Conference Agenda

Despite the prioritisation of widening participation agendas globally, and increased levels of working-class people entering higher education, inequalities along the lines of social class persist (Hoskins & Shah, 2017). As a result, social class dynamics produced in the higher education remain a critical site of research, particularly as practices of precarious employment rise (Walkerdine, 2021). While a growing body of higher education research emphasises the shifting and contradictory nature of class assemblages (Hey et al., 2021; Threadgold, 2020; Webb et al., 2017), there remains a need to counter an historical tendency to use binary conceptions of power, which typically point to the stability of classed relations. For the most part, working-class students and scholars remain framed around notions of constraint in social class research, which risks naturalising deficit framings. What tools do we have then, to refocus on working-class agency? What concepts can aid in capturing how ‘dominant class interests… [are] forever encountering and sometimes fraying in the face of dissent and difference’? (Hey et al., 2021, p.18).

In this paper, I use Jack Halberstam’s insights on the queer art of failure (Halberstam, 2011) to understand complex, classed student and early career academic identities, by exploring ambivalent rejections of middle-class norms. As Halberstam has it, the failure of queer lives to comply with dominant norms generates ‘negative’ affects, but these ‘bad’ feelings are, simultaneously, a productive force. Their mobilisation can ‘poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life’ (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3) and expose capitalist logics as a sham, including the assumption that there must be winners and losers in life. Practices of queer failure blur the normative lines between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ affects, and undo the binarisation that often occurs in relation to working class actors, who are read as disempowered rather than as both mobilised and constrained. An impetus towards queered class relations could engender a working-class being-in-the-world as a mode in which attachments to loss, awkwardness, alienation and otherness continue, but in a way that offers relief. The impossibility of doing or being ‘elite academic’ may usher in ambivalence; knowing failures are ‘modes of unbeing and unbecoming [which enact] a different relation to knowledge’ (Halberstam, 2011, p. 23). That is, ambivalence towards middle-classed assumptions and modes of action in higher education represent a potential means of unknowing and un-feeling of class deficits—an un-becoming of class disadvantage.

In this empirical research, I apply Halberstam’s insights on reading non-normativity to the lives of working-class, women-identifying students and early career staff in Australian universities enrolled in postgraduate education. Through interview data, and in conjunction with Margaret Wetherell’s (2012) affective-discursive practices approach, I identify affective practices that enact ambivalence and productive failings. Everyday sense-making is treated as series of affective events where analytic attention is placed on the micropolitical, but in relation with ‘entanglements between the constituent social, cultural, biological and material parts of the broader field’ (Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). The art of failing to perform the elite and high performing student or early career researcher does not necessarily eradicate the negative impacts of deficit discourses. However, it has potential to displace them, by giving them other meanings. Overall, this paper contributes to a feminist and queer ethics for class research in higher education that is both intellectual and affective (Reay, 2015), and emphasises working-class capacities.