means by which the collate it, current conceptual debates within their academic disciplines and their own social and political positioning. They use the ‘memory work’ of their interviewees and themselves to reinterpret the narratives for an academic audience. Ultimately the story is layered and mediated with other meanings and is never just a ‘straightforward’ account.

Understanding Identities

The fourth assumption built into the themes of the book is a complex one but one which can be stated simply. An understanding of identity formation and change involves an exploration of the relationships between an individual’s social location, embedded in a complex patterning of structural inequalities, and interpersonal and personal interpretations of this location and its consequences. This conundrum, how to encapsulate the relationship between an individual and society, lies at the heart of the social sciences. What is a ‘self’? Is there a core, fixed uniqueness which is identifiable or a socially constructed performer, conforming to social roles? To what extent is one free and able to change ones social identity? How might we conceptualise those aspects of society which frame the way individuals think and behave, the balance between self and structure, structure and agency? To what extent do social structures determine aspects of social identity? What possibilities exist for individual and collective identities to influence the social structures in which they are embedded? Or is it the case that identities can be free from the influence of social structures? For example, to what extent do material conditions, such as the ownership of wealth, the formalisation of status and power within key institutions, fundamental to the making of rules, the policing of conformity and so on, contribute to an understanding of individual interactions and responses? How do we incorporate into these debates the belief systems, the ideologies and discourses, that justify the distribution of wealth or status or educational merit? On what bases do significant groups emerge, labelled by others and perceived as different? Are the signifiers of difference material, biological, cultural or symbolic? What are the processes of inclusion and exclusion?

The history of social science disciplines is partly a history of struggles to answer these questions. The purpose of this book is not to provide this history or any new answers, that has been done thoroughly by other authors (see Giddens, 1991; Bradley, 1996; Jenkins, 1996). The aims of the book are more limited; to concretise some of the debates outlined above concerning the nature of identities within the context of the lived experience of students and staff in higher education. Our contributors use qualitative accounts by students and/or their own biographies to link conceptual questions with empirical ones, to illustrate how identity formation and change take place in particular educational settings, how power is institutionalised and experienced, and to explore the gendered, classed and racialised differentiations which take place. In doing so they inevitably draw upon a range of conceptual models, using language which stems from, and is embedded within, particular approaches to understanding the nature of identity. The contributors do not all draw on the same models; they provide alternative approaches and alternative languages of understanding. In particular the contributors differ in the weight they place on structure or agency, on the material conditions in which we live and the extent to which these shape our identities or on our ability to transcend these, to be different.

Determining Identities

Materialist/structuralist approaches highlight the ways in which structures impinge upon individual identities. They prioritise a range of economic structures, particularly the formation of capital, the control over, and nature of, labour and the interlinking of economic, political and ideological power. Such approaches stress the ways in which social class, gender and racial hierarchies are institutionalised, power is routinised and there is a continuity in the way particular groups (elites) retain power. A materialist emphasis pinpoints the perpetuation and legitimation of structures of wealth and power, the interlocking of material and ideological processes, the crucial significance of an individual’s position within these structures, the forms of oppression that are a consequence of this position and the forms of consciousness - the identities - which stem from that position and are embedded within it, even if they challenge it. (see for example, Giddens, 1991; Bradley, 1996; Jenkins, 1996). Feminist materialists include within oppressive structures a whole range of gender inequalities linked with domestic forms of power and their accompanying ideologies. The summary term ‘patriarchy’ is used to highlight both personal and institutional forms of gender oppression (see for example, Barrett, 1980;Delphy, 1981;Walby, 1986). The French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1988) has revisited materialist theories in his writings on education. He has unpacked the notion of ‘capital’ in ways that we can link with an understanding of the nature of higher education. Economic capital (wealth, income, property) can be linked with cultural capital (language, involvement in and familiarity with high status cultural activities, knowledge of the way society operates and ability to use that knowledge to one’s own advantage) and with educational capital (educational achievement, high status qualifications gained through the ability to attend the ‘best’ schools or universities, through purchase or merit). Jenkins (1996, p. 163) illustrates the way in which one form of capital, for example cultural capital, embodied in a particular social class position can be converted into educational capital, the achievement of particular qualifications through a familiarity with the institutionalised categories of judgment embodied within examinations. Other aspects of cultural capital (language, confidence, experience) then allow these qualifications to be used through interviews to gain access to elite universities. When authors in this volume refer to cultural capital and cultural consumption they are drawing on the work of Bourdieu and others who have developed these ideas, and are giving particular weight to key societal structures (see for example, Skeggs, 1997; Reay, 1998). Identities are most fruitfully understood within a framework which places them within this series of capital forms, and where individual change necessitates negotiation and challenge to such forms.

Fractured Identities

In contrast, the theoretical approaches known as postmodernism and poststructuralism shift the focus from ‘difficult to change’,determining societal structures, to the power of individuals to challenge such structures. From the debates surrounding postmodernism and poststructuralism several facets link with the discussions in this book; the first concerns the nature of identities and the second the nature of power.

Postmodernism rejects the idea of a universal subject whose identity is fixed and unchanging. For postmodernists identities are fluid, fractured and multiple. For example, the identity ‘student’ is a totalising category which obscures the complexity of differences experienced by those so labelled. There is no typical student since students are variously differentiated by gender, ethnic origin, age etc. Given there is no unified subject, grand theories which attempt to explain, provide the ‘truth’, about the student experience are inadequate, since there can be no single truth given that students are differentially constituted. Poststructuralists further add to this the idea that subjectivities (the term used to highlight personal understandings of the self) are constituted through language; language is the arena where fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Section 1: Identity and Difference in Higher Education: The Context
• Section 2: Students in Post-Compulsory Education
• Section 3: Reflections from Feminist Academics: Researching and Teaching in HE
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index