Conference Agenda

Feelings of shame appear as a central dimension in the experiences of working-class students (Loveday, 2016; Skeggs & Loveday, 2012). Literature shows that those, who – against statistical odds (Hauschildt et al., 2021) – are the first in their family to attend university are frequently accompanied by feelings of shame in academic spaces. In his analysis, German Sociologist Sighard Neckel exposes feelings of shame as deeply connected with social hierarchy and thus always related to the social biography of subjects (Neckel, 2020). Nevertheless, the significance of shame in social mobility tends to remain a side note in empirical studies (e.g. Hinz, 2016). Rather, these studies focus on the experience of foreignness, the lack of fit and coping with habitual differences (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Lehmann, 2013; Hurst, 2010; Reay, Crozier & Clayton, 2009). However, shame seems to be of particular importance looking at the current state of education: According to the meritocratic logic, disadvantage, dropouts, and lack of fit in educational institutions are discursively interpreted as individual failures, as collective patterns of interpreting of social inequality lose their significance (Neckel, 2020). Feelings of shame are thus necessarily produced in the educational institutions of an increasingly individualised society. The university acts as an accomplice in the social production of shame – and shame becomes a fundamental pedagogical problem (Magyar-Haas, 2020). Still, the question of how shame unfolds in concrete empirical contexts of class transitions has yet to be answered.

Against this background, the paper poses the questions: What role do feelings of shame play in processes of social mobility in the context of university? How is 'class shame' coped with in the process of social mobility? To answer these questions, I will draw on exploratively collected data from a research project that aimed at gaining better understanding of the lived experiences of working-class students regarding their navigation of their course of education (“Becoming Academic – First-Generations Students in Austrian und German Higher Education”, 2019-2023). This in-depth qualitative research was formulated as a biographical inquiry (Merrill, 2020), with data having been collected via biographical-narrative interviews and through written accounts. The aim of this paper is to use in-depth empirical research to gain insight into the emotional experience of social class in education and outline systematic reflections the role of shame in these processes. As an example, the autobiographical accounts of an education studies student are brought into the centre of the analysis and questioned regarding shame and its representation.

Particularly when debating social closure and education, shame needs to be conceptualised in relation to the reproduction of social inequality. Thus, the theoretical framework of this study combines Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and his work on habitus, milieu and field (Bourdieu, 1984) with Neckel’s concept of shame as a social emotion (Neckel, 2020). Neckel differentiates between moral and social shame: unlike moral shame, which is linked to guilt, social shame has a specific societal function (ibid.). Shame is thus considered both a product and a producer of class relations in that it devalues the shamed, legitimates the subordination of one subject to another in the experience of shame, and thus contributes to the self-participation of the shamed subjects in the maintenance of the social order. The feelings of inferiority expressed in social shame are not individual, but bound to membership of certain social groups, collective identities, and social classes (ibid.). Feelings of shame in the context of higher education are therefore not simply personal, they are rather profoundly social since the symbolic relations of violence are reflected in the subjective experience of shame (Bourdieu, 2001).

Although the current trend is to shop online supermarkets still have customers, especially around rush hour. In Denmark, when we shop in person, we meet just a few junior (often young) staff members who perform the routine but essential retail tasks like stocking shelves, arranging displays, working on the tills, cleaning counters, and sweeping the floor. Such work seems simple but behind it there exists a complex, increasingly technological, global chain of markets, production, and transportation. To function within these challenging spheres requires skills that must be learned and further developed within a commercial, organisational framework, yet how these are acquired is rarely studied. So, this project sets out to examine and analyse internal training and educational practices in retail, focusing on the basic workforce up to mid-level management.

At the conference I will present preliminary findings and ideas for further research.

The background for the project is that the public education system, since WWII, has been part of an extensive education project (Imsen et al., 2017) which ensures that as citizens in the welfare state we in Denmark share a common view of society and consequently of how education should be understood and performed. Within this unilinear perspective, other forms of educational activities become invisible, particularly those that increasingly take place outside the welfare state's value framework, such as internships and training within the retail area. Even when it is acknowledged that the public and business sectors are not two separate worlds but interact and rely on each other at many points (Pedersen, 2011), training activities remain shrouded, for the educational activities of floor workers and management are not a fundamental part of a business’s daily activities. Dealing with specific competencies together with liberal and commercial values and attitudes requires worldviews that differ from those embedded in public education.

The overarching framework for this project is an analysis of how cultural worlds that traditionally are categorically apart, meet. Attitudes towards the other – a possibly unknown world – shape our ideas about ourselves even while we enhance our understanding of the unfamiliar. Taking a sociological perspective, and inspired by Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame (1981), the study will seek to capture values and attitudes related to working in the business area from both within and outside retail. Furthermore, it will study young people who work and have careers within large retail chains: for personal, familial, and social reasons, significant numbers of retail employees have earlier opted out of public education programmes and are hence seen as individuals with 'No education'. However, this label often obscures other forms of educational activity: partly completed educational programmes, study undertaken outside Denmark, or informal learning from participation in civic society.

The questions the project will seek to answer are: What leads to the choice of a career in retail and which dynamics within families, school, society, and companies propel the young into retail? What are the young employees’ stories about their working life, and their understandings of possibilities in the organisational field they act within? Do discontinued studies or civic educational engagement influence the choice to work in retail and, if so, how? Moreover, what can we learn from this encounter between the cultural worlds in business and the public school system?

The number of international students in Australia has expanded rapidly over the past three decades, in line with a trend towards global expansion in the number of globally mobile postsecondary students: there were more than 5.3 million people studying for a tertiary qualification outside of their home country as of 2017 (UNESCO, 2021). Australia has benefitted from this migratory flow, having developed a highly lucrative higher education export industry. In 2021, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 570,626 students enrolled in Australian tertiary institutions, making it the fourth most popular destination country for globally mobile students.

In this paper, based on data from a mixed-methods study, first, we seek to understand how levels of financial precarity vary within this group, responding to calls to reverse the socioeconomic homogenization of the international student migrant in existing academic work (e.g. Lipura & Collins, 2020; Raghuram et al., 2020). Secondly, we explore the ways in which financial precarity seeps into the ‘intimate spheres’ of international students’ lives. In doing so, we aim to centre and refine ‘precarity’ as a conceptual framing for the study of international student mobility. As such, although this study is focused on the Australian context, we seek to discuss the wider implications of increased precarity among international students globally, including in Europe. We posit the use of precarity as a bridge or ‘relational nexus’ (Neilson, 2019), anchored in structural conditions but connecting these to the broader lived experiences of students, focusing on time poverty, social isolation, and negative impacts on physical and mental wellbeing, as facets of precariousness understood as ‘a socioontological dimension of lives and bodies’ (Lorey, 2015, p.11). In sum, rather than defining precarity exclusively as an economic condition, we propose that it is useful to explore the connections between financial precarity and precarious life (Strauss & McGrath, 2018).

The precarity and precariousness of international student migrants remains underexplored. They are generally framed as a relatively homogenous group, through consumption-based metaphors, as privileged members of the nascent ‘global middle class(es)’ (Robertson, 2015). This is reflected in the fact that a significant portion of the empirical research on internationally mobile students has been concerned with the ways in which this form of migration is employed as a means of middle-class social reproduction. As a result, research in this area, especially that focused on major destinations in the Global North, has only rarely acknowledged the full diversity of socio-economic backgrounds within this group. However, there is increasing recognition of a critical need to acknowledge the vulnerability and precarity faced by many international students, progressing beyond the aforementioned ‘flattening’ of the socio-economic dimensions of international student mobility (Lipura & Collins, 2020; Raghuram et al., 2020). The findings that we present in this paper contribute to understandings of precarity among international student migrants by highlighting the high level of variation between this group.

Survey respondents are divided into four groups of financial deprivation, according to results from a baseline survey which collected information on financial stress indicators – none, moderate, high, and extreme. This enables an exploration of the ways in which economic insecurity, and other facets of broader lived experience – wellbeing, free time, and relationships – interact with each other and shape migrants’ experiences differentially along lines of financial vulnerability.