Marginalised Communities in Higher Education

Disadvantage, Mobility and Indigeneity

Neil Harrison, Graeme Atherton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000388145
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on examples from nine countries across five continents, this book offers anyone interested in the future of higher education the opportunity to understand how communities become marginalised and how this impacts on their access to learning and their ability to thrive as students.

Focusing on groups that suffer directly through discriminatory practices or indirectly through distinct forms of sociocultural disadvantage, this book brings to light communities about which little has been written and where research efforts are in their relative infancy. Each chapter documents the experiences of a group and provides insights that have a wider reach and gives voice to those that are often unheard. The book concludes with a new conceptualisation of the social forces that lead to marginalisation in higher education.

This cutting-edge book is a must read for higher education researchers, policy makers, and students interested in access to education, sociology of education, development studies, and cultural studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Marginalised communities in higher education

Neil Harrison and Graeme Atherton

Internationally, concerns about differential access to, and contrasting experiences of, higher education have grown over the last 75 years. After the Second World War, higher education across the globe was typified by elite systems (Trow, 1973), where few members of society had the opportunity to attend by dint of the availability of places, qualification thresholds, and the direct and indirect costs of participation. Students were disproportionately men from the middle and upper classes, with little or no support to enable disadvantaged groups or individuals to participate. In many countries, higher education had been primarily a colonial pursuit with a small number of universities predominately serving the expatriate European community rather than indigenous peoples.

Perhaps the first chips in the wall came with post-war schemes like the so-called GI Bill in the United States (US) and Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme in Australia that gave unprecedented educational opportunity to service veterans, including the right and means to attend higher education (Forsyth, 2015; Olson, 1973). Meanwhile, the exigencies of war had opened up new social and economic spaces for women and minority ethnic communities in many countries, leading to a rapidly-escalating demand for concomitant educational opportunities. Arguably, these threads of social change forced universities to think – perhaps for the first time – about how they might reconfigure themselves to accommodate new types of students with different needs, ambitions and experiences. Elsewhere, the retreat of colonial powers from the late 1940s onwards saw higher education opened up to previously excluded national and ethnic groups, albeit that access was still only available to a tiny proportion of the population within small and elite higher education sectors that often did not enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of local population (Jensen et al., 2016).

In most mid and higher income countries, the late 20^th century was marked by a rapid growth in the provision of higher education places. In the United Kingdom (UK), for example, the proportion of young people participating rose from around 5% in the 1960s to 50% by the late 2010s, as well as opportunities opening up for older learners (Harrison, 2017; National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). Marginson (2016a) argues that this global phenomenon was driven in large part by growing social demand, especially from the burgeoning urban middle classes who valorised education as a means of maintaining or extending their socioeconomic status. However, this opening up of supply also provided new opportunities.

Widening access in the 21^st century

Over the last twenty years, the political and academic spotlight has increasingly shifted to focus on which individuals and communities have access to higher education. This is partly due to concerns about international competitiveness in the ‘knowledge age’ and partly as a result of a wider emancipatory movements to address structural inequalities and expand educational opportunities to groups who have been deliberately excluded or whose ability to participate has been curtailed by legal constraints, personal circumstances or socioeconomic privilege (Marginson, 2016b).

In wealthier nations with mass systems of higher education, this attention has historically focused on common sites of inequality like social class, gender, ethnicity and disability, with a rich policy and practice landscape and a significant research literature (e.g. Bathmaker et al., 2016; Boliver, 2015; Brunner et al., 2006; Burke, 2012; Clancy and Goastellec, 2007; Koucký et al., 2010; Meyer et al., 2013; Reay et al., 2010; Waller et al., 2016). Intersectional studies have brought to light the ways in which these inequalities interact to mitigate or intensify disadvantages; this has, for example, led to concerns about the opportunities and experiences afforded to white working class boys in the UK (Atherton and Mazhari, 2019). Often due to the actions of charities and other social activists, attention has now started to turn to less-readily apparent groups who are subject to specific forms of disadvantage.

In low income nations, which tend to retain elite systems where higher education generally remains only available to a small proportion of the population, there are now attempts to expand higher education to include new social, ethnic and cultural groups (Chien et al., 2017; Salmi, 2018). However, continuing discrimination – direct or indirect – often means that these new opportunities are not equitably distributed, while the large-scale movement of people in response to global crises such as conflict and climate change is causing new strains on educational systems where people seek a better life through education in their adopted country (UNESCO, 2019).

Marginalisation – of whom and by whom?

The rationale behind this book is to explore new or re-emerging forms of disadvantage seeded by the processes of expansion and emancipation outlined above. Our aim has been to collate and present a collection of individual chapters that engage with groups that have generally been absent from the literature on disadvantage and inequality in higher education, drawn from different national contexts and distinct sets of circumstances.

While evocative, the term ‘marginalisation’ is slippery and we have used it somewhat reluctantly in framing this book. It brings to mind ideas about pushing to the edges of sociocultural spaces – people who are present, but peripheral and unrecognised. Marginalised students are in our universities, but they are unlike other students in key ways that compromise their opportunities to engage and thrive in the environment. Even alongside better known disadvantaged groups, marginalised communities may appear to policymakers, university staff and other students as out-of-step, displaced and even a distraction from the main business.

Messiou (2012) cites the United Nations Development Programme (1996, p. 1) in defining marginalisation as ‘the state of being considered unimportant, undesirable, unworthy, insignificant and different resulting in inequity, unfairness, deprivation and enforced lack of access to mainstream power’. We will come on to question whether this might be too narrow, with some people more passively marginalised by collective indifference, uncaring bureaucratic systems or indirect exclusions from power that are unenforced, but nevertheless pervasive. Furthermore, Mowat (2015) argues that marginalisation is more than a state of being, but encompasses ‘a sense that one does not belong and, in so doing, to feel that one is neither a valued member of a community and able to make a valuable contribution within that community nor able to access the range of services and/or opportunities open to others’. Messiou (2006, 2012) draws an interesting distinction between whether putatively marginalised learners feel that they are marginalised and whether this marginalisation is recognised by society at large.

As we will see, marginalisation is not a crude ‘numbers game’. Some of the groups examined in the two chapters are indeed very small (e.g. transgender students in Hong Kong), but others are numerically large (e.g. rural students in South Africa) or even dominant (e.g. religious students in the UK). Social power does not come from weight of numbers alone and those who have power in some social fields may lack it in others. As Petrou et al. (2009) note, ‘Societies often have the tendency to construct margins, considering those that are differentiated from the majority or the accepted normality to constitute a deviance.’

Similarly, the vectors for marginalisation that the chapters explore are varied. Direct forms of discrimination from mainstream society are readily apparent for some groups, but the marginalisation is more subtle in others, where traditional heritages, lifestyles and economic niches have been inexorably pushed to the fringes by the modern world (e.g. the Sami of Scandinavia or Traveller communities in Ireland). Some, like the indigenous peoples of Australia, continue to wrestle with the legacies of colonialism that saw them historically excluded from power and access to basic services like education, despite more recent efforts to provide legally protected rights. Subtler still are those forms of marginalisation that are about time and space, where access to education is a constant balance between the constraints of family life (e.g. carers in the UK) or bureaucracy (e.g. parolees in the US). There are also examples of groups that have been marginalised suddenly or through their entry into new contexts, including those losing positions of relative power or prestige as a result of war or natural disasters (e.g. refugees in Germany).

There are therefore meaningful challenges in using the language of marginalisation in the way that we have done. Indeed, Messiou (2017) questions whether a focus on marginalised groups is appropriate, given that categorisations tend to obscure individual challenges, while the process of identifying and researching these groups may risk intensifying the stigmatisation or subjective marginalisation that they feel. Nevertheless, there is some consensus that there is considerable value in sensitive and ethical research. For example, Mowat (2015) argues that questions such as what it means to be marginalised and what people are marginalised from ‘can only be fully addressed by looking at the experiences of individuals’ – a starting point before starting an active dialogue where findings are shared between researcher and researched to add new insight and act as a stepping stone to practical action (Messiou, 2012).

It is in this spirit that we hope that this collection will contribute to this discourse within universities and with national policymakers. We have brought together what is currently known about twelve different communities of students in higher education whose stories are less commonly told and who experience varying forms of marginalisation in the hope that they will spark new conversations about these groups, as well as shedding light on the phenomenon of marginalisation more widely.

Marginalisation in higher education

As outlined above, there is a rich literature around disadvantage and inequalities in higher education. Some of this has focused on marginalised communities and their access to higher education, but very little has specifically been conceptualised in terms of marginalisation as a specific phenomenon or process by which those communities are excluded – nor on the links between these communities and others that are subject to similar processes. It is this space that this book aims to fill and we pause briefly to review the literature that does exist.

Based on their work in schools, Ainscow, Booth and Dyson (2006) view educational marginalisation as resulting from failures in ensuring the presence, participation and achievement of learners. In their study of indigenous Australians in higher education, Gale and Mills (2013) argue that it is insufficient to simply provide places for marginalised groups – policymakers and educators need to open up spaces where they are welcomed and valued. Walker and Mkwananzi (2015) note a similar challenge in South Africa, where the presence of Black students has risen rapidly with the reconfiguration of the higher education sector, but their ability to succeed remains compromised. Petrou et al. (2009) and Teranishi et al. (2015) highlight the pervasive and persistent link between socioeconomic disadvantage and marginalisation from education, the latter focusing on the situation of undocumented migrant students in the US who have no access to state support.

Gale and Mills (2013) focus on the centrality of learning to inclusion for marginalised groups, as the core function of higher education. They argue that pedagogy not only provides access to a curriculum, but also a means of signalling a wider intent and legitimacy to those groups. Similarly, Petrou et al. (2009) caution against well-intentioned initiatives predicated on students assimilating into alien educational forms, stressing that the role of educational renewal should be to identify divisive pedagogic practices and seek to remove them. On a more positive note, Mkwananzi and Mukwanbo (2019) highlight the potential role for online pedagogies in enabling the participation of vulnerable migrant students in South Africa.

Interestingly, Mowat (2015) asserts that for a group to be considered marginalised, there must be a sense of shared (perhaps even stereotypical) experience, but also a conceptualisation of an idealised state from which the group is excluded. Perhaps this begins to explain the lack of attention that such groups have received to date: there is no agreement about how a ‘perfect’ higher education system should look across time and space, with new forms waxing and waning in response to globalised market forces that also open up new forms of marginalisation (Balarin, 2011).

Structure of the book

In conceiving this book, we have eschewed chapters on higher-level sites of inequality such as gender, social class and disability. It is not that these topics are unimportant, but rather that these have received – and continue to receive – significant attention. Our desire has been to bring to light communities about which little has been written and where research efforts are in their relative infancy. As a result, some of the chapters are necessarily based around small-scale studies, high-level descriptions or analyses of research gaps.

As an organising principle, we have divided the chapters across three sections broadly representing different types of marginalised communities. Clearly these are not distinct and some of the chapters could have been placed in multiple sections, reflecting the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon.

The first section focuses on Disadvantage. This takes in both direct forms of disadvantage caused by discrimination and stigmatisation, as well as more subtle forms of indirect disadvantage arising from a mismatch between students’ lived lives and the bureaucratic milieu of higher education with its timetables, teaching spaces, policy documents and assessment deadlines. These forms of temporal, spatial and cultural dislocation from the mainstream student experience are perhaps less immediately obvious, but potentially no less marginalising. For some groups, the disadvantag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Marginalised communities in higher education
• Section I Disadvantage
• Section II Mobility
• Section III Indigeneity
• Index