Notes on:  Reay, D. (2003) Shifting Class Identities?: Social class and the transition to higher education. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215058374_Shifting_Class_Identities_Social_Class_and_the_Transition_to_Higher_Education DOI:10.4324/9780203464939 Dave Harris There is a lot of stuff about identity, including post-modernism, the fragmentation of experience, diversity of lifestyles and so on, while at the other end [including Giddens] there is an insistence that the metanarratives of social class, race and gender are still useful. Beck and the theory of individualisation is still workable: the certainties of the industrial era have gone but a new set of risks have emerged so individuals are likely to seek solutions on an individual rather than a collective basis. Experiences are individualised and setbacks and crises are viewed as personal failures even if they originate in social processes. Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody have argued that understanding social class means recognising class identity both as a 'phantasmatic category' discursively constructed, but also as a category rooted in social cultural and material differences. This article tries to keep personal biography in play with structural processes. Social classes and identity designation 'lived out by individuals materially, socially and culturally', but it is also understood at the individual level and takes the form of 'dis-identification, defensiveness, pride and shame' as responses to 'living class on a day-to-day basis' [and she draws on Skeggs and Savage here — NB no page numbers]. Identity is 'relational and marked out by differences and exclusions', as Hall has reminded us: '"identities function as points of identification and and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render 'outside' abjected"' [apparently in de Gay, Evans and Redman ( eds) Identity: a Reader, 2002. London: Sage in association with the Open University]. These matters of inclusion and exclusion 'are becoming manifest in the field of higher education' and in the politics of national identities across Europe. Class identities are more problematic and disputed, but classificatory schemes are still active and many are rooted in class differences, for example in parental choice, where class aspects are disguised by 'myriad euphemisms' relating to the sorts of children that middle-class parents wish to avoid in their school choice. 'Similar processes can be identified in universities in the era of mass HE. In particular 'universities like North London, Middlesex and South Bank Universities are increasingly pathologised for having large working class and ethnic intakes'. New Labour are particularly keen to attract young and mature students as first-generation, but Reay wants to see how class and race interact in their choices and aspirations, how they view HE institutions and how they develop a '"classed self"' to influence these meanings. She is also interested in the consequences of change and transition. She tries to examine inequities and social justice implications. What emerges is that transition into HE is far from a superficial process of class transition, and working class applicants often have to do 'a lot of psychic reparative work, from dealing with fear and anxiety about the unknown to, in extreme cases, reconciling two different senses of self (Lather 1991)'. This is like Bourdieu's duality of the self where there are two irreconcilable worlds. She has some examples [no other details of the sample though]. A black working class lone parent said that she saw no point spending time with people who would not relate to her, that she came from a different world, which illustrates Bourdieu and the practical anticipation of limits which can lead to self exclusion. Many working class students had 'high levels of ambivalence about the more elite universities' and worried about fitting in. Good universities were far from 'uniformly positive' in contrast to middle-class counterparts. One black working class student saw it is a dilemma between choosing a good university and one where she might be more likely to fit in. She saw psychological barriers. She seemed to express 'both a class and ethnic distance' and how these two can amplify each other. She worried that she would make the wrong choice altogether because she knew so little. Another white working class (?) female had similar anxieties that she found tiring and strenuous, and this confirms what Walkerdine also found among successful working class girls. A white working class boy found similar levels of anxiety especially if he did not get the predicted high grades — he really did not know what he was going to do if the worst happened. Lots of students saw the risks, but 'only the working class students used such powerfully emotive language of fear and anxiety'. Those who were established middle classes had a 'more coherent story', and experienced only 'episodic uncertainty and stressful periods. There are extensive familial reserves of expertise… safety nets', for example family companies, and other kinds of cultural academic and social capital. Parents had often been to university, sometimes the same one. They often saw higher education choice as 'the logical end product of a host of earlier academic choices… a rational, orderly, clear-cut' matter. Working class students felt anxiety about fitting in or feeling at home. The culture of old universities was elitist and alien. One was put off by the interview at Goldsmiths — '"like what I'd imagine to be a conversation around the dinner table in a really upper-class middle-class family… They wanted me to have really strong views about things"'. She felt she was out of her league. The same thing was felt by other working class students — '"a complete shock… You expect little pictures with eyes moving around watching you all the time"', a metaphor for the contempt felt for social inferiors, having to see yourself through middle-class eyes. Identity is about difference and differences generate exclusions. HE is all about exclusionary processes including hierarchical ordering. There are many who have been eliminated, potential outcasts, '"outcasts on the inside"' for Bourdieu, rejected by fractions of the middle classes with higher levels of cultural or economic capital or both, segregated by class and race even within HE, untouched by schemes for widening access and participation. Risks have indeed been individualised, but not evenly In terms of education the working classes are still most at risk — they cannot gain access to all parts of the school system especially the higher levels because the economic and symbolic values of degrees have to be maintained. This goes along with a process of devaluation, for Bourdieu arising from proliferating degrees and degree holders — the new arrivals are the first victims, although they are often seen as directly responsible. We can see devaluation in HESA data [even in 1998 – 9!] — 'Almost 1/3 of all graduates, over 40,500 got clerical, secretarial or administrative jobs compared with 37,800 going into professional occupations'. Some universities, including South Bank and North London were seen as offering particularly devalued degrees, mostly because it was an '"ethnic University"' as many working class applicants said. So mass HE has created spaces but also new stigmatised universities and identities [the old 'buffer zone thesis' as in Glass's fear back in the 60s]. This has led to complications like rather not doing a degree at all rather than doing one at a stigmatised university — not wanting to be a member of any club that will have me. Places where you are going to feel more comfortable must be deficient. We can see the working classes are the classic other of higher education. They are confronting issues around 'authenticity, shame and belonging'. Some clearly illustrate a duality of the self 'in which a tarnished past identity coexists uneasily along a desired new improved identity' the generalised suspicion of new universities therefore takes on a particular implication — 'the middle-class students are not implicating themselves when they talk about avoiding new universities, although such avoidance is racialised as well as classed'. There are more difficult impulses for working class students, involving 'both denial and pathology', or 'shame and the fear of shame'. Indeed many working class students have been 'caught between two opposing shames — the shame of overreaching and failing ... [never just an academic matter but affecting the whole individual and whether you were a right person and]... a second shame, that of ending up in a second-class university'. The whole narrative is 'steeped in class distinctions'. It is similar to Skeggs finding that working class women students disidentified from their current class positions, or recognised their place and also associated it with deficits and were attempting to leave, seeing the spaces in HE as degraded places, 'aspiring… To the places of more privileged others' So 'symbolic violence can be enacted at one's own expense'. There are resonances with the injuries of class in Senat and Cobb, although those injuries kept them in their place. Here, symbolic violence means disidentification, which seems essential in order to think yourself into more privileged spaces, via some duality of the self, '"habitus divided against itself, in constant negotiation with itself and with its ambivalences and therefore doomed to a kind of duplication, to a double perception of the self, to successive allegiances and multiple identities"' [Weight of the World p.511]. There are also hopes and desires — they all wanted to go to university and sought gains, and there was evidence of 'optimism and self transformation [which she notes in Reay et al. 2002], and creative responses with this sample. There are also material differences not just psychological ones. For example paid employment was much more common for working class students during term time. These were consequent constraints in predicted A-level grades and achievements. There were also strong signs of localism among working-class students appearing for example in 'material constraints of travel finance' affecting things even like limited choices of institution according to the number of stops on the tube or walking distance of different London HE institutions, or living at home. Together, these factors mean that 'most of the working class students in our study ended up in the new "working class" universities'. Overall, far from new equal opportunities, there is now a process of unequal opportunities in which a majority of working class students 'are segregated in low status universities at the bottom end of the University's league table'. They get different experiences of being a student and thus student identities. Working class students are constrained both geographically and financially — most of them were still staying in the parental home and anticipating long hours at work while studying, so the traditional idea of independence leisure and academic work 'was beyond the reach of many'. The small number who do attain a place in one of the elite universities often are faced with 'considerable identity work'. They may have to refashion their working class self into a middle-class persona, which can be painful because it implies that who one was and where one comes from 'are imputed with deficit and old devalued identities'. It might still result in lower earnings generally anyway. Generally, there is still a lack of research on '"the ones who got away"', the overt psychological processes involved, and 'the more hidden layers of compromise and compromising; the psychic struggles and stresses', the strains of shedding earlier class identities, and how to reconcile the sense of self they started out with.  Some do develop hybrid identities but , overall, do they see the benefits as worth it. In the widening access scheme she undertook at King's College London they asked the young minority ethnic predominantly working class young people what they were looking for in a university and their answers were 'to fit in, feel comfortable, be somewhere where there is a mixture of students from a wide range of backgrounds'. Yet they have little chance of finding it with themselves if they apply to pre-1992 universities and will find themselves caught in the same double bind, facing marginalisation, 'various feelings of shame, denial and defensiveness that the social backgrounds, and the difficult task of constructing a middle-class self without middle-class resources'