Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities 9781350041080, 9781350041103, 9781350041110

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Series page
Title
Copyrights
Contents
List of Figures
Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: (New) Theoretical Directions for Understanding Student Geographies and (Im)Mobilities
1 Patterns, Policies, Discourse: Transformations in UK Higher Education
2 Missing Out, Standing Out or Under Threat? Current Conceptualisations of Student (Im)Mobility and Belonging
3 A Framework for Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Diversity in Student Experiences
Part Two Researching Mobile Belonging: Emplacing Students’ Experiences and Identities
4 Methods for Researching Students’ Everyday Mobilities and Belonging
5 Methodological Notes: Synthesising Our Research Approach
Part Three Empirical Explorations: Students on the Move in the UK
6 Disassembling the Binaries? Characterising the Heterogeneous Living at Home Student
7 Inhabiting Everyday Mobilities: The Relational Belonging and Not Belonging of ‘Movers’ and ‘Stayers’
8 Rhythm-Making and Everyday Belonging: Understanding the Daily Commute as a Performance of (Not) Belonging
9 Ongoing Mobilities: The Complexities of (Not) Belonging to the Graduate Class
Conclusions
References
Index

Citation preview

Everyday Mobile Belonging

Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education Edited by Paul Ashwin and Manja Klemenčič As the number of students attending higher education has increased globally, there has been an increasing focus on student experiences of higher education. Understanding how students experience higher education in different national, institutional and disciplinary settings has become increasingly important to researchers, practitioners and policy makers. The series publishes theoretically robust and empirically rigorous studies of students’ experiences, including a broad range of elements such as student life, engagement in degree courses and extracurricular activities, experiences of feedback and assessment, student representation and students’ wider lives. It offers a richer understanding of the different meanings of being a student in higher education in the 21st century. Also available in the series Negotiating Learning and Identity in Higher Education, edited by Bongi Bangeni and Rochelle Kapp Understanding Experiences of First Generation University Students, edited by Amani Bell and Lorri J. Santamaría Also available from Bloomsbury Consuming Higher Education, Joanna Williams Globalization and Internationalization in Higher Education, edited by Felix Maringe and Nick Foskett Meritocracy and the University, Anna Mountford Zimdars Reflective Teaching in Higher Education, Paul Ashwin

Everyday Mobile Belonging Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published in 2021   Copyright © Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton, 2019   Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page.   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4108-0 PB: 978-1-3502-0132-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4111-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-4109-7   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India Series: Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education   To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vii viii ix x

Introduction

1

Part One Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: (New) Theoretical Directions for Understanding Student Geographies and (Im)Mobilities 1 2 3

Patterns, Policies, Discourse: Transformations in UK Higher Education Missing Out, Standing Out or Under Threat? Current Conceptualisations of Student (Im)Mobility and Belonging A Framework for Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Diversity in Student Experiences

15 41 63

Part Two Researching Mobile Belonging: Emplacing Students’ Experiences and Identities 4 5

Methods for Researching Students’ Everyday Mobilities and Belonging 85 107 Methodological Notes: Synthesising Our Research Approach

Part Three Empirical Explorations: Students on the Move in the UK 6 7 8

Disassembling the Binaries? Characterising the Heterogeneous Living at Home Student Inhabiting Everyday Mobilities: The Relational Belonging and Not Belonging of ‘Movers’ and ‘Stayers’ Rhythm-Making and Everyday Belonging: Understanding the Daily Commute as a Performance of (Not) Belonging

121 139 157

vi

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Contents

Ongoing Mobilities: The Complexities of (Not) Belonging to the Graduate Class

175

Conclusions

195

References Index

207 233

Figures 1 2 3 4

Percentages of respondents living either in student accommodation or at home Percentages of respondents living either in student accommodation, with parents or in their own homes Mapping the proximity and distance of living at home students to the University of Portsmouth Word cloud of living at home students’ thoughts about ‘going’ to university

123 126 133 135

Series Editors’ Foreword The Understanding Student Experiences in Higher Education book series publishes theoretically robust and empirically rigorous studies of students’ experiences of contemporary higher education. The books in the series are united by the belief that it is not possible to understand these experiences without understanding the diverse range of people, practices, technologies and institutions that come together to form them. The series seeks to locate students’ experiences in the context of global changes to higher education and thereby to offer a rich understanding of the different global and local meanings of being a student in higher education in the twenty-first century. Everyday Mobile Belonging makes an exciting contribution to the series in a number of ways. The primary focus of the book is living-at-home students – that is, students living with parents or in their own homes – and the effects that their everyday mobilities have on their experiences of studentship, identities and belonging. Everyday mobilities are investigated in different stages of the student life course: transition to higher education institution, during studenthood and in transition from higher education into employment. In this way, the book aims to capture the multi-scalar mobilities of twenty-first-century students. Although empirical data are drawn from mixed-methods research on three British universities, the theoretical and methodological advances in how we think about and research student mobilities in relation to student experiences, student identities, and everyday belonging will have resonance far beyond these contexts. One of the major achievements of this book is the way in which the highly localised focus of the research supports such a deep theoretical and methodological contribution to higher education research. The authors meticulously and extensively review the ‘mobility turn’ in higher education research and offer a range of theories and methodologies for scholars to draw on and develop further. The authors’ critical reflection on their research process and use of methodologies enriches the work and will be helpful for anyone thinking about how to develop their approach to research. All in all, Everyday Mobile Belonging makes a highly original contribution to our understanding of students’ experiences of higher education through an important and often overlooked perspective of student mobilities and everyday life routines. Paul Ashwin and Manja Klemenčič

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the editors of the Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education series  – Manja Klemenčič and Paul Ashwin  – for commissioning this book and to Maria Giovanna Brauzzi  – Assistant Editor for Education at Bloomsbury Academic  – for her keen guidance through the publishing process. Thank you to the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) for funding part of this research through the Everyday Student Mobilities project (grant number RA1513). Thank you to Kim Allen, Nicola Ingram, Jon Shaw, Kate Carruthers Thomas, Mark Riley, Rachel Brooks, Johanna Waters and colleagues at our respective institutions for offering support, guidance and encouragement at various points along the journey, as well as to the various conference convenors and audience members that have invited us to talk about the research within the book and offered us valuable feedback. Thanks also go to Shaun Lewin for producing the map in Chapter 6. Finally, a special thanks goes to all of our research participants whose experiences have been inspirational in helping us think differently about living at home students’ routes through higher education.

Abbreviations BGMU

black gay male undergraduates

BME

black and minority ethnic

DLHE

Destination of Leavers from Higher Education

EU

European Union

FE

further education

HE

higher education

HECSU

Higher Education Careers Service Unit

HEFCE

Higher Education Funding Council for England

HEP

higher education provider

HESA

Higher Education Statistics Agency

LGBTQ

lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer

LOH

living in own home

LSA

living in student accommodation

LWP

living with parents

ME

myalgic encephalopathy

NCIHE

National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education

NS SEC

National Statistics Socio-economic Classification

OFFA

Office for Fair Access

SRHE

Society for Research into Higher Education

TEF

Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework

UCAS

Universities and Colleges Admissions Services

UUK

Universities UK

Introduction

Higher education as a global entity has undergone dramatic changes over the opening two decades of the twenty-first century. Arguably, these changes have played out most significantly in relation to student mobilities, which have seen fundamental shifts in the ways students move at a range of spatial scales. Research has examined the meta-migration of international students as they passage between the global north and south (Xiang and Shen 2009; Brooks and Waters 2009) and the inter and intra-national mobilities of students engaging with intercontinental year-abroad programmes such as ERASMUS (European community action scheme for the mobility of university students) (King and Ruiz-Gelices 2003; Cairns 2014; Van Mol 2014). At the national and regional scales scholars have explored the mobilities involved in students leaving home to study in other university towns and cities during term-time (Duke Williams 2009; Donnelly and Gamsu 2018a, 2018b; Hinton 2011) and the implications for situating ‘different’ identities in term-time spaces (Fincher and Shaw 2009; Taulke Johnson 2010a). Following on from this, others have explored the small(er) scale mobility practices of students operating in their term-time locations (Holton 2015a, 2015b; Prazeres 2017), in their homes (Janning and Volk 2017; Holton 2017) and in their journeys between the two (Finn 2017; Holton and Finn 2018a). In this book, Everyday Mobile Belonging:  Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities, we advance these multi-scalar discussions of mobilities to launch a new framework for thinking differently about what might constitute student mobilities in contemporary higher education. In a field of research that often feels crowded by very similar theorisations, and in which student mobility is most often taken to mean large-scale international and intercultural movements, this volume provides tools for researching and conceptualising the multi-scalar regional and localised mobilities that underpin the experiences of contemporary university students.

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Situating higher education contexts Our concern is centred specifically on the everyday mobile practices of UK students, and while these experiences of mobility constitute a very particular perspective of mobility we are conscious to advocate our innovative conceptual framework as developing helpful anchor points that can be transferred and applied to other locations and perspectives. For context, 35 per cent of UK students live either with parents or in other privately rented accommodation (Higher Education Statistics Agency [HESA] 2018). In Australia this equates to 89 per cent of students living at home (Savills 2017), while in the United States, where term-time student accommodation has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, more than half (54 per cent) of students reside with their parents during term-time (Ashford 2014). These figures illustrate a strong appetite for living at home for university students (albeit it one that is focused mainly on the Global North1) yet in many contexts – specifically in the UK – this pathway is persistently badged as inferior, deficient, immobile and ‘second-best’ (see Holton and Finn 2018b; Maguire and Morris 2018). As will be explained, and critiqued, in subsequent chapters, student mobility in the UK is predicated on an expectation that students who leave home for university will maximise their opportunities to access the ‘right’ university education and associated life skills (Read, Archer and Leathwood 2003). Conversely, there remains a persistent perception that those who do not follow this pathway are more likely to have less-advantaged experiences (Holdsworth 2009b). This constitutes a tertiarylevel climate that may seem unfamiliar in other international contexts, yet, the findings from our book relate to a strong emerging canon of work that begins to question alternative small-scale student mobilities in a variety of contexts, such as Australia (O’Shea 2014), Canada (Frenette 2006) the United States (Mulder and Clark 2002; cf. Rowell 2015), the Middle East (Harker 2009), Asia (Waters and Leung 2013) and parts of Europe (Holdsworth 2005; Antonucci 2016), where students are increasingly exhibiting diverse intra-national and local mobilities while at university. Within debates about youth transitions and higher education participation, the role and significance of mobility strategies is therefore increasingly underlined. Yet, more often than not it is the spectacular, semi-permanent movements across distance that are privileged in discourses of student 1

In many sub-Saharan African contexts living at home is a less viable option due to rates of poverty, concerns over security and larger rural populations (Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) 2016).

Introduction

3

geographies, leaving the mundane, routine and everyday mobilities of students hidden and underexplored. Indeed, there are now several important texts that examine the experiences of leaving the family home to attend university (Holdsworth and Morgan 2005) and issues related to localism and choice (Reay et  al. 2005; Donnelly and Evans 2016; Hinton 2011); studying abroad and internationalisation of higher education (Brooks and Waters 2011; Guruz 2011; Cairns 2014); more general discussions of young people’s relationships with different places and identities (Hopkins 2013); and the increasing mobility of academic staff and doctoral students (Ackers 2008; Byram and Dervin 2009). These studies share a focus on mobility at different scales; however, rarely have theories and methods that explicitly speak to ideas about mobility been brought together in a volume on higher education. Thus, our text brings these debates together in one place and sets out a coherent and empirically supported campaign for theory and research within studies of higher education that foreground multiple mobilities and mobile belongingness. Crucially, our interdisciplinary approach to everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness advances these debates, speaking to the new geographies of higher education, sociological studies of participation, inclusion and identity and educational debates about retention and belonging.

Defining the living at home student Focusing on the scale of everyday mobilities is vitally important in understanding the experiences of contemporary higher education students. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, figures from HESA (2018) place more than one third (35 per cent) of UK students living with parents or in their own homes in 2016/17. While this demonstrates a compelling case for understanding the experiences of a significant body of UK students who ‘live at home’ it is less clear as to what this really means in terms of mobilities. Donnelly and Gamsu (2018a), for example, state that over half of UK students (55 per cent) attended a local university in 2014/15.2 In earlier studies Duke Williams (2009), using the 2001 UK Census, and Holdsworth (2009b), using data gleaned from the Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) noted marked regional bias towards

2

In Donnelly and Gamsu’s (2018a) methodology this equated to short distance commuters that lived in the family home and short distance movers that were living in term-time student accommodation. Short distance here equates to living 0–91 km (57 miles) from the university.

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students choosing institutions within or close to their local region. Yet, while this indicates an appetite for more limited forms of mobility than perhaps other literature suggests, what remains unclear is what kind of work the term ‘local’ is doing here, and how and why it is being used to label this group of students. In the UK, local students are often profiled in direct contrast to those who have left home for university but the geographical connotations of what it means to be local are somewhat opaque and contradictory. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2018 n.p.), the term ‘local’ can be defined both as [r]elating or restricted to a particular area or one’s neighbourhood

and relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these.

These definitions are interesting. First, in terms of geography, the OED description equates the local to both the region and the neighbourhood – two rather dissimilar spatial scales that infer different relationships with mobility. Second, the terminology suggests fixity and constraint, of being, perhaps limited or unable to fulfil something (tellingly, beyond ‘global’, antonyms for local include ‘broad(minded)’, ‘liberal’ and ‘unrestricted’). With these contrasts in mind, we argue that it is important to consider more critically how the term ‘local’ is utilised in relation to student mobilities to ensure that the diversities involved in the student experience are recognised. Our key motivation for writing this book was to dispel some of the monoliths and associated terminology that fixes certain student experiences to help develop a new way of thinking about contemporary higher education. In doing so we became particularly interested in how human geographers, sociologists and education researchers used a suite of terms to define students whose roots and routes (their social and geographical mobilities) do not necessarily follow the accepted UK-centric pathway of leaving home for university, or chart traditional familial trajectories into higher education. We quickly found ourselves faced with a confusing plethora of definitions that related to students’ socio-spatial mobilities, albeit in contrasting and often uncomplimentary ways. For example, many scholars have focused on the social mobility characteristics associated with ‘non-traditional students’ (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010; Munro 2011); ‘first gen(eration) students’ (Collier and Morgan 2008) or ‘new students’ (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003) whereby access to higher education under these guises carries connotations of inexperience and nonconformity that

Introduction

5

marks students out as different and somewhat disadvantaged. Building upon this, other definitions add geographical subtexts that infer a sense of iterative mobilities, including ‘day students’ (Christie, Munro and Wager 2005); ‘learn and go students’ (Thomas and Jones 2017) and ‘commuter students’ (Smith 2018). The phrasing of these terms (‘day’ and ‘learn and go’ in particular), while implying short-term, iterative movements, also infer a lack of belonging for those who do not immerse themselves within typical student-centric lifestyles. Finally, expressions such as ‘local students’ (Holdsworth 2009a) and ‘immobile students’ (Christie 2007) – usually discussed in binary terms – emphasise the differences between student cohorts more explicitly, marking out those who may be perceived to be local/immobile to be trapped or stuck in relation to their non-local/mobile peers who appear to be unencumbered (a highly problematic way of thinking, as this book will reveal). So, in preparing our book we felt compelled to find a term that would encapsulate the experiences of our participants but not silo them further, nor homogenise their identities. We settled on ‘living at home students’ – loosely defined as those students living with parents or in their own homes (e.g. living with partner(s) and/or children)  – as a term broad enough to acknowledge the flexibility of the cohort but also be capable of capturing the socio-spatial mobilities inferred by many of the definitions above. While increasingly students live outside of official student accommodation, our definition of living at home students does not include those who are sharing with peers or other students in private rentals. Indeed, we are most concerned with the mobilities of students who are actively eschewing this model of residential relocation and shared living. Our use of this phrase comes from the University of Manchester Students’ Union’s (2018) ‘Living at Home Society’ a programme set up to support students who live at home during study using buddying/mentoring schemes and support networks. Exploring our participants’ experiences using living at home as a point of reference from which to move forward provided us opportunities to consider how students’ multiple identities (learner, as well as parent, sibling, dependant, carer, colleague, etc.) might influence (and be influenced by) relationships between home, campus and social position. For example, students may live at home during study but may not be the first in their family to go to university; likewise, first-generation students may leave home to live in student accommodation. We therefore consider ‘living at home’ to offer the requisite flexibility for discussing the heterogeneity of students’ experiences.

6

Everyday Mobile Belonging

A place for the everyday and belonging in student mobilities research Moving beyond the characteristics of living at home students, we chose to cultivate our understandings of living at home students’ experiences using the mobilities turn as a fruitful prism through which to develop an interdisciplinary and empirically grounded theory of everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness. Using these notions of the everyday and belonging in our framework we extend previous discussions of student mobility that perhaps privilege large-scale international migration, and in the UK context, the residential mobilities attached to leaving home for university. Our book outlines the ways in which the increasing focus on the globalised and marketised higher education sector has led us to mobilise especially narrow notions of student mobility through which international migration is recognised as ‘mobility’, while other domestic and localised forms of movement and flow are read as ‘non-mobile’ experiences (see Gone International 2016). To counter this, we argue that the politics of student mobility is premised on ‘power geometry’ (Massey 1991) – that is, who moves and who does not. Through this we question how notions of fixity and mobility are figured and resisted by students and how we can better come to know these performances both theoretically and methodologically. Through our framework we maintain that scholars neglect everyday mobilities at their peril. Writing out everyday mobilities through assumptions of rootedness and fixity glosses over important issues around power and contestations over which students have the right to belong in higher education in particular ways. Moreover, it obscures our understandings of how students are responding to shifting structural changes of higher education through their various mobilities. For example, as we intonated earlier, in the UK context there is a growing trend towards local university participation, emulating the Southern European model in times of austerity (Antonucci 2016). A recent study by eurostudent.eu (EUROSTUDENT VI 2018) places 36 per cent of students across twenty-eight European countries living with parents; 18 per cent living in student accommodation; 21 per cent residing with partners and/or children and a further 15 per cent living in other shared housing that is not student accommodation. While these relationships between the broader European contexts of living at home and living in student accommodation differ to the UK figures outlined earlier in this chapter, there are starker contrasts in how European students reside during term-time. Those in Malta (69 per cent), Italy

Introduction

7

(69 per cent), Georgia (65 per cent), Albania (51 per cent) and Croatia (51 per cent) appear most likely to live at home during term-time. Conversely, those in the Nordic countries of Finland (4 per cent), Denmark (8 per cent), Norway (9 per cent) and Sweden (13 per cent) demonstrate the least propensity to live with their parents. This, we believe, emphasises the international relevance of our research, suggesting that, while new places and technologies enhance the mobility of some students, the immobility of others is often exacerbated in these ever-changing educational landscapes. Our book explores these shifts and, in doing so, problematises sedentarist theories that are present in many studies of higher education, which seek to fix students in place and treat the stability of student identities as normal and particular notions of belonging as an unequivocal good (Thomas 2012). The arguments set out in this volume, therefore, build upon a body of work that challenges the idea that students’ sense of belonging are necessarily always developed and nurtured within the boundaries of campuses and that experiences of transience and placelessness are atypical for contemporary students (see Christie 2007; Holdsworth, 2006, 2009b; Patiniotis and Holdsworth 2005). Yet, rather than considering these to be relational issues, within our analysis, we reveal notions of risk, difference and separation to be important dimensions that underpin students’ everyday mobilities and rhythms of mobile belongingness. To summarise then, our approach of everyday mobile belonging developed and taken forward in the book recognises that all places  – nation, region, city, university, the in-between spaces of travel and movement – are tied into networks of connections that stretch beyond each such place and these networks are often central to students’ ongoing feelings of mobile belongingness and sense of place. In mapping this approach, the book offers new ways of theorising and researching higher education experiences and mobilities in the twenty-first century.

Structure of the book Everyday Mobile Belonging:  Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities is divided into three parts. Part One situates contemporary UK higher education in policy and conceptual debates so as to develop a more critical understanding of student geographies and (im)mobilities. Chapter 1 draws upon the key patterns, policies and discourses which have circulated around student mobilities and belonging, both historically and in contemporary society. In doing so, this

8

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chapter outlines how contemporary mobility is diverse and knowledge driven, meaning students may not necessarily be attracted to the universities closest to them. To achieve this we provide a brief overview of policies and initiatives which are in some way shaped by, and have power to influence, discourses of student mobility. From debates about the value of internationalisation to more locally based policies around retention and widening participation, we identify dominant discourses of mobility evident within policy and institutional practices, focusing on the power relations and ‘regimes of truth’ about student mobility that they sustain and/or challenge. Here we consider the performative dimensions of belonging; that is place-making as a discursive practice in action (Benson and Jackson 2013). Indeed, choice alone cannot explain how students’ mobility practices translate into a sense of belonging; there are other factors at play, such as prevailing representations of place, that have to be negotiated by students on and off-campus. This discussion is important for situating the patterns of movement we explore in the rest of this volume. Following on, Chapter  2 examines the ways in which higher education students have come to be known in relation to their (im)mobilities and to how they feel a sense of belonging to place and space. The chapter elaborates on some of the patterns illuminated in Chapter  1 and reveals how students are positioned through the interplay of policies and public discourses around authenticity and independence, particularly in the UK and the United States where moving away to attend university has a long history among the elite and middle classes, and in Europe where shared family living is more common than residential relocation (see Holdsworth and Morgan 2005; Antonucci 2016). We draw upon geographical, sociological and educational theories of social class and inequalities that are dominated by Bourdieusian-inspired ‘classed practices’ approaches, and how this has become the ‘go-to’ model for explaining students’ choices, identities and feelings of (not) belonging in higher education. The chapter examines the scope and influence of this way of seeing students and the forms of classification which have become attached to particular experiences of (im)mobility and belonging; for example, the relationship between ‘new’ or non-traditional students and immobility (Christie 2007); middle-class mobility and innate belongingness (Chatterton 1999); mature students as day students (Christie, Munroe and Wager 2005); and the association of women and Black and minority ethnic (BME) students and localism (Evans 2009; Reay, David and Ball 2005). In Chapter  3 we present our framework for everyday mobile belonging. Here we draw upon theories of mobility to propose new ways of considering

Introduction

9

the nature of student mobilities, their contested belongings, and the significance of everyday life as a moving and dynamic entity that has a rhythm and a temporality. Following Back (2015: 2), we argue that focusing on everyday life allows us to ‘attend to the inherent liveliness of social life and its time signatures’ and to consider the implications for mundane daily encounters upon students’ university experiences. We argue for better recognition of emotion, affect and the sensory experiences associated with place and mobility (e.g. Lefebvre’s (2004) concept of rhythmanalysis) to advance a more critical alternative theorisation of belonging than that expressed in the literature pertaining to student retention (Tinto 1975; Thomas 2012). Crucially, we argue that mobility need not serve to threaten attachments to place or space. Thus, while we do not deny the significance of students’ social engagement to a sense of belonging in higher education, we seek to challenge assumptions that suggest that engagement should take place in specific socio-spatial contexts and not others. Part Two of the book contends with how everyday mobile belonging is researched in higher education contexts. In Chapter  4 we consider the vast array of innovative methods that have been employed to study students’ sense of belonging, identity and place-making with a particular focus on how mobile methods have enlivened research and opened up new avenues for understanding how space is (co)produced through everyday and exceptional movements. The chapter is organised around the following conceptual themes: place; everyday life; mobility; belonging, identity and representation; and temporality and transition. These themes are discussed and examples are provided of research undertaken in (higher) education studies or their closest relative discipline. Chapter  5 then provides methodological notes from the case studies that our analysis derives from. Three UK-based studies have been drawn together in this collective endeavour to re-theorise student mobilities research. All three characterise the complexity of everyday mobile belonging for living at home students, albeit in specific and contrasting ways. Study One  – Investigating Students’ Sense of Place in Portsmouth, UK – investigates how undergraduate students participating at the University of Portsmouth, UK, negotiate place and mobility within their term-time location. With its strong focus on the complexities of managing multiple and contrasting mobile identities, this mixedmethod approach – comprising a web-based survey and walking interviews – is closely aligned with our everyday mobile belonging framework that we develop in Chapter 3. The web-based survey was disseminated among the entire undergraduate cohort at the university (2012) and, during the spring/summer of 2012, thirty-one walking interviews were undertaken with undergraduate

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Everyday Mobile Belonging

students recruited from the web-based survey. These students were asked to take part in a self-guided ‘walking tour’ of Portsmouth and were encouraged to consider their experiences of the city and how they might relate to different aspects of it. These walking encounters were essential in understanding how everyday practices are performed and their mobile, ‘place-based’ qualities certainly enhanced the elicitation of knowledge within the research. There are close methodological connections between the walking interviews conducted for the Portsmouth project and Study Two  – Examining Everyday Student Mobilities in Lancaster, UK – funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). Study Two explores the lived emotional and sensory experiences of living at home students attending Lancaster University, UK. The research looks specifically at how belonging and well-being are cultivated, or indeed hindered, by the act of commuting and the extent to which commuting works with or against some of the goals related to sustainability to which most universities must sign up. Participating students self-identified as ‘commuters’; that is, they felt they had not engaged in traditional forms of residential relocation to attend university, however, they did not necessarily regard themselves as local. As with Study One, the project involved a range of research techniques collectively understood as ‘mobile methods’ (Buscher, Urry and Witchger 2011). These included go-along, in-situ, and campus walking interviews (depending upon participants’ needs, preferences and mode of transport). Lastly, Study Three – Expectation and Everyday Relationships: Before, During and After University – is the fourth stage of a seven-year qualitative longitudinal methodology (2006–13), undertaken with ten (of an original twenty-four) female students as they moved into higher education in the UK, and later transitioned into graduate employment. Study Three can be understood as picking up on the themes of temporality and how relational positioning shift and change over time for students, particularly as the binaries of home/university and student/ graduate become increasingly unstable at different transitional moments. Although this study includes data from women as university entrants and during their first year of study, the main focus is on graduate (im)mobilities and the ways in which these are implicated in experiences of belonging to particular notions of the graduate class (as based upon ideas about knowledge work). The inclusion of living at home contexts that stretch beyond university into post-student life provides sustainability to our framework of everyday mobile belonging, particularly in a climate whereby remaining in the family home well into adulthood is becoming increasingly commonplace (Stone, Berrington and Falkingham 2014).

Introduction

11

In moving into the empirical work, Part Three of the book is divided into four chapters that detail some of the trajectories of living at home students as they progress through their degrees. Chapter 6 presents a mixed quantitative/ qualitative analysis of a cohort of students from the University of Portsmouth, focusing specifically on their transitions into university and their motivations for living at home or moving away. Our intention here is to consider the complexities of these student experiences, and in doing so, begin to disrupt the binaries that fix students to specific identities. Chapter  7 develops these arguments through a qualitative examination of the experiences of students from the University of Portsmouth and Lancaster University. Here we explore the contrasting ways in which residentially mobile and living at home students make sense of their term-time location in and through their everyday mobilities. It begins by focusing on students’ changing activity spaces and the ways in which the iterative movements between home and term-time accommodation might influence identities and how these are performed and adapted over time. Alongside this, Chapter  7 explores the everyday meaning-making of living at home students to problematise how students might operationalise deviations from more ‘typical’ student spaces in positive and enlightening ways. This part of the discussion challenges what it means to ‘be mobile’ or ‘stay local’ and examines how a sense of mobile belongingness is developed by students through different (on- and off-campus) spaces. In Chapter  8 we follow on from discussions of activity spaces to consider the everyday rhythms, temporalities and choreographies associated with living at home students’ commuting practices. In taking commuting performances as the central focus we concentrate specifically on the experiences and practices of living at home students, and how their everyday participation in higher education is significant in understanding the impact of movements and rhythmmaking upon their university experiences. This has implications for the ways students (especially those on the margins) are able to feel a sense of belonging in higher education and, likewise, manage feelings of otherness. Chapter 9 moves these debates forward using a longitudinal study of students living in a northern England town whose ongoing mobilities, and complex relationships with home and as sites and contexts that are returned to and lived among, were translated from ‘being’ students to ‘becoming’ graduates. Through this chapter we acknowledge how practices of ‘post-studenthood’ become part of longer-term strategies for mobile belongingness which are cultivated through higher education participation. The mobilities of graduates

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have received increasing attention in recent years, both in the press and from academics. Research has examined the incidence of ‘boomeranging’ back into the parental home after university and, given the concentration of highly skilled work in particular regions of the UK, and in urban centres of other countries (see Corbett 2013 for the Canadian context), returning to the local area after completing university has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been read as cause for alarm for graduates and their families and wider society, signalling a lack of independence and stability. This chapter interrogates this idea, focusing on the everyday mobilities and sense of mobile belongingness of women graduates as they navigate their post-university pathways back at home. Graduate mobilities are understood as emerging out of, and being negotiated within, parallel and interwoven processes affecting the linked lives of individuals and households embedded in spatial and socio-economic structures operating at different scales. In concluding the book, Chapter 10 brings together the arguments expressed in the book regarding theory, methods and the significance of empirical research on the everyday experiences of students for advancing debates about contemporary practices of mobility and belonging in twenty-first-century higher education. Here, we challenge higher education scholars to ‘think otherwise’ (Fine 2009) and develop new and dynamic theoretical tools which go beyond the dichotomies that have become entrenched in discourses about student mobility and belonging. We return to our framework for everyday mobile belonging, and in doing so advocate its use as a toolkit for researchers seeking to understand everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness in their own contexts. Through this we emphasise the importance of thinking about students and graduates, and the choices they make about mobility, as being embedded within their roles and experiences within the wider world and as part of the cyclical and processual dynamics of families and relationships, the life-course and shifting associations with place and space.

Part One

Higher Education in the TwentyFirst Century: (New) Theoretical Directions for Understanding Student Geographies and (Im)Mobilities

1

Patterns, Policies, Discourse: Transformations in UK Higher Education

Introduction We open Part One with an overview chapter that provides a sense of how common understandings of student (im)mobilities have emerged in the UK context, particularly since the expansion of the sector became a key priority of government policy in the mid-twentieth century. We are especially concerned with the ways this expansion has subsequently shaped the contemporary neoliberal higher education landscape, and the patterns of participation that are currently evident. The following chapter examines a number of transformations that have taken place within the UK higher education sector  – which have stemmed from both domestic and global shifts – to reveal the ways in which changing patterns of student geographies have been shaped by policies around massification and widening access, the pervasive discourse of the market, choice and value for money and the changing composition of the student body across all levels and modes of higher-level study. As shall become clear, these patterns, policies and discourses have framed higher education as a site which demands, excludes and, quite often, normalises certain kinds of social and geographical (im)mobilities, simultaneously attaching a hierarchy of mobility practices to different groups of students, depending upon their social position and access to social, cultural, economic and mobility capitals. This has, inevitably, led to particular ‘ways of seeing’ students in the UK and elsewhere, which – as we demonstrate here and also in Chapter 2 – has had implications for the conceptual frameworks scholars have come to rely on to make sense of the ways students move, take up space and, crucially, find ways to belong in various higher education contexts. In order to map these shifts and changes, this first chapter is divided into two main sections. The first briefly outlines the historical context of policy change

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in UK higher education since the 1960s – a key period in the story of higher education reform – and links these shifts to a set of mobility practices that have become embedded in the ways student experiences have been routinely discussed and, thus, widely represented for several decades. The second section examines contemporary UK higher education policies, and reflects explicitly on the years since the Browne Review (2010), which marked an important interlude, not only in terms of UK higher education funding and access, but a more general shift in the sociopolitical and economic landscape, following the global financial crises of 2008. Here, we examine how patterns of participation and discourses around student mobility have been (re)framed by government and societal responses to this defining historical moment which triggered swingeing austerity measures, a growing culture of neo-liberal marketisation and an increasingly internationalist focus within UK institutions. The chapter outlines how these transformations have impacted upon the geographies of higher education participation, particularly the emergence of ‘local’ students and regional orientations that, in turn, have implications for post-student mobilities and graduate outcomes. In doing so, we argue this has reframed how and in what ways different students, at different levels and at different stages in the student life cycle, are recognised and therefore (de)valued for their differing orientations towards (im)mobility.

Twentieth-century (im)mobilities: Widening access and the shifting patterns of UK higher education participation The story of higher education in the twentieth-century UK is one of widening access, increased participation of young adults (as well as mature and nontraditional learners) and, as the new millennium dawned, a radical reorientation of the discourses of higher-level study from a public good, to a private benefit. These changing patterns of participation, supported (and in many cases hindered) by policy interventions and the increasingly powerful narrative of meritocratic aspiration, gave way to particular geographies of higher education at different historical moments, which include classed, gendered and racialised (im)mobilities, the cultural phenomenon of shared living among the young, and, related to this, the rise of studentification in major towns and cities (Smith 2005). Here we consider these changing student geographies against the backdrop of UK higher education policy in the mid-to-end period of the twentieth century that focused specifically on the shift towards a massified and more diverse sector.

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We begin with a necessary account of how these policies have in some ways disrupted the normative ideal of the full-time, residentially mobile and unencumbered learner, providing space for new, albeit less symbolically valuable mobilities, to emerge. Indeed, higher education has historically been conceptualised as an elite and exclusive space, which is able to reproduce (and, to a large extent, redraw the boundaries of) its own status and prestige through this exclusive spatiality (Massey 2005). Widening participation has, in many ways then, meant both social and geographical mobility, multiple modes of relocation and absorption, as ‘newer’ (and more traditional) students enter and to some extent redefine these spaces. Thus, massification as a policy project necessarily challenges dominant ways of thinking about higher education as an exclusive and bounded space and indeed, what it means to do student life in an everyday sense within these spaces. What is interesting to us and other scholars, are the tensions which have arisen from the simultaneous stretching and protecting of UK higher education’s borders, and the new/old (im)mobilities that are being created, sustained and held back through this process.

Massification and the normalising of de-location as an authentic dimension of the student experience This part of the story is concerned with the policy changes in higher education in the 1960s, a period that saw the provision for, and mobilities surrounding, higher education shift considerably, paving the way for a vision of what universities are shaped like today. Prior to the 1960s, university life was primarily a ‘closed shop’ – a fundamentally privileged affair with, in the early 1960s, only 8 per cent of school leavers joining higher education, attending one of just twenty-four universities.1 As Scott (1988:  45) articulates, such territories of education were home to ‘members of the same national elite [who] shared the same silent allegiance to the same unarticulated values’  – a process of succession that had existed for centuries. Thus, our focus upon the midpoint of the twentieth century is crucial as the spaces of higher education generally (and within Oxbridge in particular) were largely immutable, requiring clear and established routes of entry. The key turning point here was when the Committee on Higher Education, chaired by Lord Robbins, established what became commonly known as the

1

This included three out of twenty students attending Oxford or Cambridge (Oxbridge) institutions (Scott 1995).

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Robbins Report2 (Her Majesty’s Stationary Office 1963). The Robbins Report promoted the idea of massification, a stark move away from the elitism associated with higher education, with the intention of opening universities up to a broader audience. This encouraged a greater propensity for mobility in choosing higher education institutions (albeit often privileging some mobility practices over others) and in many ways transformed patterns of student geographies in the UK. Moreover, the report gave way to the Robbins Principle, which pledged to enable those who had acquired commensurate qualifications opportunities to pursue courses of higher education (HMSO 1963). This new way of conceptualising higher education  – as an inclusive and merit-based experience  – established new horizons for the possibilities of student mobilities with many of the nineteenth-century civic institutions, typically located in industrial northern English cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool and Sheffield, attempting to challenge the dominance of the Oxbridge ‘boarding school’ model of term-time residential relocation. These universities offered higher education for those seeking advanced and part-time study in their local area, and for whom de-location was not an option nor a desire. Indeed, the Robbins Report has left a crucial legacy in students’ approaches to higher education, being published at a time when levels of parttime, local participation in higher education were on a par with those of fulltime participation (Watson 2014). Hence, the Robbins Report, and the principles that emerged from it, galvanised calls for increased state funding, the further expansion of higher education and a more socially just approach to access and inclusion that continued until the early 2000s. Lord Robbins’ directives may have paved the way for an exciting new vision of higher education provision and attainment, however, the binary of local (immobile) and residential (mobile) modes of higher education participation remained. This was built upon two key, but largely unspoken, assumptions about the nature and form of student participation and mobility. First, it was expected that a degree should be acquired through full-time study over three years of studentship. Second, and related to the notion that learning happens when one is immersed solely in study end educational experiences, was the continued emphasis on ‘de-location’ – that is of moving away from home for the duration of the degree (Carswell 1988; cf. Thomas 2016: 20). These two strands of the student experience were supported by grants and bursaries awarded to

2

Higher Education:  Report of the Committee appointed by the prime minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins (1963).

Patterns, Policies, Discourse

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residential students, thus embedding residential mobility into the imaginary of the wider public and within discourses about authentic student transitions.3 As we discuss in this book, this practice is still somewhat dominant; however, for the year 2016/17 the number of full-time students in institutionally maintained and private halls of residence combined (490,590), was lower than the number living in other rented accommodation (536,030) but still more than those living in the parental/guardian home (338,040) (HESA 2018). It is important to appreciate the influence of existing, and normalised, patterns of mobility, participation and de-location upon this moment of transition for the sector. Thus, even though Robbins set out a vision for something new, the civic universities nevertheless adopted the Oxbridge college model, which, of course, carried certain symbolism and value. These new institutions followed closely the well-established pattern of the ‘finishing school’ model of higher education (Scott 2012), and, as Brown and Scase (1994) have argued, the practices of de-location and linear transition became entrenched in the practices of higher education in post-war England. Although the sector continued to grow and change – notably through the conception of seven new ‘plate glass’ universities built between 1961 and 1965 (the Universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Sussex, Warwick and York), these universities also attempted to emulate the Oxbridge college model that (once again) privileged elitist mobilities centred around living away from home and university study as a self-contained experience (Holdsworth 2009b). In fact, as Thomas (2016: 21) argues, despite the aspirations of plate glass universities to ‘redraw the maps of knowledge’ (Scott 2009: 404), residential mobility continued to be normalised because all were built on greenfield sites, and therefore at a distance from towns and cities. While it would appear that residential mobility was being further entrenched within the higher education system, the first steps in embedding higher education within the local (in a very real and everyday sense) began to take shape with the inception of the Open University in 1966. Despite its explicit appeal to local students, it was originally conceptualised within the Labour Party Manifesto as a ‘University of the Air’, referring to its flexibility on the one hand, and the medium though which it connected with students (Thomas 2016). In January 1971 it opened to its first 24,000 students (Open University 2014), operating a model of remote provision and offering an open admissions policy that made it possible for mature, working adults with caring obligations to participate

3

De-location increased substantially in the middle of the twentieth century; e.g., in 1962, four-fifths of university students lived in halls of residence or lodgings (Carswell 1988).

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without the rupture of re-location. This is a clear departure from the traditional provisions of elite, civic and plate glass universities, and the emphasis placed on studying at a distance turned ideas about the relationship between higher education and geographical (im)mobility on their head. Moreover, the Open University promoted social mobility and inclusivity in a very real sense; it was recognised that financial subsidies for studying full-time and away from home disadvantaged older students with family or employment commitments. Thus, to fill the gap created by traditional models of provision, the Open University offered a learning environment whereby part-time study could be incorporated into everyday life, with students learning in their own home and alongside their daily lives and commitments (Thomas 2016). The higher education sector in the UK had, then, become a radically transformed field by the later part of the twentieth century; even if some of the patterns of mobility and discourses about what it meant to belong to a particular student identity remained relatively unchanged. The initiation of the polytechnic college between 1969 and 1972 perhaps did the most to reshape student identities, modes of belonging and patterns of university-related (im)mobility. These new technical institutions operated under local government control and invited a more heterogeneous student body into higher education. Emerging out of Antony Crosland’s White Paper, A Plan for Polytechnics and Other Colleges (1966), they were designed to weave the processes and practices of university more visibly in and through local places and spaces. Crosland imagined a ‘binary system’ of, on the one hand, independent universities, and, on the other, a public sector of technical and further education colleges that operated within the public sector. This new arm of the sector would serve different needs. This included providing access courses for adult learners that did not hold regular entry qualifications (Leathwood and Hutchings 2003) and upgrading the status of technical education (Kerr, Gade and Kawaoka 1994). Crosland argued that polytechnics met the demand for vocational, industrial and professional courses that could not be accommodated by the university sector. The motivations for creating polytechnics have been strenuously debated. Whereas Scott (1988) argued that the emergence of polytechnics is aligned with Robbins’s vision to establish a national and much more varied framework of higher education, Trow (1989) suggested that they were simply a means for the sector to expand without weakening the social and academic distinctions attached to traditional universities. Notwithstanding, their introduction led to the establishment of a two-tiered system that made it possible for the middle classes to maintain their dominance within elite institutions (Ainley 2003). This

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encouraged a more socially diverse cohort entering newer spaces and replicating mobility patterns of moving away from home but not fragmenting the sector in any significant ways. Even so, the city-centre locations of many polytechnics meant that they were purposefully accessible and, for this reason, they at least in part encouraged a new set of mobility practices and sensibilities among higher education students, despite the fact that considerable numbers of students continued to leave home to attend polytechnics and universities alike. It is these shifts in practices, sensibilities and geographies that require new theoretical tools for explaining and understanding contemporary student experiences of (im)mobility.

The ‘post-1992’ university and beyond – paving the way for ‘new’ horizons of higher education reform This next stage in our mapping of higher education transformation now focuses upon the processes that planted the seeds of the sector, or rather the market, that we recognise today. It was arguably the outcomes of the 1988 Education Reform Act, which removed polytechnics from local authority control (effectively granting thirty-two institutions across England and Wales entry to the university ‘club’) that did more to entrench binary thinking about higher education (and, related to this, student mobilities) than mix things up. This policy was designed to create a more fluid relationship between the academic and vocational streams that differently characterised polytechnics and universities. The aim of this policy was to develop a more level playing field on price, quality and access that would open up universities (Sanders 2002). To some extent, then, we might interpret this as a move to enhance feelings of belonging to a wider community of students across the sector, and a strategy to dismantle some of the divisions and hierarchies that the university/polytechnic system established. In practice, though, the binary divide that Crosland imagined persisted, albeit under the new monikers of pre- and post-1992 universities. To this day, these divisions have functioned as lay indicators of supposed value and the stratification of both spatial and social mobility. Bathmaker and colleagues (2016) reflect on this in their research with Bristol’s two universities: University of Bristol and University of West England. They describe the ways in which ‘[r]eputation was produced and reproduced through the constant circulation and telling and retelling of stories from student to student’ (45). Drawing on examples of sports events and university merchandise, the authors demonstrate the ways the legacy of the polytechnic

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colleges is used to undermine the status of University of West England students and position them as outsiders relative to more ‘authentic’ students attending a more established institution such as the University of Bristol. It is not simply students who engage in this kind of posturing, however. In May 2018, the official Twitter account for the Russell Group – an association of the twenty-four major research-intensive and ostensibly elite UK universities – published a number of tweets about the value of attending an institution within this club. One (later deleted) tweet referenced the increased earning potential of graduates of Russell Group universities, and was roundly criticised by academics and commentators for failing to acknowledge issues around access and the class and ethnic composition of most of its students. Indeed, this ‘twitterstorm’ illuminates Longden’s (2013) argument that one layer of the sector has historically been understood to consist of students with high qualifications on entry, with very few coming from low participation neighbourhoods, whereas the post-1992 universities have become synonymous with ‘new’ students, non-traditional routes of entry, lower attainment levels and, hence, depressed graduate outcomes. These binary understandings clearly have an impact on discourses about which students, and indeed which institutions, have the right to belong in within the sector and make claims of authenticity as highly qualified graduates and high quality higher educational institutions respectively. Commenting on this entrenched perception of status and value, Bathmaker and Thomas (2009:  119) assert that the sector has become both ‘increasingly differentiated and stratified’ as the pre-1992 universities retained their selective nature while the post-1992 institutions began to engage in more active recruitment  – largely through fairs and roadshows  – though certainly not on the scale of the professional and strategic marketing that is common today (Smith, Scott and Lynch 1995; cf. Foskett 2011). This, combined with the more vocational and applied nature of the programmes offered by newer institutions, maintained the pre-1992 universities as the territory of the middle-class, fulltime, ‘traditional’ student. By contrast, the majority of ‘non-traditional’ students, including ‘local’, part-time and mature undergraduates, were funnelled into post-1992 universities, bringing new, more localised and class-based mobility practices based around class, gender, age, culture and ethnicity with them (Reay, David and Ball 2005). Increasing the number of universities that clearly privileged and supported different kinds of (im)mobilities meant that while it was still commonplace to ‘go away to university’, the mobilities associated with this meant quite different things, with students effectively choosing from different markets (Scott 1996) and

Patterns, Policies, Discourse

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sharing the same city spaces. This became a key dimension of contemporary ‘student experiences’ that, in the early 2000s, Darren Smith described as a process of ‘studentification’; a term that acknowledges practices of urban change whereby specific neighbourhoods become dominated by university students (Smith 2002, 2005, 2008). Smith’s work helps us to make sense of how the binaries of student mobilities were gradually becoming starker and more political, with substantial seasonal in-migration and out-migration patterns of students shaping both the morphology and the commodification of term-time spaces in direct opposition to perceived ‘local’ students who are considered disadvantaged through their immobilities (Holdsworth 2006, 2009b). The gradual integration of higher education with wider society (and economy) gathered pace as, in response to a funding crisis largely brought about by the rapid expansion of the sector, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (NCIHE, 1997) was chaired by the then Chancellor of the University of Nottingham, Sir Ron Dearing. Just as Robbins’s paper had years earlier, this report sought radical changes; however, while still appealing to the language of inclusion and social justice, this review advocated a much closer integration of higher education with the economy, making explicit links between universities and globalisation and the skills required of the UK workforce (Peters 2010). This emphasis on the relationship between graduates and the labour market was yet another step in the blurring of the once tightly bounded spaces of higher education, as the sector became integral to the UK’s long-term requirements to become a world leader in skills associated with knowledge work. Thus, being a university graduate became part of a discourse around the knowledge economy, salaries and investment in one’s own future. We pick up on this theme later in this chapter and specifically how it relates to feelings of belonging and the propensity towards particular post-student mobilities. First, however, it is important to state how the Dearing report maintained the focus on a widening participation in higher education, including at subdegree levels, among lower socio-economic groups and mature students. Notwithstanding, it is perhaps better to conceptualise this policy intervention as a contradictory mix of widening participation rhetoric on the one hand and increasing signs of a discourse of marketisation and competition within the higher education system on the other (Scullion, Molesworth and Nixon 2011). This undoubtedly had impacts upon notions of belonging and student engagement as conceptions of diversity and competitiveness sat uneasily alongside one another. Bathmaker’s (2015) research on dual sector institutions recognises this and she reflects the ways the growing role of English further

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education college within higher education provision further entrenched notions of localism within certain areas of the sector. These ‘HE in FE’ programmes helped the ‘New Labour’ government to work towards a target of a 50 per cent participation for 18-30-year-olds by 2010. This policy was spearheaded by greater access to higher education for those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and the measures included a funding premium for higher education institutions based on their success in recruiting students from lower socio-economic groups. Significantly though, Labour rejected Dearing’s recommendation of the introduction of a graduate contribution to tuition costs as a way to address the funding issues of a mass higher education system. Instead, top up fees were introduced by Tony Blair’s government as a mechanism for steering higher education towards the market and private funding sources while retaining a certain degree of state control (Tight 2006). The government also abolished maintenance grants, undercutting both Dearing’s advice and the foundations which made any aim of widening participation possible. Crucial to our later discussions of everyday mobile belonging, this had a noticeable impact on the ability of some students to move, to live away from home, and, therefore, choose from different geographical areas of the market. Callender and Jackson (2008: 426) considered the impact of these changes, specifically debt aversion upon student choice, concluding that potential students were much more willing to respond to fear of debt by living near their family home and pursuing a course in the subject they wanted, rather than to change the subject or the type of course they wanted to pursue. This suggests something about relations within families, and students’ recognition that their family can support them both in kind and in cash as their costs of study rise.

Donnelly and Gamsu’s (2018) recent work on higher education mobilities and ‘regional structures of feeling’ adds necessary weight to this argument that a new localism emerged in the early part of the twenty-first century. Indeed, from this point onwards, successive policy changes were implemented by the Blair government, and by the late 2000s the patterns of participation in UK higher education were beginning to transform considerably. For example, from 2004/5, strict eligibility criteria (Thomas 2016) automatically disqualified the majority of part-time students from receipt of government-funded support and a redistribution of government funding towards full-time first-time degree students necessarily impacted upon the geographies of participation and student (im)mobilities (Cochrane and Williams 2013). This was compounded

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by the dramatic scaling back and closure of public and continuing education programmes across the university sector (Atwood 2009; cf. Thomas 2016) through the removal of funding in instances where students were studying for a qualification equivalent to, or lower than, a qualification they already held. By the time this ruling came into force in 2010 (a year that marks an important shift in university funding) higher education was taking on a brand-new dimension, one which would greatly impact the everyday mobile belonging for tens of thousands of UK students through changes to the UK political governance and the all-pervasive discourses of neo-liberalism.

2010: The Brown(e) interlude The year 2010 is a useful place for this chapter to pause and reflect, before moving on to examine the second decade of the twenty-first century and assess the state of play for contemporary student geographies in the UK. The year 2010 was the last year of the Labour government, with Gordon Brown at the helm presiding over one of the most significant financial crashes of a generation and marking the end of an era characterised by government spending. As Brown left office, a Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition government moved in, bringing with them a programme of harsh austerity measures framed by the language of neo-liberal individualism. That year also brought yet another review of higher education funding, this time chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley. This review, entitled the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, recommended removing the cap on tuition fees, proposing that universities should be funded primarily through fees paid by students, with the government providing loans to students in order to enable them to pay these fees (Browne 2010). The intention was to create a market system where institutions in England and Wales competed on price, however, it also led to a more active role for the recently established independent public body, the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) which was set up to ‘promote and safeguard fair access to higher education for lower income and other under-represented groups following the introduction of higher tuition fees in 2006–07’.4 There were plans to extend the role and capacity of OFFA following the Browne review; however, as we outline in the next section, the second decade of the twenty-first century has seen the entrenchment of neo-liberal policies and practices in higher education in 4

https://www.offa.org.uk/about/.

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the UK which many argue has created a much more unequal system, having implications for the interrelationship between students’ geographical and social mobilities (Bathmaker et al. 2016). The OFFA, however, played an important role in the restructuring of tuition fees in England and Wales.5 After Browne’s recommendation was rejected, the Coalition government introduced a £9,000 cap on tuition fees for full-time students, and £6,500 for part-time, effective from 2012, and accompanied by an 80 per cent cut in the universities’ teaching grant. The OFFA therefore had to approve the requests of any institution that wished to charge a tuition fee above £6,000. In practice, the introduction of the cap meant that the majority of institutions in England and Wales charged the maximum annual tuition fee of £9,000. Of course, both full- and part-time undergraduate applications dipped when higher fees were introduced. In 2011/12 there were 521,605 full-time and 278,940 part-time first-year students in higher education and this fell sharply to 466,270 and 199,940 students respectively in 2012/13 (HESA 2018). While fulltime applications have since recovered (there were 525,490 full-time first-year students enrolled in 2015/16 (HESA 2017)), part-time figures have continued to decline dramatically (part-time numbers of first-year students have declined steadily since 2012 to 148,570 in 2015/16 (HESA 2017). In 2008/9, part-time students comprised approximately one third of all UK higher education students (Callender, Jamieson and Mason 2010) but numbers fell by 40 per cent between 2010 and 2012  – equivalent to 105,000 fewer students (Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE] 2013: 13). Even though the Browne review made it possible for universities in England and Wales to charge up to £9,000 per year (in 2018/19 this is now £9,250 per year) this new system meant that students were not required to pay their fees up front but begin to repay only when they earn above a certain threshold.6 These neo-liberalised measures continue to affect funding and the implications of the new finance regime were compounded in 2015, when the Conservative government announced that the maintenance grant for low income students was to be replaced by a further loan system. The rising cost to the individual, 5

6

Tuition fees are currently capped at £4,030 in Northern Ireland, with loans of the same size available from Student Finance NI. Tuition is managed by the Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS), which does not charge fees to what it defines as ‘Young Students’. Young Students are defined as those under the age of twenty-five, without children, marriage, civil partnership or cohabiting partner, who have not been outside of full-time education for more than three years. Students who began their course after 1 September 2012 in England or Wales begin paying off their student loan when they earn over £25,000. Students who started before 1 September 2012, or those who have a loan from the student finance agencies in Northern Ireland or Scotland, pay back when they earn over £18,330.

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it was argued, would be offset by the financial and employment returns to participation in higher education (Browne 2010). As graduate employment and incomes have come under greater scrutiny, however, the very notion of the graduate premium is losing traction, and in 2018 public and political debate returned to the issues of student funding which was a key issue in the UK General Election of 2017 (Tatlow 2017). However, despite both the governing and opposing political parties appealing to the student vote through a focus on fees and funding, the discourse is yet to shift away from an emphasis on the value of higher education for individual graduates, towards the benefits for wider society (Adams and Walker 2018). It is this individualising discourse, together with the language of the market and competitive advantage through higher education, that is perhaps (re)shaping student mobilities and the ways in which some students are able to feel a sense of belonging through (and in spite of) such spatial orientations and practices. This ‘story’ of modern UK higher education is, then, one of massification and marketisation, but also of uneven geographies that result in ‘differential mobilities which have the potential to reinforce [the] social reproduction of inequalities in [higher education]’ (Holdsworth 2009b: 1862).

Contemporary marketisation and neo-liberalisation: New patterns, new discourses, new mobilities? The separate, but interrelated policy initiatives outlined in the previous section have had a material impact upon the patterns and discourses which both reflect and redefine experiences of students in higher education in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the shrinking of the state, widespread cuts to public funding and the privatisation of social investments has impacted upon the capacity for some students to be mobile, agile and make investments in their own futures, with many, particularly mature and part-time learners, having to be much more risk averse than in the past. As we have already outlined, mass higher education systems were developed in the UK, and most other countries, in the context of the ‘welfare state’. Europe has a long history of seeing higher education as a ‘public good’ to which everyone able and motivated should have access (Schuetze 2014). Yet, since around 2005, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United States have all introduced some form of student fee system contributing to the funding of higher education (Miller 2010). Moreover, as Wilkins, Shams and Huisman (2013) reflect, this

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trend has led to higher education being regarded as a private good, that benefits individuals, and for which individuals are necessarily required to fund, rather than a public good, which benefits societies and economies in much broader terms. The policy shift around fees and public investment in higher education has inevitably changed, and continues to transform the ways in which students are seen, and view themselves, and the kinds of decisions they make about how to participate, and hence belong, at university. In this section, then, we examine these dual transformations that stem from increasingly marketised practices and neo-liberal discourses of UK higher education, in the context of changing student mobilities and relationships with place. At one level, these changes reflect the changing culture of universities and other higher education institutions, which are increasingly regarded as corporate entities, embodying the efficiency of ‘New Public Management’ systems which are increasingly focused on markets, branding and growth (Schuetze 2014). On a separate level, however, changes to students’ own self-perceptions and to wider understandings of what it is to be a student in higher education, are influenced by discourses of debt, consumerism and value for money.

Careless corporate spaces and pragmatic mobilities? Writing about the spaces of higher education in the twenty-first century, Kathleen Lynch (2010) maintains that universities have been transformed into ‘powerful consumer-oriented corporate networks’ (54). Indeed, as the traditional system of collegial university governance has been replaced by New Public Management systems, the discourse within universities has shifted towards market and league table positioning, branding and the need for expansion. In line with this, universities have been increasingly held to account by successive governments, and of course the wider public, to demonstrate how efficiently money is being spent and the extent to which their ‘services’ represent good value (read predominantly as graduate salaries and employment rates). Lynch argues that this has led to a ‘careless’ academy which has diminished time and space for learners with complex lives and needs, with the focus instead being on ‘educating an autonomous, rational person, homo sapiens, whose relationality is not regarded as central to her or his being’ (2010: 59). It is clear how such things as belonging, inclusion and student welfare might get lost within this; however, it is true that issues of student well-being have surfaced in recent years, largely in response to an apparent crisis, wherein levels of mental illness, mental

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distress and low well-being are increasing and are high relative to other sections of the population (Thorley 2017). That being said, often the strategies for dealing with everyday experiences of mental well-being are linked to individualised strategies of resilience. In this way, such policies for addressing student (and staff ) well-being and belonging chime with the neo-liberal focus on technologies of the self to ensure a readiness for the increasingly competitive labour market, rather than reflecting on the practices and cultures of institutions themselves. For Giroux (2010), this is yet another example of the ways everyday life within higher education is increasingly organised around market principles, to the extent that a corporate-based ideology shapes the neo-liberal framing of public and higher education. Giroux (2014b) locates higher education within the broader struggle over knowledge, subjectivities, values and the future that has shaped parts of Europe, the United States and the UK. The context of austerity, which includes severe cuts to public services and radical ambitions to cut national debt, has created fertile ground for this market-led system of ‘lean’ governance and the accompanying discourses of ‘the entrepreneurial self-made self ’. This has implications for student geographies and mobilities – both in terms of patterns and practices – because the costs associated with the university are perceived to move away from the public purse and onto the balance sheets of students and private households. Moreover, there are clear implications for students’ sense of belonging to a wider community of higher education students on the one hand, and the local area or region of workers on the other, as they are forced into greater responsibility for their individual choices and the personal debts these accrue. There are real issues here in terms of the wider social value of higher education participation and the cultivation of highly skilled workers for the economy and society. Although many people thought (and feared) the numbers of students studying in England and Wales would fall sharply with the introduction of higher tuition fees, data from HESA (2018) reveals this was not the case. The total number of students in UK higher education remained relatively constant between 2010/11 (2,503,010) and 2016/17 (2,317,880). Thus, as Bathmaker (2016) notes, participation in higher education actually increased under the coalition government immediately after the financial crisis. This notwithstanding, a closer look at the figures suggests that post2010 there has been a significant change to composition of students, especially in terms of age and mode of study; however, because these nuances are beyond the scope of our research it is more fruitful for this discussion to illuminate the growth in localised study and the trend towards living at home.

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It is important to read the turn towards the local against the changing discourse around higher education which has emerged since the current Conservative government took control in 2015. During this time, a language of ‘increased competition’ and ‘diverse markets’ has gained traction in recent policy proposals that is squarely aimed at setting the scene for new provisions (Bathmaker 2016). This includes short-cycle two-year courses and ‘degree apprenticeships’ which, the then Universities Minister Jo Johnson claimed in a speech, would offer ‘a more accessible route to a higher education and a faster path to productive employment’ (Johnson 2015: n.p.). Plans for two-year degrees were announced again in November 2018, with the Universities Minister Sam Gyimah appealing explicitly to ‘mature students and those who commute’, citing efficiency and costsaving as key benefits (Coughlan 2018). Here, then, pragmatic decision-making around participation and, therefore, mobility, is encouraged through policy directives and the discursive framing of education as a pathway to employment. This links directly to our rationale for the book through the contracting and further localising of higher education participation as a necessary outcome of the broader socio-economic conditions. Here, we argue that those considering higher education are orienting themselves towards age-old questions about what, where and how to study at university, through the highly individualised and economically focused lens of neo-liberalism. We recognise that the challenges faced by students, in relation to the immediate and long(er)-term social, economic and cultural costs of a university education, are very much at odds with narrow political and wider social/media discourses that reify degrees as essential instruments for productive employment. Moreover, we also argue that this message contradicts many of the debates about part-time and lifelong learning, which, as we highlighted earlier in this chapter, have been sidelined and squeezed through funding cuts and diminishing support for mature students. Thus, as policies speak the language of widening access and diversifying provision, the reality is that in the early stages of the twenty-first century, universities have retrenched in the face of economic pressure and a decline in public funding, reorienting themselves to the core missions of mainstream undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and research. As a consequence, providing opportunities for adults has become a lesser priority for many institutions, despite the obvious community, social and economic benefits that lifelong learning is shown to bring (Osborne and Houston 2013). This emerging pattern of decline is outlined in the Universities UK (UUK 2015:  19) report, Patterns and Trends in UK Higher Education. It states that, for higher education participation,

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the overall picture is one of growth for students under 30 and decline in students aged 30 and older . . . between 2004–05 and 2011–12 the number of undergraduate students aged under 30 increased each year, falling only in the last two years of our period of study, while undergraduates aged 30 and over either remained stable or fell in all ten years. During the same period, the number of postgraduate students aged under 30 rose every year except 2011–12 and 2012–13 (although these were considerable falls which have not yet been recovered) and postgraduate students over 30 had two years of growth in 2008– 09 and 2009–10, but otherwise remained stable or fell.

There are several ways to reflect on this changing pattern of age-based higher education participation. For Esson and Ertl (2016) the cost-sharing funding model, and neo-liberal rationales upon which it is founded, compels young adults to ‘assume the role of makers of their own livelihood mediated by the market as well as their biographical planning and organization’ (Kelly 2001: 26; cf. Esson and Ertl 2016). This means that for many younger prospective students, there is a sense that there is ‘no point worrying’ about tuition fees or debts increasing, because their ‘biographical planning’ will be assumed in a context where today’s sociopolitical issues will melt into projections of future earnings and careers (Esson and Ertl 2016) delaying, deferring or obscuring the financial burden. We pick up this point in our discussions of ‘transition’ and ‘risk’ as features of (not) belonging in Chapter 2. However, to make a brief point, this goes some way to explain the stability of youth higher education participation since 2010; even so, these new discourses of biographical planning, which are embedded within a growing culture of family-based support systems (e.g. Sage, Evandrou and Falkingham 2013), perhaps reflect a real shift in attitudes towards student mobilities and geographies of participation and belonging which are more closely aligned with European models of localised study. For example, the EUROSTUDENT VI (2018) study notes that across the 28 countries surveyed, 47 per cent of students were reliant on familial financial contributions to support monthly income. Among 60 per cent of the countries featured, this contribution counted as the primary source of income for many students, particularly those living at home (e.g. 86 per cent of students living at home received family contributions compared to 72 per cent living in student accommodation). Linking to our claims regarding UK systems of family-based support systems, the EUROSTUDFENT VI research also emphasises academic background as a key feature, with first generation students (51 per cent) more likely to rely on parental financial support, compared to their peers with familial HE legacies (43 per cent). These findings strengthen our later arguments throughout our analysis

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of the links between term-time residential circumstances and risk, placing them squarely within multiple, complex and contrasting contexts of European living at home students’ mobilities. Indeed, living at home while participating in higher education is interpreted by many as a strategy to reduce costs and create a more cost-efficient higher education experience, to adopt the language of the market. Data gleaned from HESA (2018) reveals that the numbers of full-time undergraduate students living at home with parents have been rising since 2010/11, from 317,505 to 338,040 in 2016/17 (and up from 8 per cent in 1984 to 19 per cent in 2016/17). This is in addition to the number of part-time and mature students for whom, spatial and temporal flexibility is key. Indeed, adult, mature and part-time students often prefer to access education in locations and modes (and at times) that are of their own rather than institutions’ choosing (Osborne and Houston 2013). As approximately 77 per cent of full-time students are working alongside their degrees (Endsleigh 2015; see also Brooks 2017 for a discussion of ‘students as workers’), flexibility and local provision have become important for them in a similar way to part-time and mature student historically. The necessity of part-time work could therefore be driving the tendency towards local study. As Donnelly and Gamsu (2018a) imply in a recent report compiled for the Sutton Trust, the majority of young people stay local for university (55 per cent in 2014/15), usually located within about 55 miles from their home address.7 Their interpretation of this is to suggest that university is no longer an event that is necessarily attached to de-location, given that ‘only one in ten students attend a university over 150 miles from home, and those that do are socially, ethnically and geographically distinct groups’ (Donnelly and Gamsu 2018a: 4). However, it is our view that just because this is a minority experience, it does not mean it is not the most symbolically valued and normalised within discursive framings of authenticity and experience. Localism, HE in FE and the increasing number of higher education institutions generally, has led to a diversification of the sector, which is said to be more responsive to local communities, filling the gaps, or ‘cold spots’ in higher education provision, and providing a different kind of learning culture for students who want to study locally and part-time (Bathmaker 2016). As Parry et al. (2012: 14) imply, this includes having the benefit of ‘more intensive classroom contact and placing a lower value on extracurricular activities’. Thus, what we are witnessing in the first stages of the twenty-first century is a shift 7

This comprises all students, not just those living at home.

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of emphasis from the de-location strategies implemented in the 1960s, towards localised and, to an extent, compartmentalised higher education participation, which not only requires different and dynamic mobilities of students who blend study with work, family and existing ties to a community or locale, but different conceptions of belonging too. Of course, these new mobilities exist alongside, and in tension with, the ‘old’ mobilities associated with traditional and elite participation (Donnelly and Gamsu 2018a, 2018b); however, as the following discussion outlines, these symbolically valuable student mobilities increasingly incorporate strategies of international migration as part of ‘new’ forms of de-location.

The impact of internationalisation The discourse of ‘choice’ and of the neo-liberal, self-governing, market-ready student have, in fact, led also to a much broader range of higher education options (and hence, mobilities) and not just the increase in localised provision and participation. As Wilkins, Shams and Huisman (2013) assert, students articulate increasing anxiety regarding the financial burden of higher education in England and Wales, and this has the potential to affect the kinds of choices all students make, not simply those who have limited stocks of capital or who are risk averse. The authors argue that ‘the shock effect’ of the significant increase in fees goes some way to explain why more than one third (36 per cent) of their participants were considering overseas study; a much higher percentage than current outgoing degree mobility data show (King, Findlay and Ahrens 2010). Here, the marketisation of higher education and the privatisation of funding, is understood as ‘stimulat[ing] students to consider a broader range of study options’ (Wilkins, Shams and Huisman 2013:  136) than classic regional– national de-location. Certainly, this supports arguments about the ways in which students from well-resourced middle-class homes have begun to apply to study at leading international institutions, in order to claw back some of the ‘distinction’ – to borrow from Bourdieu (1986) – that higher education used to bestow only on the elite (Findlay, McCullom and Packwood 2017). Indeed, in a progressively massified higher education sector, and increasingly congested graduate labour market, middle-class students seek distinction in new ways and through diverse mobilities. International student mobility therefore reproduces distinction through the credentials associated with where people move to access higher education (Waters 2008; Brooks and Waters 2011; Madge, Raghuram and Noxolo 2014; Waters 2017).

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It is not simply a demand for greater distinction that has fuelled the rapid increase in international student migration, as Findlay, McCullom and Packwood (2017) maintain. When considering the supply-side – that is higher education institutions themselves – they assert that the processes of international marketisation are key drivers which both shape and help to explain the particular geographies of university recruitment strategies and the subsequent movement of different groups of students around the world. Thus, in an increasingly neoliberal and market-oriented climate, it is apparent that international student recruitment may be driven by powerful financial incentives that are not only changing patterns of geographical (im)mobility, but also the cultures of campus spaces, as universities strive to embody the ‘globally excellent’ characteristics of world leading institutions with all that this embodies. Beech’s (2014:  173) work offers interesting insights into the ways international students perceive different parts of the UK before and after their arrival for study. Beech reflects on the ‘diverse imaginative geographies regarding the UK study experience’ and how international students cultivate a sense of belonging. Crucially, this is not necessarily expressed just through their immediate physical space but through social networking websites that draw together the material and imaginative dimensions of their everyday lives that may otherwise be eroded through processes of mobility (see also Blunt 2007; Ellison et al. 2007). This raises interesting points for understanding belonging for living at home students too, who are equally able to engage with their non-student networks through the everyday use of social media and mobile communication. We interrogate this dimension of mobile belonging further in Chapter 8 to help unpack how performances and practices associated with virtual student identities contribute towards sensing of daily life in different ways. Crucially, though, as Findlay, McCullom and Packwood (2017) reflect, international student mobility contributes to the production of the uneven spaces of higher education, and the success or failure in achieving the mission of ‘global excellence’ lies in institutions’ imagined statuses as being more (or less) distinguished. This has important ramifications for the everyday organisation of higher education; but is driven largely by economic models. Consequently, as Hall (2015) maintains, scholars interested in contemporary student mobilities need to critically examine the ways in which higher education markets are constituted through a range of spatial relations from the local through to the global, and the patterns of participation that these (re) produce.

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Bottlenecks and blockages within the student and graduate life cycle Thinking about higher education in spatial and territorial terms allows us to focus on the bottlenecks and blockages of the sector  – which mobilities are curtailed for some, and yet are smooth and free-flowing for others? In this final section we wish to reflect on the specific flows and obstructions that have potentially reshaped student geographies in the current moment. A key turning point was the abolition of student number controls in the UK announced on 5 December 2013, by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. Curiously, this move was taken in spite of the clear reduction in part-time and older students entering the market and the general plateauing of full-time undergraduates. Thus, from this point onwards, English and Welsh higher education institutions were able to recruit greater numbers of students, with caps totally abolished completely in 2015/16 (Hillman 2014). For Hillman (2014) there are two ways to interpret this sharp change in policy, after several years of punishing institutions with fines for over-recruitment. On the one hand, the removal of student numbers controls appears as an intervention to ensure a more authentic higher education market, where previous policies had failed; however, on the other, it is simply another step in the neo-liberalisation of English higher education. According to Morrison (2017: 201), however, the removal of student numbers controls should be read as an unequivocal example of the government’s attempts ‘to create something much closer to a free market proper than has existed hitherto’. The removal of student numbers controls and a greater inclination towards market forces has the potential to impact upon the patterns and discourses of student participation, particularly in the post-1992 university sector, where social justice and widening participation missions have historically been an explicit part of their values (McCaig and Taylor 2017). McCaig and Taylor (2017) see this policy as evidence of wider marketisation rather than simply freeing higher education of bottlenecks and blockages. Specifically, they connect this policy shift with the pursuit of higher league table positions, and the kinds of New Managerialism we discussed earlier in this chapter, of which Giroux (2014a) is immensely critical. For the authors, the removal of student number controls means, in practice, newer institutions – those that once catered for nontraditional students  – now feel that they have to develop a new set of policy goals in order to ensure a good position within all-important league tables. This

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has meant that mature and part-time students, who are often located within foundational degree and vocational programmes, have declined within the post1992 subfield, which is now far less diverse than it was, as it strives to compete with more elite institutions, such as the Russell Group, mentioned earlier. Indeed, considering the impact of recent policy changes on English universities’ attempts to widen participation of underrepresented groups, Harrison and Waller (2017) argue that while there have been improvements in entry qualifications  – which in turn might be driving participation in general – the established social order within higher education has not shifted significantly with relatively advantaged social groups dominating participation in elite universities. This point has been highlighted most recently by Gamsu and Donnelly (2017), in their report, Diverse Places of Learning? Home Neighbourhood Ethnic Diversity and the Ethnic Composition of UK Universities. They found that the majority of students from neighbourhoods which are in the bottom 40 per cent of areas for ethnic diversity generally attend universities which are also in the bottom 40 per cent for ethnic diversity. That is, very few students from these largely white-dominated areas attend the most diverse universities while over 50 per cent of students from the most diverse neighbourhoods in the UK attend universities that cater for students from the most diverse backgrounds. They argue that because students from the most and least diverse neighbourhoods tend to attend universities with a similar level of diversity to their home neighbourhood, there are ‘deep spatial divisions of ethnicity across the UK’ (6) and higher education sits within, and must address, this problematic context. Living at home students are evidently an important part of this story of spatial division, hence the timeliness of this volume. In addition to living at home students, graduates also play a significant role in the ways we understand spatial divisions, mobility and belonging. In recent years the (im)mobilities of university-leavers have come under scrutiny, largely in response to analyses of (1)  the increasing numbers of students moving through the system; (2) the so-called graduate premium, as individual students have begun to bear the cost of study; and (3) the impact of the recession and austerity measures on the young (who make up a considerable portion of the student body). As we discuss in Chapter 3, and later in Chapter 9 using empirical data, measuring graduate outcomes has led to an embedding of particular temporal rhythms within public and policy discourses around success and value for money. In the main, this stems from the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey, conducted with university-leavers six months after completion of their degrees.

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This survey informs a range of research with graduates, including the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF); Universities UK Gone International reports (2015, 2016, 2017); and research for the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU) (Ball 2015). While the TEF is crucial to university rankings and the rating of teaching quality (notwithstanding the various critiques of using employment outcomes as an indicatory of teaching quality – see Ashwin 2017), the other two strands of analysis point to important patterns of graduate (im)mobility and, crucially, contribute to the discursive framing of graduates as productive and mobile subjects in those first few months out of fulltime study. In brief, the Gone International reports make explicit claims about the value of study abroad programmes for employment outcomes (e.g. 2015/16 graduates who had studied abroad were considered more likely to have acquired graduate-level employment that provided them a higher starting salary and were more likely to retain that employment than their peers remaining in the UK). It is important to dwell though on the fact that these reports discount internal and regional migrations, recognising only international study and work as evidence of valuable mobility practices. This clearly has implications for how the highly mobile degree class is discursively framed and, relatedly, which students can claim a sense of belonging to this niche group. More than this, it reveals the blockages that can emerge at the later stages of the student life cycle as many university-leavers can neither afford nor wish to work abroad. Ball’s (2015) research for the HECSU offers an interesting picture of the pattern of movement within the UK as students’ transition out of higher education. Examining the first-degree graduates from 2012/13 who were in employment in the UK six months after graduation, Ball identifies four categories of poststudent mobility:  Loyals, Stayers, Returners and Incomers. These typologies are quite self-explanatory, however, to summarise briefly, they relate to those who are domiciled in a region, went to study in the region, and remained to work in that region (Loyals); those who travel away from their home region to study and then stay in that region to work (Stayers); graduates who were domiciled in a region, who go elsewhere to study, and then return to their home region for employment (Returners); and graduates who go to work in a region in which they neither studied nor were domiciled (Incomers). Ball (2015) reflects on the regional trends and, for the North West and South West of England (where some of our empirical work is drawn from), reveals that the North West retains more domiciled graduates and more students who studied locally than any other English region outside London, while about 40 per cent of graduates employed in the South West of England were ‘Loyals’.

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Elsewhere, commenting on the geography of graduate transitions Wakeling and Savage (2015) highlight the peculiarity of the ‘London vortex’, noting how the dramatic expansion of UK higher education has led to real differences in the fortunes of graduates from different universities. This work illuminates the significance of where graduates are located – where they move to and within – for their earnings and a sense of belonging to a particular class and experience. With the ‘elite’ bunched in the urban centres of the South East, this begs the question of how and in what ways graduates in the North and South West feel represented by idealised notions of the knowledge worker. The tendency to return to or remain within one’s home region after completing university has been framed as ‘boomeranging’ (Mitchell 2006; Stone, Berrington and Falkingham 2014; Sage, Evandrou and Falkingham 2013); a practice through which (mostly young) university-leavers return to the family home in order to benefit from material, economic and social-emotional resources as they prepare for and make decision about work (Finn 2017). This complicates interpretations of DLHE data, particularly as a measure of ‘quality’, because returning home may, for many students, means living in an area of low economic prosperity and limited opportunities for skilled, graduate employment, while also providing an economic and emotional buffer in the form of affordable housing (see Finn 2016). This process of post-student (im)mobility is investigated in Chapter 9, making particular reference to the ways living at home students must negotiate obstacles, as well as comforts, as they establish and make sense of the multiple rhythms of belonging and transition beyond the university in the de-industrialised spaces of the North of England.

Summary In this chapter we have outlined the major policy changes that have shaped higher education participation in the UK since the midpoint of the twentieth century to the current moment. These policies have been motivated by two guiding missions – massification and marketisation – which, as we have demonstrated, have created particular geographies of participation and patterns of student (im)mobility, which are more or less sustained by discourses of authenticity, advantage and competitive individualism. Indeed, as this chapter outlines, the two guiding missions of massification and marketisation overlap and come into tension, simultaneously speaking to the values of social justice, widening participation and education for all, and those espoused within notions of the

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neo-liberal self-made self, privatised debts and individual pay-offs. It is the interaction between these dual processes that means, on one level, there is more choice within UK higher education as a result of policy interventions and yet, at the same time, these ‘choices’ – particularly regarding students’ mobilities – are differentially valued. This has entrenched binary understandings about ‘movers’ and ‘stayers’ within the student body, with non-traditional, mature, part-time and black minority and ethnic (BME) students represented as immobile, and traditionally middle-class and elite students as (hyper)mobile. In the next chapter we examine how this binary conceptualisation of student mobilities and geographies has shaped current theorising of student mobilities and some of the pitfalls that emerge as a consequence. This allows us to build a case for our everyday mobile belonging framework, which is outlined in Chapter 3.

2

Missing Out, Standing Out or Under Threat? Current Conceptualisations of Student (Im)Mobility and Belonging

Introduction In this chapter we examine the ways in which the shifting policy context outlined in Chapter 1 has led to particular ways of knowing and, hence, conceptualising students’ (im)mobilities as these relate to a sense of belonging in higher education. Belonging is a broad concept and often conflated with experiences of selfhood and identity, fitting-in, place-making and passing notable milestones. Consequently, theoretical developments within the field draw on these various terms and ideas to make sense of the ways ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ students navigate feelings of belonging; however, and particular to this volume, current research has tended to focus on the intersections between social class and identity as a way to illuminate the socio-spatial inequalities faced by living at home students in accessing and interpreting higher education. We argue here that in doing so, living at home students are necessarily positioned in relation to their more residentially mobile peers, largely through the interplay of policies and public discourses around authenticity, independence and transition (variously understood). This is particularly characteristic of UK and US student experiences where moving away to attend university has a long history among the elite and middle classes, whereas in European, Asian and Australian contexts, shared family living is more common than residential relocation (Holdsworth and Morgan 2005; Antonucci 2016). It is worth noting, however, that this is changing as higher education is becoming more globalised (Prazeres 2013; Findlay, Packwood, McCollum, Nightingale and Tindal 2018; Cairns 2017; Yu, Bryant, Messmer, Tsagronis and Link 2018).

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To establish this, the chapter is organised around four themes which delineate the different ways that belonging has been theorised for more or less mobile students in UK higher education. These themes are as follows: ●

●

●

●

Transition – that is, belonging defined and understood as emerging out of particular and ostensibly linear socio-geographical movements through higher education and, crucially, away from home. Feel for the game – theories which adapt and extend a Bourdieusianinspired ‘classed practices’ approach which has become the ‘go-to’ model for explaining student choice and experiences of (not) belonging. Risk – theorising which draws out the ways differently positioned students perceive risk in terms of their identities and engagement with certain places (i.e. international students and local students, urban and minority ethnic students). Bounded places – here we refer to the theories that present students as developing a sense of belonging in ostensibly fixed places and social spaces, rather than through more fluid and ambivalent engagements with a range of physical, digital and liminoid spaces.

These four ways of viewing belonging have particular implications for understanding the everyday (im)mobilities of living at home students, and they overlap and inform one another. Although coming from geographical, sociological and educational literatures, these conceptualisations proceed from theories of social class and inequalities, and have, therefore, been fundamental in understanding largely working-class experiences of higher education in Canadian (Lehmann 2014), Australian (O’Shea 2014) and UK (Abrahams and Ingram 2013; Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010) contexts. Nevertheless, these approaches have also shaped understandings of more privileged students’ mobility practices too (Waters and Brooks 2010). By acknowledging this literature, our aim is to illuminate the forms of classification that have become attached to particular experiences of (im)mobility and belonging in higher education. In doing so, we argue that although these classificatory approaches are incredibly useful for revealing the complexities for the growing number of ‘new’ students entering higher education through the dual processes of marketisation and massification outlined in the previous chapter, there are nevertheless some problems and blind spots. Thus, while these classifications help to emphasise those whose experiences are not represented in stereotypical discourses of leaving home, and for challenging the notion that staying at home is a second-best option driven by financial or other constraints,

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it has also led to a taken-for-grantedness of boundaries and fixity in many cases. Building on other critiques (Donnelly and Evans 2016; Holton 2015c; Thomas 2015), then, this chapter concludes by arguing for a need to challenge some of the binary classifications we have come to rely on when theorising student mobilities and belonging, and to integrate more mobile and geographically oriented theoretical tools into our approaches. We take up this challenge in Chapter 3 and the remainder of the book.

Transition Transition implies a start and end point and a fairly linear route between the two. A  transition, once complete, denotes success of some kind, insofar as it reveals that a journey has been made. As UK higher education opened its doors to an increasing number of new entrants, the issue of transition has become increasingly pertinent, largely because this journey is, for this cohort, unchartered territory. As was concluded in Chapter 1, the widening participation directives that were initiated in the 1990s opened up greater opportunities for students from diverse classed, gendered, aged and cultural backgrounds to access higher education (Holdsworth 2009b; Mangan, Hughes, Davies and Slack 2010; Leese 2010). Yet, research has shown that diversity also exposes complexities and sensitivities in how the ‘new student’ (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003) might access, experience and interpret higher education (McClelland and Gandy 2012; Gibbons and Vignoles 2012; Mangan, Hughes, Davies and Slack 2010). While policies around massification (and in particular, widening participation) have constituted a positive social and economic step for higher education, some argue that increased access has diluted the sector, paving the way for a cluster of students unaware and unprepared for student life (Archer and Hutchings 2000). Yet, recognising diversity within the student cohort has been fundamental in critiquing the notion that all students follow a linear transition through university (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010). Here we argue that transition (that is belonging defined and understood as emerging out of particular  – and ostensibly linear  – socio-geographical movements through higher education and, crucially, away from home) manifests in research and theorising around students’ sense of belonging in three contrasting ways: transition as the adoption of new learner identities; transition as an emergence from adolescence; and transition as becoming middle-class, or, at the very least, developing classed identities.

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We begin by examining the structures that influence and support (or hinder) transitions into and through higher education. Often, the onus is placed upon transition being linked with success and of participating in the ‘right’ pathways through which to successfully experience university life (e.g. Thomas 2012). This has implications for the student, the university and the sector as a whole, with access and retention key markers for measuring the quality of higher education. Yet, interpreting successful transitions is intensely complicated and is fraught with problems. We problematise this through the lens of learner identities, and in terms of transition as adopting new learner identities we first question the equitability involved in making accessible transitions for students and how transitions may produce social inequalities within student cohorts. While widening participation has made higher education more accessible to multiple groups, it is important to recognise that socio-spatial constraints remain persistent for many students. Put bluntly, the (in)ability to choose institutions based upon informed choice and not by geography or by class (e.g. academic merit, social and cultural opportunities, associated life skills, etc.) plays heavily to the stereotypical images of higher education as spaces for the young and unencumbered, and reveals both social class and social and geographical mobility as significant in how students transition into university (Holdsworth 2006; Holton and Finn 2018a). This links directly to the traditional/non-traditional, mobile/immobile student binaries that were outlined in the previous chapters, particularly in setting up learner identities in a relativistic sense. To crystallise our definition of how social inequalities manifest within higher education transitions, we turn to Read, Archer and Leathwood (2003) who argue that living at home students are often characterised in direct contrast to what is perceived to be the ‘typical’ student. In their discussion of non-traditional students, they warn that [d]ominant discourses of the authentic ‘student’ often present the firstyear higher education entrant as a school-leaver with little or no family responsibilities. (265)

This notion of an authentic higher education experience implies a sense of inadequacy among living at home students that is often supported by the structures of higher education. Indeed, Read and colleagues (2003) imply that universities may be complicit in the normalisation of the ‘the student experience’, especially when materials – such as course prospectus – may ‘subtly enforce the conception of “normal” university students as heterosexual, and also young, unmarried and living on site’ (2003: 262). Hence, such hegemony

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and marginalisation that affects the transition into higher education for living at home students is socially and culturally constructed and follows the belief that universities have long been regarded as institutions of learning for the young, the middle class and the unencumbered (Richardson 1994). This raises questions as to the purpose of the university – and by association, the purpose of widening participation. Either universities exist to prepare school leavers with the necessary tools for their adult lives or they are ‘part of a life-long process of personal and social growth’ (Marks 1999: 157). Notwithstanding, this can foster confusion, resentment and anxiety among a cohort that has little in common with its peers and within a system that places them in the minority within institutions. Despite this perceived vulnerability (e.g. a lack of higher education experience and external pressures), living at home students nevertheless often adopt more pragmatic learner identities, partly due to self-motivation and/or previous life experiences. Consequently, the transition into university for living at home students suggests they are more likely to experience a direct change in selfperception as they progress through higher education (Brennan and Osbourne 2008). As Palmer, O’Kane and Owens (2009) caution, the process of transitioning into university constitutes an ‘in-between-ness’ or ‘betwixt space’, a fragile and emotional space where students are learning to ‘become’ their future selves. This highlights some of the challenges faced by living at home students who may appear to be motivated by learning, interest, challenge and achievement that contrast, perhaps, with more traditional students who may be encouraged by results and qualifications (Reay, Ball and David 2002). This interpretation of transition as complex, emotional and fragile compliments (and in some ways contrasts with) more traditional understandings of transition as a process, or sense, of becoming, emerging or transforming – particularly in the context of the life-course. It is important to note, then, the belonging in this context of transition is particularly skewed towards conceptualisations of the Student as a young adult embarking on early adulthood, rather than, perhaps, a mature student. Here scholars extend notions of the learner identity as processual and linear to examine how and why transitions link to an emergence from adolescence into adulthood and the residential mobilities that may (or may not) be attached to this (e.g. leaving home, managing finances, extending social networks, etc.). It has been observed, though, that the linkages between home and university can also have implications for successful transitions into and through university life (Wilcox, Winn and Fyvie-Gauld 2005); thus directly shaping feelings of belonging. These notions of

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emergence are, of course, closely tied to the traditional/non-traditional, local/ non-local, mobile/immobile student binaries, yet research shows that transitions are not approached uncritically and there remains a great deal of agency in how students might make sense of this pivotal point in their young lives. In terms of the mobile ‘non-local student’, Chow and Healey (2008) point to the adoption of certain markers that retain continuity between the family home and term-time accommodation (e.g. linking student and non-student behaviours, friendships material items, etc.). These connections may be useful in steadying the journey but also may be essential in developing preparatory life skills (Kenyon 1999) and identifying a young person’s individualised sense of self that might be less visible in the familial environment. Conversely, there can be a complex process of disentangling from past lives, relationships and selves for students (Finn 2015) and self-awareness may be articulated in ways that promote active disengagement from their pre-student lives when transitioning to university (Brooks 2002). This suggests that while continuity may instil familiarity, students’ agency may present opportunities to experiment with becoming their future selves. For most students though, the transition through university is finite as they will inevitably cease to be students – either returning to the family home, moving on to make other living arrangements or adopting post-student identities – once studies are complete. Among younger learners, this stage of the transition is often referred to as a ‘boomerang’ or ‘feathered nest’ effect (Molgat 2002; Mulder and Clark 2002) and represents a cumulative point in the broad, messy and non-linear transitions from adolescence into adulthood (Calvert 2010). These definitions conjure notions of student mobilities as semi-permanent or even ephemeral experiences in which the structure of the family will be returned to; however, as we argued in the previous chapter, when students return or remain within regions that have fewer opportunities for graduates, this can affect their sense of belonging to the graduate class of knowledge workers and indeed the return on their investment. The instability this engenders can – to some extent – threaten the successfulness of post-university transitions, a point we develop later in this chapter in our discussion of risk. It is perhaps because university transitions are considered in terms of the educational investment they represent, and because they are unlike other transitions from the family home that often facilitate independence (e.g. through relationships and marriage, home-ownership, employment, etc.), that risks to belonging can be navigated and the decision to return or stay within the family can be legitimised (Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1998). According to Sassler, Ciambrone and Benway (2008:  692), adulthood may be defined as

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‘assuming responsibility for one’s actions and decision making, and learning how to interact with adults (particularly parents) from a position of equality rather than dependence’. Hence while no transition into adulthood can be viewed as irreversible, contemporary student mobilities may be defined more as an interlude rather than a stepping stone into adulthood, particularly in light of the barriers to independence placed on young people in contemporary society (e.g. increased fees and debt, precarious employment prospects, unattainable mortgages and overinflated house prices, etc.). With this in mind, university transitions are by no means straightforward. In many cases, the movement between different life stages whereby the family home remains the fulcrum through which mobilities are negotiated can have repercussions for relationships with others who may feel ‘left behind’ and may last well into adulthood. For example, Gabriel (2006) argues that re-establishing friendships and relationships within home communities can be complex and fraught with difficulties as young adults elect to take different pathways into adulthood. Moreover, these complex life-course transitions have been discussed by Archer, Hollingworth and Halsall (2007) in the context of non-academic youth identities and highlight incongruities between attitudes towards (non)student lifestyles, particularly in terms of understanding the hegemonic discourses of higher education. Challenging much of the literature around student mobilities, transition and adulthood, Lahelma and Gordon (2008) argue that autonomy from parents and families does not constitute the culmination of childhood and the beginning of full independence. Indeed, Holdsworth (2005) makes similar observations of young Spanish men and women and their perceptions of home-leaving. While it is traditional for Spanish youths to remain in the family home until marriage, Holdsworth’s study reveals many were delaying the point at which they permanently left home and instead were returning home periodically through university, gap years or short-term employment. Similarly, in a study of credit transfer schemes, Dent, Mather, Nightingale and Strike (2017) highlight the significance of student mobility during the course of a degree programme. Rather than a one-off decision, then, mobility choices are considered as more flexible allowing students to transfer to different institutions during their studies. What this emphasises is that moving away from home is not always a one-off event – the possibility to return is always open. This ‘yo-yoing’ between independence and interdependency (Biggart and Walter 2006; Lahelma and Gordon 2008) has been developed by Sage, Evandrou, and Falkingham (2013) who observed that the precarity of transitions away from the family home extends well into adult life. They suggest that post-student trajectories away from the family home may

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become disrupted well beyond graduation and result in the need for financial, residential and/or emotional support. Sage, Evandrou, and Falkingham (2013) term this a ‘double boomerang’ and highlight how such intergenerationality can create complex non-linear post-modern life-courses. In this section we have shown how belonging is often understood as a transition and process of becoming (a learner, an adult). In this way, not belonging is understood as arising out of moments where transitions are fragmented, delayed or ruptured, and belonging as thought to arise from smooth, linear journeys. Clearly, this way of interpreting belonging is predicated on the notion of The Student as the young adult that experiences movements (everyday or semi-permanent migrations) out of home for the first time. This poses difficulties for theorising mature students’ sense of belonging, particularly when those students may have already made the transition into parent, partner, financially independent worker and so on. While the notion of transition into learner identities has some traction for mature students (Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008; Mallman and Lee 2016), belonging is likely to manifest rather differently, wherein mature-aged learners are aware of the game but unsure of the rules. The following section examines this in more detail.

Feel for the game Overwhelmingly student belonging and (more present in this definition) their identities have been theorised as reflecting the degree of fit between their personal background and values, and those of the institutions they attend. This branch of thinking draws on the Bourdieusian scholarship surrounding classed practices through the approaches of habitus, capital and field to explain students’ understandings of choice and experiences of (not) belonging. Bourdieu’s theories underpin many of the binaries discussed elsewhere in this book, particularly in terms of narratives of ‘successful traditional’ university experiences (e.g. having a family history of tertiary level education and/ or the prior knowledge of the ‘university game’ within which to successfully transition into and through higher education (Chatterton 1999; Patiniotis and Holdsworth 2005), exposing the classed distinctions between social groups that are linked to familial and institutional legacies. How different students move into and through the field of higher education – a social space – is the focus here, and this both depends upon and shapes their habitus. Put simply, habitus

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refers to the transmission of values between parent and child which in turn defines the child’s attitude towards different capitals, experiences of education and the structuring of social practices (Bourdieu 1977, 1984). The habitus develops within the field(s) in which it moves, ‘according to its position, and the field develops in response to the multitude of differently positioned habitus’ (Ingram 2018: 51). Indeed, the field can be interpreted as a social space ‘defined by the mutual exclusion, or distinction, of the positions which constitute it, that is, as a structure of juxtaposition of social positions’ (Bourdieu 2000: 134; cf. Ingram 2018: 54). It is widely recognised that cultural capital is a product of the middle classes, or at least of becoming middle class, and this relates directly to our discussions of (in)equitable transitions. Ingram (2018: 206) asserts that cultural capital denotes the cultural resources that people have that can be used to give them status. This can be knowledge (such as knowledge of art and literature) and it can also be educational qualifications; it can be embodied as attitudes and taste as part of the habitus . . . as manner, accent and posture.

Hence, as the title of this section implies, those of the middle classes have a feel for the student game, ‘mov[ing] in their world as a fish in water’ (Bourdieu 1990: 108) due to ‘class wisdom’ (Ball, Davies, David and Reay 2002), meaning their transitions through institutions, such as school or university, are usually met without disruption or (visible) anxiety as they are well aware of how to function within the mechanics of such institutions (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010). Hence, non-traditional students’ experiences are framed as relational, with assumptions of limited access to the ‘right types’ of cultural capital required to make successful transitions through university and limited understandings of the feel for the game (Read, Archer and Leathwood 2003). Non-traditional students are subsequently labelled as experiencing higher education in response to various structural, emotional and practical issues that may disrupt a sense of social stability and, hence feelings of security and belonging. Relevant to our discussion of student mobility is the notion of ‘the game’ and how students might understand the rules required to ‘play’ it. These rules can include the strategic roles and activities that can be vital in enhancing future employment profiles that, in many cases can be transmitted from institution and/or parent to child. Therefore, as Holdsworth (2006) suggests, it is presumed that for non-traditional students that do not fully understand the rules, the game will be somewhat alien and may take considerable time and effort to come to terms with. In this way, a sense of

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‘authentic’ student belongingness will always appear to be hard won, or simply unattainable, and as much about overcoming feelings of not belonging as achieving a sense a ‘fit’. Contemporary scholarship has also sought to adapt and problematise such Bourdieusian frameworks like habitus to refer to the institutional ethos of differently located (socially, culturally and geographically) higher education institutions and how this allows for certain kinds of identities to take shape and for students to feel they ‘fit in’ or ‘stand out’ (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010). Reflecting on their research with working-class students at four different universities in England, Reay, Crozier and Clayton (2010) state that, like individual habitus, institutional habitus have their own histories which have built up and taken on meaning over time. However, while they are capable of adaptation, their collective nature renders them much less fluid than individual habitus that can break down and become dislocated (Baxter and Britton 2001). Such histories and the values they convey might relate to the position of a university in national and global league tables or the cultural imaginary (i.e. its prestige and status). Equally, the subjects offered or for which it is renowned may also inform an institution’s habitus. Finally, ‘the expressive order’ of a university institution, which includes expectations, conduct, character and manners (Bernstein 1975) and the embodied cultural capital of its students (which includes class, comportment and accent) are also thought to make up the institutional habitus and, thus, have a bearing on the extent to which some students may feel a sense of belonging. While this approach feels rather different to the ‘belonging as transition’ model outlined above, there are examples of scholars working with Bourdieu’s theories for whom belonging does in some way equate to notions of success, adaptation and immersion in the traditional (middle-class) culture. Lehmann (2014), for example, juxtaposes ‘ease of transition’ and ‘habitus dislocation’ in his research with working-class students in Canadian higher education. Here, modifying the habitus – that is ‘fully embrac[ing] and becom[ing] integrated on campus’ (11) – although recognised as personally costly, is read as cultivating the right kind of identity and, relatedly, establishing a strong bond with the higher education experience. Of these students (and their transformations), Lehmann claims as follows They not only spoke about gaining new knowledge, but also about growing personally, changing their outlooks on life, growing their repertoire of cultural capital, and developing new dispositions and tastes about a range of issues, from food to politics and their future careers. (11)

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This transformation is regarded as an unequivocally good thing for identity and belonging, notwithstanding some of the hidden injuries Lehmann reflects upon. In making such a case, this approach again reifies notions of the monolithic ‘student experience’ and, similar to much of the research undertaken in the United States, students’ sense of belonging, feeling at home and not feeling like a cultural outsider (Stephens, Markus and Nelson 2015: 3) is tied to notions of success and psychological development (see also work by Elmore and Oyserman 2012; Markus and Nurius 1987; Oyserman 2013; Oyserman and Destin 2010; Stephens, Markus and Fryberg 2012; Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson and Covarrubias 2012; Stephens, Hamedani and Destin 2014). Indeed, this point is echoed in studies of working-class students in elite institutions in the UK, where it is argued that when working-class students’ habitus  – their sense of self and strategies for action  – encounters the unfamiliar field of prestigious higher education, ‘the resulting disjunctures can generate not only change and transformation, but also disquiet, ambivalence, insecurity and uncertainty’ (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2009: 1105). These arguments chime with Ingram’s (2009) work on educationally successful working-class boys in Belfast. Ingram does not shy away from interrogating the emotional complexities of class mobility and what she terms, ‘habitus interruptions’. Through the typologies of the Abandoned, Reconfirmed, Reconciled and Destabilised Habitus, Ingram (2009) goes further than most in unpicking the ways in which belonging and identity are experienced ‘when a person is caught between the influences of any two opposing fields’ (67). Belonging is thus achieved when it is either: divided from its original field (i.e. the home); when the original field is strengthened through an encounter with the new; and when the two fields, though opposing, are successfully integrated. Where reconciliation does not occur, identities become unstable and feelings of not belonging – both in educational and home settings arise (Ingram 2009). Although Ingram’s work relates to schooling, there is evidence of this kind of thinking in higher education research (Bathmaker et al. 2016; Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010; Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008). Here, students are shown to be involved in a complex balancing act, with some privileging their learner identities (over and above their class-based identities), and others seeing university as a small part of their identities and everyday lives. In extreme cases, some students felt they were not ‘proper’ full-time students and should not therefore expect to ‘fit in’ (Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008: 576). Loveday’s (2016) research illuminates the emotional anxieties of standing out in the spaces of higher education and the shame that the embodied habitus can

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engender. While also focusing on the habitus for making sense of who can and cannot feel a sense of belonging in university spaces, Loveday shifts the focus away from the institutional habitus towards the ‘linguistic habitus’ (Bourdieu 1991). Her discussion reveals how accents and mode of speech either ‘depreciate value for those who speak “out of place”, or conversely to accrue “symbolic mastery” for those whose speech is congruent with the expectations of the field’ (Bourdieu 1986: 1146). Thus, feelings of (not) belonging, and the shame of such, emerge relationally and in response to the judgements of others (and of the self) which become part of the affective practices of everyday life in the university. Thus, belonging is always a risky endeavour for working-class, living at home students and student parents, who are marked as ‘Other’ and fear their true identities might be ‘found out’. We say more about the risks of not belonging in the following section. Notions of resilience, perseverance and, in Loveday’s (2016) case, shame, bring the emotional dimensions of belonging to the fore. Belonging is, of course, a ‘feeling’ and Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, with its focus on embodied dispositions, provides ways to understand pre-reflexive modes of (dis)connection and relational affinities of students in higher education. The tendency to view the emotional dimensions of belonging in higher education as testing (traumatic even) for mature, women, LGBT, working-class and minority-ethnic students is evidenced in the literature (e.g. Wilcox, Winn and Fyvie-Gauld 2005; Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008; Finn 2014). However, notwithstanding the focus on the need for transformation and adaptation within working-class identities (Hurst 2010; Lehmann 2014), several scholars have worked with Bourdieu’s theories to illuminate ‘the positive aspects of a marginal vantage point, a re-articulation of habitus (rather than a division), which contests the terms of two incommensurable fields to create a new space’ (Ingram and Abrahams 2015:  140).Thus, although risky for some, transformations and disruptions within the habitus can in fact be experienced positively – or certainly ambivalently – in terms generating feelings of belonging of shaping one’s identity.

Risk Alongside understandings of habitus and capital we next turn our focus more explicitly on notions of risk to examine its socio-spatial implications for living at home students’ university experiences. Within the existing literature on

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working-class and non-traditional students’ experiences of identity and belonging is the notion that identities are under threat and wholly incompatible with the spaces of higher education. Louise Archer has written extensively on notions of risk, particularly for young people in urban settings (e.g. Archer and Yamashita 2003; Archer, Hollingworth and Halsall 2007). Writing about young people’s nonparticipation in higher education, Archer explores the risks of failure to workingclass identities and to their sense of familial belonging (Archer and Hutchings 2000: 561). It is argued that participants constructed failure as a very real risk, supported by personal anecdotes and ‘urban myths’ (stories concerning unknown others, that respondents had heard). The meaning of failure was constructed in economic, social and personal terms. Among ethnic minority respondents, particular emphasis was placed on the family and social consequences of failure.

Beyond family relationships, Keane (2011) examines university friendships and argues that risk was articulated by her working-class participants as a rejection and devaluation of selfhood. Keane describes strategies used by students in her research at an Irish university that allowed them to distance themselves from other students in order to ‘stick to their own’. The study’s participants largely came from families with low income, long-term unemployment, little or no tradition of higher education progression and family stresses. Keane asserts that these practices of distancing from other, more privileged students were a reaction to a social context where her participants felt subserviently positioned. In this way, Keane maintains that students were engaging in classic selfprotection, no matter how self-limiting and self-sabotaging this strategy might be. This way of theorising higher education students’ (im)mobilities, in relation to belonging and identity, chimes with broader theories of social change and risk as linked to ‘de-traditionalisation’. The work of scholars such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens has been advanced in higher education and (predominantly) youth transitions research to argue that in contemporary society, change occurs at such a pace that the experiences of the older generations have little relevance for the lives of the young. Thus, they are forced to navigate decisions about education and employment without a blueprint, and in a context of neo-liberalism which requires that ‘each person must explain and underpin their actions and choices by “rational” arguments rather than by referring to “traditional” ways of doing things’ (Brannen and Nilsen 2005: 416). This process of reflexivity and self-responsibility for decisions made, means that there are an increasing range of risks to identity, to successful transitions and to future

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prosperity that students must navigate. As they perceive these risks, whether ‘genuine’ or ‘socially constructed’ (Ekberg 2007), it is argued that students must constantly try to shield and protect themselves from ‘an ever-increasing matrix of risks – unemployment and financial security, loneliness, personal relationships, health problems, crime, ecological disaster and terrorism’ (Threadgold and Nilan 2009: 49). We highlighted in Chapter 1 how, since 2012 and the creeping increases of tuition fees to £9,250 per annum in England and Wales, student numbers have not fallen significantly. Although it might seem odd to draw on theories of risk to explain the steadiness of these numbers and the inclination towards debt, it is worth remembering that for many people (both school leavers and mature students), a university education is a way to insure against the risks of precarious employment and low pay (Dorling 2015). Importantly, engaging in more localised study and living at home can become practical strategies to further minimise the financial and social risks of study (Patiniotis and Holdsworth 2005). Forsberg (2017), in her research with Swedish students in second and final years of secondary school, offers a very interesting discussion of how her participants negotiated the risks of financial burden, with the risks of low pay. Within the study there were students who were clear about wanting to continue to higher education; however, they did not primarily perceive education as valuable as such, ‘but rather as an exchangeable capital to help them acquire “a good job” – one with an “okay” salary, with tasks that you understand, something you can do with dignity and that is useful in society’ (11). This was a relational decision and Forsberg (2017: 12) reflects how interviewees debated whether it would be a ‘safer choice’ to start working after upper secondary school, since a university degree might not pay off in terms of getting them a ‘good job’ with a high salary. Higher education was foremost given a value in relation to employability.

These arguments that relate risk with the continued inclination towards higher education in the context of increased fees chimes with Berlant’s (2011) concept of ‘cruel optimism’. This refers to the process by which one’s attachment to an idea or a future brings the promise of the good life (and with it success and belonging) even while the very attachment to this idea brings feelings of impossibility and loss. The same might be said about graduates and internships too. Youth researchers, such as Mendick, Ahmad, Allen and Harvey (2018) and Franceschelli and Keating (2018) make use of this concept in their discussion of young people’s aspirations and their views about the transformative value of

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‘hard work’ in the aftermath of the financial crisis and within the context of ‘austere meritocracy’. This is a point we pick up in Chapter 9 when we talk about post-student mobilities and belonging. Indeed, perceived risks operate at different levels and scales and are connected to both the social and geographical mobilities associated with higher education. Writing in the Australian context, Scanlon, Rowling and Weber (2007) refer explicitly to place-based identities and the difficulties that the transition to university can bring for some students as they try to establish a sense of belonging. They argue that students ‘gain a sense of belonging to geographically located places so that, for example, transition from school to university entails geographical displacement as well as social displacement’ (228). These risks are rooted in the everyday rather than longer-term conceptions of risk to which we refer above. It is the exchange of a stable learning environment in which students had a specific identity, for a new geographical location where they lose their sense of ontological security that poses a direct challenge to belonging. This can be particularly heightened when universities are spread across multiple sites, and where communication between lecturers and students is casualised and to some extent distant when students feel that they are only a number and the lecturer is no longer a friend, then they suffer identity displacement and a sense of loss for past learning situations. . . . Through students’ situated interactions with lecturers and other students, the institutional horizons of possibility for identity formation are recognised by students. (Scanlon, Rowling and Weber 2007: 227)

As student numbers continue to rise and campuses are increasingly fragmented across cities, the notion that students’ sense of identity and belonging, and related their well-being, are necessarily at risk has gained traction. However there has been some resistance to this discourse. Indeed, there is mounting criticism of the ways in which labels associated with emotional vulnerability have emerged within higher education in recent years, to the extent that it is now ‘commonplace to refer to “vulnerable learners”, “at risk learners”, learners with “fragile identities” and “low self-esteemers” ’ (Ecclestone 2007: 455). This critique reflects broader concerns about the therapeutic turn in culture, politics and society, which, in part, stems from neo-liberal discourses of the self-made self (outlined in Chapter  1) that call for individuals to be agile, work-ready subjects, constantly working on their own resilience and character. There has been widespread debate among academics and social critics about the rise

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of therapeutic culture, its influence on the shaping of the modern self and its infiltration into key social institutions, like higher education, and public policy (Wright 2014). Of course, institutional policies that seek to help students negotiate potential risks to their well-being and mental health are not intended solely for living at home students; however, there is a recognition that those doing higher education differently may have to navigate more risks than others. Thus, it is argued that theorising non-traditional students as necessarily ‘at risk’ actually turns them into ‘anxious and self-preoccupied individuals rather than aspiring, optimistic and resilient learners’ (Ecclestone and Hayes 2009: i). This perception of the at-risk, ‘cotton-wool-wrapped’ student jars with the notion of the ‘careless’ university, to which we refer in Chapter 1. Indeed, there are several scholars who argue that the spaces of higher education are entirely risky for minority-ethnic and LGBT students, as well as those with caring obligations and/or disabilities. Lynch, Lyons and Cantillon (2007: 1) maintain that there is an ‘allegiance to the education of the rational autonomous subject and public citizen’ which makes it difficult for others to feel included and generate a sense of belonging. Quite often, students who do not fit the stereotypical mould of the young, residentially mobile student are perceived as risky by institutions and, hence, many policies that promote well-being and the self-management of risks, are borne out of fears about student retention and withdrawal. Thus, the onus is shifted on to the student to engage in strategies that allow them to be more resilient and this in itself can lead to a sense of presenting more ‘things’ to manage in the everyday practices of being a student. This has led others to conceptualise everyday procedures, such as commuting, as ultimately constraining practices for living at home students (see Thomas and Jones 2017). Ploner’s (2017) research with international students makes an important contribution to these interactions of mobility, well-being and higher education. He argues that, if addressed at all, ‘resilience’ among students is mainly linked to more or less quantifiable elements such as academic adjustment, achievement and retention, or else with the ways in which they are able to cope with ‘culture shocks’ and manage to ‘adapt’ to unfamiliar educational and/or cultural environments. Drawing on mobilities theories, Ploner posits a concept of resilience that does not so much relate to linear forms of ‘adjustment’ or the mastery of ‘culture shocks’, but instead describes the ways in which both movement and sense of place are constantly negotiated by students moving in and across international higher education settings as they ‘cope with major tribulations, emotional stress and personal hardship, not least due to experiences of displacement and uprooting they face moving in unfamiliar cultural, social and educational environments’

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(428). We say more about this in Chapter  3, where mobilities theory is our central focus. Other research provides alternative stances on the centrality of institutional spaces and practices  – or the top down approaches  – in students’ developing a sense of identity and belonging in higher education (see Holdsworth 2006; Holton 2015a, 2015c; Cheng 2016). Morosanu, Hanley and O’Donovan (2010) embed their theorisation not within institutional policies or directives, but in students’ own personal networks and lived experiences. Drawing parallels with Bourdieu’s theory of social capital  – whereby networks and connections are called upon and used as resources – they draw on social network concepts to offer insights into the ways students’ cope with the risks posed by academic challenges and the process of ‘becoming’ a university student: Looking into the ties linking individuals, a social network approach allows a dynamic approach to students’ fluctuating pathways within and across organisational and group boundaries. Similarly, rather than presuming ‘community’, a social network approach can provide a more complex picture of social relations and support in academic contexts. (672)

There is now a wealth of research that examines the roles of peer relationships and friendships for student support (if not belonging) (Holton 2016a, 2017a; Finn 2015; Robertson 2018). However, contrasting with other studies of belonging, Morosanu and colleagues do not presume the existence of a community within academia to which working-class, mature or other students might seek to identify with or belong to. Instead, they propose that by following students’ own networks and choices, and crucially, by extending the analytical gaze wellbeyond the university and in line with or against institutionalised support a more complete picture can be assembled. We expand on these points in Chapter 3.

Bounded places Following the themes discussed earlier in terms of binaries, this final section situates the student experience more geographically by exploring the privileging of certain forms of mobility over others and how this has implications for students’ engagements in and with place-making. We focus first on the notion of choice being represented as oppositional – essentially fixing the propensity for mobility for some while facilitating more fluid movements for others. Thus, home-leaving is often tied to more ‘traditional’ experiences (and spaces of experience), while

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those with more limited geographical access to higher education are assumed to struggle with finding the ‘right’ institution for them and, hence, accessing feelings of belonging (Christie, Munro and Wager 2005; Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008; Christie 2009; Clayton, Crozier and Reay 2009). Crucially, there are unique geographical constraints at work here that produce inequalities in accessibility for living at home students. For example, GonzálezArnal and Kilkey (2009) argue that students may be disadvantaged simply by living within an area with a limited range of universities, suggesting that living at home students may be forced to base their choice of institution or course on proximity alone and not on academic attainment, or perceived quality. Hence, in many ways, access to higher education for living at home students may represent being stuck, trapped or confined within a locality, meaning remaining ‘local’ can be more of a lottery – a situation whereby educational successes are governed not by a lack of agency but simply by chance – than an informed choice (Holton and Finn 2018a). Such perceived immobility means that opportunities are influenced more by geographical proximity to an institution than by any conscious decision about what (or where) would be the ‘right’ institution for them (see Donnelly and Gamsu 2018b; Duke-Williams 2009 for overviews of UK regional mobilities). Reay’s (2002, 2003) exploration of working-class women’s transitions from a London further education college into university supports this by demonstrating how opportunities to make more informed choices as to the pathway students may wish to take are shaped by location, concentration and proximity. Similarly, Reay’s research with young people in secondary schools, making choices about higher education (Reay, Davies, David and Ball 2001) shows how being geographically positioned in London did not disadvantage their higher education prospects, but instead provided opportunities to select from a range of universities that fitted their academic requirements while supporting the range of non-academic identities they also inhabited. In linking this nexus of movement, transition, proximity and belonging together it is clear to see that living at home students’ (im)mobilities are influential in determining access to universities. Contributing to the debate about localised decision-making, belonging and identity, Bagguley and Hussain’s (2016: 46) research with South Asian women participating in higher education in the UK, again demonstrates the significance of social capital. They argue that theories of social capital  – or ethnic social capital  – lack a fully rounded account of the gendered dimensions of South Asian women’s transitions to university:

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The rapid growth in Bangladeshi and Pakistani women going to university implies not just a transformation of their positioning in terms of their ethnicity, but also in terms of gender relations and practices within their communities. This is a question not just of social capital, of social networks changing, but also of the transformation of cultural norms and expectations.

Thus, they reflect on the ways in which location is negotiated by these women in their choices about mobility and where to study at university. Many of their participants were living at home and did so not for reasons of affordability but because of negotiations and obligations towards the local community, with whom the benefits of education were shared, rather than individualised. Finney (2011) advances similar arguments; however, a life-course perspective is taken here and this is particularly interesting for the development of our own framework in which temporality is a key dimension. Finney (2011: 457) reflects on the ethnic differences of migration at student and graduate levels, noting that ‘ethnic minority students, particularly females, are expected to be less mobile than their White counterparts’ and that ‘Blacks and Asians were less likely than others to move away from their home region for study and to move again following graduation’. Finney rightly acknowledges how this immobility might shape graduate employment opportunities, and how family influence on higher education decisions might be greater for non-white women. In this way, then, belonging is very much tied to the spaces of the local and the home, with higher education positioned outside (and in opposition) to this sphere. Indeed, when minority ethnic students, particularly women, are theorised, their mobilities and sense of connection are often embedded within understandings of how their educational transitions are managed as part of wider negotiations with a fixed locality/community (Bhopal 1997; Dale, Shaheen, Kalra and Fieldhouse 2002; Hussain and Bagguley 2007; Gamsu and Donnelly 2017). This kind of bounded sense of belonging contrasts with theorisations of international students, who are understood as cultivating a sense of belonging as students by leaving the comforts and familiarities of their home communities in the West, in search for a distinct cultural gap that aids a process self-discovery and self-change (Prazeres 2017). Nevertheless, there is still something within this articulation of student mobility and belonging that appeals to a sense of place as a fixed experience and resource. Prazeres reflects on her research with Canadian university students in the Global South, noting how they ‘play around’ with mobility and immobility in a new setting, hoping to be embedded in the mundane, everyday spatial and cultural contexts of these locales. The study

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illuminates how banal and ordinary practices in far-away places were perceived as exotic and indicative of an ‘authentic localness that they wish to tap into . . . to achieve a level of comfort and of unreflexivity as a testament of their new cultural capital and sense of local belonging’ (Prazeres 2017: 916). Prazeres’s research demonstrates the significance of place-making as a process through which students establish a sense of belonging within different locations. It is often the symbolic and material qualities of place-making that help scholars to interpret students’ experiences of university spaces and how these subsequently feed into and through notions of belonging. For example, Paul Chatterton (1999) proposes the idea of ‘exclusive geographies’ in the context of how term-time university spaces are appropriated by students and how this appropriation ultimately shapes ‘town’ and ‘gown’ relations within university spaces. As Chatterton (1999) argues, student spaces (i.e. locations that contribute towards the production of a ‘student city’ infrastructure) often constitute a divided city within university towns and cities through the self-segregation of students away from non-students. Through forms of appropriation, Holt and Griffin (2005) argue that students develop certain tactics for exclusion, and thus galvanise (and legitimise) the use of specific term-time spaces. These exclusionary behaviours are essential in understanding the placemaking habits of (predominately young and mobile) students, demarcating locations along the lines of our spaces and their spaces. Holdsworth (2009a) draws upon Barth’s (1969) theorisations of ethnic groups and boundaries to argue that students can become both ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’ when they are simultaneously a ‘local’ and a ‘student’; that is, when home and university locations are one and the same. Holdsworth argues that in such cases, students may employ exclusionary tactics as methods of defending against perceived threats of hostility from local communities, as well as way of enacting their specific, ‘student’ identities (see also Chatterton and Hollands 2002, 2003). Yet, in problematising these behaviours, Holton (2015c) argues that such exclusionary behaviours may equally be present within the student population – particularly in terms of the binaries that have been discussed throughout this chapter  – with the distinctions between living at home students and their relatively more mobile peers being played out on campus spaces, in social environments and in mobility practices on a daily basis. Such territorialised behaviours therefore perpetuate the hegemonic heteronormative identities discussed earlier in this chapter, differentiating the ‘Other’ by essentially demarcating space for certain students’ exclusive use. This has implications in terms of intersectional identities, multiple forms of belonging

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and the expression of difference in university spaces. As Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine (2012) argue, diversity can be affected by a limit of acceptance on university campuses, particularly in how difference is identified and mediated by student groups. They draw parallels between the ways students in their study discussed openly gay peers and students who displayed faith-based practices (such as an avoidance of alcohol) to assert that an intolerance of difference was never articulated as having a problem with religion or sexuality per se, but about the ‘particular behaviours associated with these identities, which are seen to threaten the social codes of conduct on campus’ (507). This focus on the bounded spaces and, hence, the practices that such spaces produce, reveals how acceptance and belonging are played out within what Smith, Rérat and Sage (2014) term the ‘spaces of education’ (e.g. halls of residences, Students’ Unions’, campus spaces and learning environments, etc.) (see Finn 2015). This establishes place-making as an intensely complex and contested process, particularly in terms of how students may perceive their belonging to be legitimised by their institution and cohort (Sykes 2017). This perspective brings belonging into the bounded spaces of universities; however, we think it is important to question the production of the homogenous typical student identity and the implications for this in terms of intersectional identities and different trajectories through university. Thus, in what follows in this book we aim to explore the ways that place-making is experienced and carried out by living at home students; why these places are significant and how they relate to other, seemingly non-student spaces and practices; and, finally, how these are received/interpreted/articulated by living at home students and other cohorts.

Summary This chapter has provided an overview of the ways belonging, mobility and, relatedly, identity, are commonly conceptualised in higher education research and studies of youth transitions. In doing so we have highlighted the ways that the language of belonging becomes subsumed into other debates about transition, inequality, risks and place-making. We find each of these strands fruitful; though not without their problems, particularly in reinforcing some of the binaries of traditional/non-traditional, mobile/immobile and rooted/flexible that have come to dominate the ways different students are known and understood. In drawing together this broad array of conceptual arguments pertaining to student experiences, we will demonstrate through the rest of this book that, while many

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living at home students may inhabit a position as Other within the student body, the risks involved in entering higher education via a non-traditional route (e.g. factoring in jobs, families, mortgages, etc.) may galvanise a need to excel. The transition into, through  – and subsequently out of  – university for living at home students should therefore be considered complex and multifaceted (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010), with both academic and personal development being highly influential in the perceived success of these transitions. What this chapter has argued, then, is that despite higher education becoming more inclusive through widening participation directives, a gulf remains in how higher education is accessed, experienced and woven together with other places, spaces and dimensions of everyday life. Christie, Munro and Wager (2005) helpfully problematise widening participation, arguing that it presents a dichotomous concept in higher education research. While at its core widening participation aims to be inclusive of all students, irrespective of social class, ethnicity, age and gender, living at home students are expected to make drastic changes to their identities and values in order to conform or ‘fit in’ among what may be considered a largely mainstream cohort. As the later chapters in this book demonstrate, it is not beyond students’ power to find ways to belong and in many cases resist some of the practices and identities that the spaces of higher education normalise and value. However, in order to see how this is achieved, in all its complexity, we need new theoretical tools – specifically those that privilege different temporal and spatial strategies, including the everyday (im)mobilities as associated with commuting. Only then will it be possible to see living at home students in terms other than lack, deficit and risk. We introduce these tools in the following chapter.

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A Framework for Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Diversity in Student Experiences

Introduction As we come to the final chapter in Part One, and having outlined the changing policy landscape, patterns of participation, and the dominant ways of knowing and theorising of student (im)mobilities in higher education, this chapter advances our own framework of understanding student geographies and belonging. Specifically, we make the case for more mobile-sensitive theories of student experiences, to counter some of the tensions and problems that emerge as a consequence of binary thinking about students as local/non-local and/ or mobile/immobile and from taking an approach to belonging as bounded in particular spaces, or tied to ostensibly linear notions of transition and movement. We do not reject the theoretical arguments outlined in Chapter 2; indeed, we build upon and extend many of the ideas discussed previously. However, by making mobilities (in their multiple sense) central, we set out a way to more productively attend to the performative and affective dimensions of student mobilities, the contested nature of belonging and identity and the significance of everyday life as a moving and dynamic entity that has a rhythm and a temporality (Back 2015). We begin by introducing mobile forms of belonging – notions of the nonstatic, the non-place specific and the varied and relational (im)mobilities connected to forms of belonging. Here we argue that, rather than threatening or undermining feelings of belonging, a person’s (im)mobilities are integral to the ways belonging is activated, performed and negotiated. As we demonstrate, this is a significant departure from current theorising.

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Following this, we tease out the three dimensions of our framework  – the everyday, (im)mobilities and belongingness  – to demonstrate how each contributes towards more rounded and inclusive understandings of how diverse groups of students, like those living at home, may experience and find ways of connecting to university. Within this process we examine mobile belonging in the context of the everyday  – the routinised, mundane, dynamic, visible and invisible behaviours that comprise our daily interactions (Back 2015; Cresswell 2015)  – identifying variations between the different movements that may be perceptible for living at home students and how these affect interactions with university life over the duration of their studies. Next, we apply the critical lens of mobilities theory to explore the implications of travelling and regular, routinised practices (e.g. commuting, walking, etc.) upon place-making and meaningful engagements for living at home students. Here we highlight the significance of digital, imagined and corporeal mobilities for ameliorating tensions and/or feelings of distance. Finally, we relate these to contemporary and relational understandings of belonging as a mobile performance, rather than fixed acquisition. By setting out our approach in this threefold way, we are able then to discuss two additional and no less significant dimensions of our framework: relational positioning and changing contexts and time. Here, we further develop our framework of everyday mobile belonging to recognise feelings of (dis) connection at university as a multidimensional process that is negotiated and invested in by living at home students. We argue that belonging is more than just the situation itself  – or even situatedness  – but has varying degrees of centred-ness that affect how it may interpreted through time and space. Indeed, as we close this chapter we acknowledge how changing contexts, rhythms and temporalities may affect the ways in which students, particularly those living at home, negotiate different spaces and places and engage invest in everyday strategies of meaning-making.

Outlining a new perspective: Mobile forms of student belonging So far, in this book we have reflected upon the ways in which the intersections of (im)mobility and belonging have been conceptualised, particularly for living at home and mature and part-time students, who have entered the sector in greater numbers as a response to a range of policy and socio-economic shifts. As part of

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this reflection, we have questioned why motion, place and a variety of relational (im)mobilities are theorised as antithetical to belonging in higher education and considered how student mobilities might be better understood as an active and negotiable set of practices and performances that provide more critical interpretations of how diverse groups go about performing their everyday lives while at university. Student mobility is often regarded as a one-off or exceptional event (e.g. studying abroad or moving away from home); however, we argue here that mobilities are experiences that form part of everyday life. Thus, following Back (2015: 2), we maintain that focusing on everyday life allows us to ‘attend to the inherent liveliness of social life and its time signatures’ and to take seriously the mundane daily encounters of students to consider what these mean for the wider spectrum of lived practices which continue to go on outside of student experiences. Specifically, we are concerned with how everyday mobile belonging may be developed to incorporate the sensory, affective and performative dimensions of student mobilities and the rhythms of belonging on the move. Moving forward, our framework for everyday mobile belonging therefore advances other work which has called for better recognition of the emotional, affective and sensory experiences of place and mobility and draws on exciting work from within leisure and transport studies that have extended Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis concept (e.g. Edensor 2010). Rhythmanalysis provides a ‘starting point for investigating the complex rhythms of the multiple mobilities that course through space’ (Edensor 2011: 189). We are mindful of the ways that students operate within social rhythms; that is the various temporal flows that are marked by the working day, national events or normalised mealtimes. There are also the rhythms of the seasons, the months, the academic calendar and, not forgetting, the life-course, that are ostensibly linear and cyclical. Some rhythms are regular and fairly predictable (the morning rush hour, for example) while others might be disruptive, such as the bodily rhythms linked to illness and disability. Thinking about how these multiple rhythms intersect and interact as students engage with higher education, allows us to approach a less bounded notion of belonging and see places and spaces as ‘continually (re)produced through mobile flows which course through and around them, bringing together ephemeral, contingent and relatively stable arrangements of people, places and matter’ (Edensor 2011: 190). We say more about time and temporality later in this chapter. This engagement with diverse and mobility-centred theoretical and methodological work allows us to advance a more critical alternative theorisation of belonging than that expressed in the retention literature (Tinto 1975; Thomas

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2012). We go further to value the multiple commitments and emotional ties that students have outside the campus boundaries and that they must reconcile in and through their everyday mobilities. We argue here, then, that everyday mobile belonging does not necessarily serve to threaten an attachment to place or space. Following Adey (2017) we seek to demonstrate that routes welltravelled over time may turn into meaningful places, just like those at either end of the route itself. Thus, while we do not deny the significance of students’ social engagement to a sense of belonging in higher education, we do wish to challenge the assumptions as to where and how that engagement should take place. It is our contention that, by examining the emotional negotiations that mark the lived experience of student (im)mobilities, it is possible to understand the messy and uncertain processes through which belonging is generated and maintained, often on the move (Cresswell 2006a). This point is particularly important when considering the debates surrounding post-student mobilities and how the ‘boomerang effect’ (Molgat 2002; Mitchell 2006) should be understood relationally and as embedded in the life-course. Moreover, by outlining and unpacking the production of mobilities (Urry 2003; Cresswell 2006; Adey 2017) and the politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010) we reflect both on what mobilities can do for studies of student experiences of belonging and place, and how students’ multi-scalar transitions and movements can add interesting and challenging dimensions to existing understandings of everyday mobilities. We divide our approach into three key components or foci  – everyday life, mobilities and belonging – and these are outlined in detail in the coming sections.

Three dimensions of mobile belongingness Everyday life To outline our framework, we begin with a focus on the everyday as part of the practice of everyday life. Lefebvre’s (1991a: 97) definition below simultaneously outlines the totality and the relationality of everyday life Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond and their common ground. It is in everyday life that the sum total of relations that make the human  – and every human being  – a whole takes its shape and form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations that bring into play

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the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc.

Yet, while Lefevbre’s definition attests to the complex intersectional components of the everyday, everyday life scholars tend to stress the unhelpfulness of oppositional categories, such as ‘private’ and ‘public’, that so often become woven into such discussions, suggesting instead that in practice boundaries are blurred and mutable (Burkitt 2004; May 2013). For example, belonging (and with this, identity and placemaking) is often felt or enacted subconsciously or at the level of the informal, the routine and the everyday. The everyday is, or can sometimes be, a fairly nebulous concept, so it is important to clarify what we mean by the ‘everyday’ and why we need to think in broader terms about the methods we might want to use for capturing it. Hall, Lashua and Coffey (2008: 1021) argue simply that everyday life refers to the mundane and ordinary world as we live it day-to-day, in all its plural particularity of routine and contingency. Everyone knows what everyday life is and means.

There are, therefore, necessarily struggles for whose daily life is known and understood and everyday life necessarily becomes a politically charged concept that aims to ‘give voice to marginalised groups and pay attention to spaces and places previously rendered invisible’ (Wood 2014: 217). This notion of the dynamics between the centre and the periphery  – of experiences and action  – are considered by de Certeau (1984a), who asserts that our everyday practices, or our ‘ways of operating’, should foreground our understandings of daily life rather than being considered subsidiary to more extraordinary life events. May (2013) reflects further on this relationship between the ordinary and extraordinary, the hidden and the visible, arguing that everyday practices necessarily occur in the context of dominant institutions and unofficial actions often challenge and destabilise official rules. Thus, there is no homogeneous set of everyday practices and no clear definition of a category of experiences; there is only leakage and overlap. Accordingly, theories of everyday life provoke us to question what we understand as fixed or separate – as work or play, home or away – and to look for the potential for change in the seemingly mundane and ordinary (Harrison 2000). From this perspective, identity performances are an essential part of everyday life and often serve to connect different realms of experience, blending the unofficial and the official, the public and private aspects of our lives. As such, our framework regards the everyday as much more than routinised, pre-scripted

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and mundane private experiences; indeed, the everyday dimensions of mobile belonging are what give this process the potential for creativity, subversion and resistance (Lefebvre 1991; de Certeau 1984a). Moreover, as it is enmeshed within the ordinary routines of everyday life, everyday mobile belonging practices can powerfully reconfigure notions of self and home (Jensen 2009) through the mutual acts of departure and return (Probyn 1996). It is important to recognise, then, the extent to which individual and collective identities interweave with and exist in relation to broader aspects of daily life, and how this in turn, reconstitutes the social world in dynamic ways (Benson 2016). The socially embedded, generative nature of our everyday mobile belonging framework is closely aligned with the Bourdieusian theorising discussed in Chapter  2, insofar as both draw attention to the ambivalent relationships between possibilities and constraint, scripting and creativity, habit and change. Notwithstanding these parallels, we find that there is greater scope to understand people as reflexive and strategic agents when using the lens of everyday mobile belonging, because the complexities and incongruences of everyday performances create space to articulate multiple modes of resistance and innovation that extend beyond a class-based model. Skelton’s (2013) research with young people in New Zealand, for example, reveals how everyday and occasional mobilities are shaped by age and the experience of being young. She argues that ‘it is inevitable that young people will experience urban im/mobilities differently’ (468) and that ‘[t]hrough these young mobilees’ eyes, we gain an insight into the city and the expectations and anxieties about what the city can provide’ (481). Of course, not all students are young, but a good portion of them are and Skelton’s work is significant in reminding us that the everyday practises of students and young people make important contributions to the production, creation and alteration of urban spaces. More than this, though, as Skelton concludes, the scrutiny of everyday mobilities in itself provides critical ways of understanding the complexities, fluidities and dynamism of social identities. Our final point in this section relates to the way notions of the everyday can invoke connotations of rigidity, fixity, immobility and an entrenched mundanity. Even so, the banality of everyday life also contains many opportunities to understand more about routines, place-making and the sensing of place. In terms of notions of place, Cresswell (2015: 116) usefully argues that most places are more often the product of everyday practices. Places are never finished but produced through the reiteration of practices  – the repetition of seemingly mundane activities on a daily basis.

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Hence, the everyday is an essential component to our framework in understanding the relative, yet highly individualised and personal sensing of different contrasting and competing places for living at home students that, once unpacked, stretch far beyond the oppositional ways of thinking mentioned earlier. For example, Tuan’s (1974) notion of topophilia – the process through which an individual’s affective ties with their material environment develops more positive connections to places – implies the valuing of stasis and familiarity as key components of our everyday interactions. In a recently updated version of tropophilia Anderson and Erskine (2014) refer to ‘[an] individual’s need to move and be moved and to be stimulated and challenged in terms of their relations to place’ (135, emphasis in original). This suggests that, for living at home students, attachments to places, or the movements between places can be strategised reflexively in accordance with their relative position, and thus, even though higher education is increasingly understood at its larger, international and global scales, everyday local practices and movements must not be overlooked or assumed. To summarise this section, then, a focus on the everyday ensures that attention is paid to the interplay between different spaces and practices, in addition to embodied, affective and sensory experiences, that are central to the ways selfhood is lived and experienced for many students. What we seek to develop further, though is how everyday engagements with what might perceived to be ‘the local’ may carry potentially dynamic qualities that link individuals with place, while providing them freedom to negotiate various interactions in multiple spheres (e.g. home, work, university, family, social, etc.). Thus, rather than conceiving of the ‘local’ (and by association, local students) as fixed and unchanging, we see the local as being (re)produced in relation to the various (im)mobilities that underpin and run through it. We explore this in the next section.

Mobilities Crucial to our understanding of the everyday mobile belonging framework is the influence of mobility and immobility upon the ways living at home students feel (un)able to negotiate the sequences and interactions that constitute university life. Our framework employs mobility as a critical conceptual lens that explores the implications that travelling and banal routinised behaviours have upon everyday place-making, and what we may consider to be important mobilities for students who continue to live at home. Mobilities are shaped through meaningful interactions between stasis and flow (Jensen 2009), yet, as

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Cresswell (2006a) argues, mobilities are highly dynamic, embodied practices that involve meaning, power and attachment and can be observed, represented and experienced through varying degrees of space and time. Important here then, is the view that mobilities are not necessarily constituted from exceptional encounters but are the product of our everyday, corporeal routines and behaviours (Peters, Kloppenburg and Wyatt 2009). Hence, while our capacity to be mobile has become a ubiquitous factor in the construction and maintenance of identities and sense(s) of self, we are also increasingly defined by our relative (and perceived) lack of mobility. This acknowledgement of the relationality of mobility is integral to the development of the everyday mobile belonging framework. Adey (2006), for example, argues against the privileging of certain mobilities over others, suggesting instead that all mobilities must be understood in relation to one another, meaning there is no absolute immobility, just relative mobilities that are mistaken for immobility. Consequently, power plays a significant role in influencing certain types of mobility, providing access to – and to a degree egress from, particular types of movement (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006). Immobilities are thus perceived as moorings (Urry 2003)  or places of storage (Adey 2017)  – essential in differentiating components of mobility that prevent mobilities becoming an unintelligible mess (Urry 2002). This relationship between stasis and mobility (what Urry (2002) has termed the ‘mobility/moorings dialectic’) is fundamental, then, in developing understandings of – and negotiations with – the politics of our mobile worlds. Crucially for us, this means that relational mobilities can be examined, not just as oppositional, but as part of a set of interrelated process. As Meier and Frank (2016: 362) argue: Mobilities such as commuting between places of work and places of residence, migrating, being a tourist or fleeing from bad circumstances to a new place are accompanied by reaching, living, creating, experiencing, leaving, maybe also by being caught in concrete places.

So, to advance this, our framework considers the relationships and tensions between mobilities, immobilities and moorings as a way of developing more critical conceptualisations of how living at home students experience and negotiate their multiple spheres of home, university, work and social lives. Moreover, as we outline in the section on changing contexts and time, we find analytical value in forms of time taking, or ‘waithood’ (Cuzzocrea 2018), which links to conceptions of the life-course and belonging and has particular significance for examining post-student mobilities.

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Waithood links nicely with ideas surrounding stillness, which is usefully incorporated into our framework to help us understand more about the varying degrees of mobility that our participants are experiencing. Cresswell and Merriman (2011) suggest that, in many ways, interpretations of mobility often start with the fact of moving and then retain that as a focus. Yet if we want to question the involvement of more marginal mobilities, which is our aim in this book, then we also need to know whether and how the action of moving (or remaining still) enlivens the ‘subject’ of mobility as well as the process. What we mean here is, for example, the ways mobile time and space – such as a journey on a bus, an email exchange, or a period of unemployment after completing university – might be filled with both liveliness and inactivity; mobility and stillness simultaneously. Stillness is often seen as a wasted moment or a kind of emptiness and inactivity  – all coded negatively, i.e. ‘dead time’. But, stillness is thoroughly incorporated into the practices of moving and we need to recognise stillness as a process of movement or a consequence of mobility and immobility. Indeed, stillness is, in its very nature, illusionary (Bissell and Fuller 2011), for how can anything be truly inert? Even decay has movement! Nonetheless, something our framework is consciously aware of is the politics of mobility:  ‘where the mobility of some is contingent on the immobility of others’ (Bissell 2010: 80). While we accept that mobilities can be relational and somewhat binary in how they are actioned and received, we expect our framework to be more malleable, porous – surprising even, rather than being necessitated on the (dis)advantaging of one form of mobility over another. Fundamental to our framework is Torsten Hägerstrand’s (1970) notion of activity space. An auxiliary of his famous ‘time geography’ theories,1 activity spaces refer to the rhythms and patterns of everyday life. Conceptually, an activity space constitutes the confluence of where all of a person’s daily activities occur (Golledge and Stimson 1997), comprising movement to and from the home and regular activity locations (e.g. home, work, shops, the pub, etc.), as well as the different movements that connect these activities (e.g. walking, commuting, exercising, etc.). Alongside these more tangible (im)mobilities sit other forms of mobile life that are pertinent to our framework. The more oblique, intangible and abstract mobilities that constitute our complex attachments to places and to movements between places all contribute towards our unique lived experiences of the everyday. Here we consider the role of digital and imagined mobilities in forming these individual attachments and their influence over living at 1

For a comprehensive discussion of time geography, see Thrift and Pred (1981).

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home students’ propinquity, or nearness, to the different aspects of their daily lives. Following others who have explored the role of digital mobilities in the process of belonging for university students (Timmis, Yee and Bent 2016) our framework takes on notions of the abstracted imagined mobilities that are co-constitutive of our daily lives. As Baas (2012) argues, this may denote potential opportunities for mobility or the outcome of a process of mobility; what Cairns (2014: 28) refers to as ‘spatial reflexivity’, how one might choose ‘a life rather than selecting a lifestyle’. This recognises that the trajectories of living at home students’ aspirations are far more fluid, flexible, complex and non-linear than the literature might suggest. Additionally, acknowledging ‘the virtual’ adds new layers to these imagined scenarios which, as Urry (2008:  159) argues, ‘[creates] many implications for a world of “movement” ’. Urry is suggesting here that our lives have become imbued with technology to the point of such technology becoming almost imperceptible. Certainly in terms of learning technologies, virtual learning environments, specialist software, content capture, webinars, massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open-access applications have become ubiquitous components of higher education over the last fifteen years (Brown and Hocutt 2015), connecting students to academic content that can be accessed far away from the confines of the classroom. Outside of the official sphere of education, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.), and crucially the means through which we interface with each other through portable smartphones and tablets, have opened up vast opportunities to collapse distance and time and ultimately ‘stay connected’. This has permeated our contemporary lifestyles, becoming central to the shaping of the activities we undertake and the ways through which we operationalise them. Moreover, the connection between person and technology has hybridised, blurring the more typical boundaries between geographical and virtual space (de Souza e Silva 2006). It is this apparently seamless segueing between physical and digital space(s) that we are interested in investigating as part of our framework for everyday mobile belonging, specifically in how this might instigate novel ways through which living at home students interact both emotionally and affectively with different spheres (social, familial, academic, work, etc.).

Belonging The third element of our framework, belonging, carries similar geographical and social complexities in terms of relationality and representation. Belonging

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is intrinsically linked with notions of movement, identity and the home, and captures the lived realities of longing and attachment that are central to understandings of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Belonging is often used in conjunction with concepts relating to boundaries, borders, sense of place and identity, and these multidimensional approaches are essentially negotiated through practice and performance. This makes belonging complex, with multiple levels of attachment to places and therefore belonging. For example, May (2016a, 2017) considers belonging to have a temporality, in that it takes on meaning in line with the different rhythms of everyday life (Bennett 2015). For example, a first-year student may have very different interpretations of belonging to a student in their final year; each is likely to interpret their term-time location, and subsequently how they belong to it in contrasting ways. Thus, as we outline in more detail later in this chapter, time is crucial in terms of negotiating a sense of belonging. Alternatively, Mee and Wright (2009) posit belonging as a fundamentally spatial concept. Here they argue that belonging links matter to place through various connections and relationships:  ‘which signal that a particular collection of objects, animals, plants, germs, people, practices, performances, or ideas is meant “to be” in a place’ (772). Indeed, Nagel (2011) identifies four characteristic functions of belonging: emotional (through attachment to places and a sense of belonging to place(s)); formalised (in terms of structures of belonging or nationally defined communities); normative (through social groupings in specific places – who belongs and who does not) and negotiated (contested forms of belongings and the widening boundaries of belonging). While Nagel’s definitions emphasise the complexities of belonging  – specifically the tensions that exist between the emotional and everyday practices of belonging and the formalised structured ideologies of belonging – we are interested in how this might have certain hierarchical implications for understandings of belonging. Making this point, Savage (2010: 116) refers to the process of ‘elective belonging’, whereby middle class people claim moral rights over place through their capacity to move to, and put down roots in, a specific place which was not just functionally important to them but which also mattered symbolically.

It is when newcomers to a space ‘rub up against’ those with historical attachments that belonging is potentially problematised and transformed, although acts of resistance and repulsion are shaped (and limited) by the power geometry of space and mobility (Massey 1993). Watt (2009) has offered the notion of

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‘selective’ belonging to help explain the coexistence of different (class-based) communities in given spatial locations and to reveal how non-identification and non-participation in spaces often exist side by side with feelings of attachment and belonging. Notwithstanding, we draw upon Arp Fallov, Jørgensen and Knudsen’s (2013) conceptualisation of mobile belonging which, through varying scales, rhythms and variations, can generate quite intricate forms of centring (what Buttimer (1980:  171) argues as the ‘ongoing life process; the breathing in and bringing home which is a reciprocal of the breathing out and reaching toward horizon’). Here, both mobility and immobility are crucial to the formation of belonging – one is not privileged over the other – and this allows us to differentiate between the different forms of belonging expressed by our participants. Connected to these ideas of mobile belonging are the temporal shifts in belonging that may occur over time – the ageing and/or generational changes that imbricate, or overlap, one another to develop more composite understandings of belonging (May and Muir 2015) or the perennial structural adaptations (e.g. curriculum changes, fee increases, grade tariffs, etc.) that may destabilise students’ understandings of the mechanics of their degrees (Wilcox, Winn and Fyvie-Gauld 2005). As Benson (2016) reflects in her analyses of residential and lifestyle mobilities, belonging is always a ‘project-in-progress rather than fait accompli [and] further complicated by ongoing attachments to people and places elsewhere’ (482). Thus, relationally experienced and performed, belonging is messy and uncertain, something to be worked upon and rarely rooted in one location. Such a conceptualisation of belonging as ambivalent, multilocal, shifting and selective is clearly at odds with idea that to belong in higher education students must be attached and located within particular spaces and places of engagement end endure over the course of defined timeline of study (Thomas 2012). Indeed, the assumed relationship between withdrawal from study and a lack of belonging is based upon this notion. We wish to depart from this, and are keen to reposition such dialogue to further to unpack the more diffuse symbolic, imagined – perhaps fleeting even – representations of belonging that swim in and out of living at home students’ lives. Here, rather than viewing these students’ lives as static and immobile, the everyday mobile belonging framework can examine how temporal changes might recognise the impacts of time – as well as space – upon the ways in which daily life is interpreted and experienced.

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Relational positionings Now that we have unpacked the three dimensions of our everyday mobile belonging framework we will move on to interrogate further how and why a sense of belonging is considered a key motivating factor for living at home students in choosing an institution. The literature argues that living at home is predominantly a tactic that reconciles emotional, financial and/or familial responsibilities, yet these characteristics of belonging are precisely the ones that may later disadvantage and/or identify living at home students as different (Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008). Belonging therefore also carries with it connotations of resilience, more precisely through its antithesis – ‘not-belonging’ – in terms of expressions of confusion, isolation and constraint (Ploner 2017), and particularly concerning how living at home students might reconcile not being the ‘authentic student’ (Read, Archer and Leathwood 2003). To extend these terms we recognise the multidimensionality of relational positionings in informing our everyday mobile belonging framework, and in doing so, how these might destabilise such monolithic binaries. Just as Adey (2017) implores the relationality of mobility as important in understanding different movements, we too are keen to apply multidimensional approaches to our framework. For example, Skelton (2013) argues that multi-scalar interpretations of places, movements, attachments and moorings are vitally important in unpacking the complex subjectivities of our post-modern lives. Moreover, Massey (2005) suggests a spatio-temporality exists in terms of the relational social, spatial and temporal aspects of our identities that increasingly impacts upon our potential to access certain types of social networks (Eriksson 2017). Thus, belonging can be viewed as something that requires time and effort to achieve, being earned rather than simply being given immediate access to (Probyn 1996; Benson 2016). Yet, while we agree that time is fundamental in the development of belonging, our framework recognises its relationality in terms of developing interaction and connections, both within and between individuals and groups as they negotiate who or what belongs and/or not belongs (Mee 2009).

Complex power assemblages In terms of our framework for everyday mobile belonging, we argue that this notion of relational positioning comprises two distinct components – positioning selves and others and being positioned.

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In terms of positioning selves and others, the academic literature has focused significant attention on relational identities  – specifically the ways in which students might position themselves in relation to others (often non-students). This has been characterised through the territorialised notions of ‘their places’ and ‘our places’ (Holt and Griffin 2005) and the forms of (self-)segregation that manifest from this relationality (Keane 2011). Chatterton’s (1999) work on ‘exclusive geographies’ has highlighted the overt and implicit mechanisms put in place to facilitate and support such self-segregation arguing that this reinforces the symbolic ‘rules’ of student life. While this may assume (and reinforce) ‘town’ and ‘gown’ divisions, our framework is interested in exploring the potential for self-segregation within the student cohort  – particularly the devices used by living at home students to distance themselves from a more ‘typical student’ identity (Holton 2015c) or to overcome the obstacles present in university life (Madriaga 2010). It is largely accepted that many students often seek to adopt the identity of the ‘typical student’ in order to ‘fit in’ (Holdsworth 2006). Yet Holdsworth (2009a) implies this identity may be perceived as detrimental to living at home students, particularly given the negative stereotyping associated with student behaviours (e.g. the uncivilised discourses associated with student behaviour, which emphasise ‘hedonistic pleasure-seeking, drinking and sex/ coupling’ (Hubbard 2013: 267). Such arguments do not, of course, align particularly well with the diverse range of intersectional identities present in university spaces (see Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine 2012; Brooks, Byford and Sela 2015). Indeed, the point has been argued that the hegemonic student identity (young, white, male, middle-class) that has been so historically pervasive within university life has been problematised through the construction of the ‘new student’ (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003) discussed in earlier chapters. Hence, our framework explores notions of power and privilege (Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine 2012) and hegemony and heteronormativity (Taulke-Johnson 2010a, 2010b), not simply as binaries of advantage/disadvantage or inclusion/ exclusion, but instead as a more complex set of power assemblages through which living at home students might (re)negotiate their daily lives. Our framework acknowledges such diversity within the cohort but rather than focusing entirely on the potential disadvantaging obstacles presented to living at home students, we emphasise the agency of living at home students to choose to engage or disengage with certain components of the student identity – should they wish.

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The diversity of unconventional student lives The alternative to positioning others is the process of being positioned. This generates another, potentially more insidious, outcome of these relational positionings, whereby living at home students become identified or characterised as being immobile or as not belonging at university. The labelling of living at home as synonymous with ‘disadvantage’ is pervasive, and highly damaging, particularly in terms of recognising the diversity within student cohorts (see Holdsworth 2009a; Holton 2015c; Allen and Hollingworth 2013). There are numerous examples of instances where university structures that are designed to speak for marginalised voices inevitably fail to speak to them in terms of accommodation (Fincher and Shaw 2009), social spaces (Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine 2012) and faith spaces (Hopkins 2011). In terms of diversity, university campuses have become contested spaces for marginalised groups – being simultaneously ‘tolerant and diverse, and discriminatory and exclusionary’ (Hopkins 2011: 157). Here the student voice remains homogenous, writing out the more intricate and nuanced tones that perhaps require less conventional support. Our framework for everyday mobile belonging is designed, therefore, to tease out this diversity and to understand the various and contrasting stories of an unconventional student life. We, of course, acknowledge Hopkins and Pain’s (2007) caution against ignoring the centre and fetishising the margins, and we accept that many of our participants, while living at home, may still consider themselves to be ‘typical’ students. That said, we recognise that what is key to understanding these notions of relational positioning is an appreciation of the multidimensional qualities of belonging – particularly in terms of intersectional identities. We are reminded here of Waller’s (2006) research with mature students in which he critiques a ‘species’ approach (see also James 1995) when studying older students, arguing that such a model is ‘for institutional convenience rather than to try to aid the understanding of narratives of experience’ (126). Indeed, Waller demonstrates that, where there have been attempts to categorise mature students as a discrete and relatively stable group (an understandable and noble aim given their low participation rates and need for greater visibility) such attempts have overlooked the ‘subtleties and nuances of personal experience [which] lead to very different outcomes for something as complex as an individual’s learner identity’ (Waller 2006). Likewise, living at home is a category that is descriptive of a mode of experience, but it certainly does not denote a homogenous ‘species’

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of students nor is it an attempt to reduce those who participate in this way to a set of defined attributes or experience of (not) belonging.

Changing contexts and time In the final section of this chapter, we focus upon time as the force that binds together place, mobility and everyday life. We have already alluded to its significance, however, we now set out the importance of building temporality into analyses of belonging for both students and graduates. When students move around campus, travel to or from university or seek out places to study or socialise, they do so within the constraints and possibilities of time (e.g. semesters and term times; the institutionalised working day; the official opening times of libraries, cafes and bars; the train or bus schedule; and ‘peak’ travel times on motorways and roads). There is often some waiting around to be done too – with students ‘killing time’ between lectures or the last bus home. The obvious significance of time notwithstanding, the neglect of time in existing studies of education has been identified as persistent and problematic (Hopwood 2014). Lefebvre (2004) argues that societies are shaped by these different temporal rhythms; pauses, stops, and fleeting movements that are a product of clock time, seasons and bodily circulation, all harmonising and clashing with one another in turn (Kullman and Palludan 2011). Understanding the rhythms of students’ experiences is important for understanding how individual lives are structured in and through time, as well as the various strategies for diverting and resisting these structures and developing a sense of agency. At the same time, higher education is also part of traditional age-based transitions; as we outlined in the previous chapter, university is commonly understood as an important part of the transition to adulthood for young people (see Cote and Bynner 2008), and as mature students re-enter education they become known as ‘lifelong learners’ (Waller 2005; Schuetze and Slowey 2002). Thus, higher education experiences are often framed in terms of the temporalities of, and movements through, various stages of the life-course. We contend here that time and rhythm should be attended to within the research process. Of course, the theories and concepts already discussed here cater in some way for the close relationship between place and movement, and how this is choreographed in relation to different temporal frames. In terms of longer-term, life-course choreographies, we may want to attend specifically to

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time to document social as well as geographical mobilities. Thus, the focus of this section is to examine how a rhythm analytical approach might be developed to enhance a focus on the sensory and everyday strategies for place-making and belonging as a means for tracking biographical narratives and motifs that young people develop and negotiate over time (see Warin 2010; Henderson, Holland, McGrellis, Sharpe and Thomson 2007). Getting to grips with rhythmic familiarity allows a much more nuanced sense of place to emerge. Bennett’s (2015) work on belonging and everyday rhythms is an important reference point here, because it shows how a focus on temporal rhythms exposes ‘the humdrum, mundane quality of everyday life’ and how such actions are implicated in ‘ontological belonging [that is] a set of mutual obligations to care for the past and future of places and those who inhabit them’ (966). For Bennett and others employing a rhythmanalysis approach, this involves getting ‘close up’ to participants through deep ethnography, diaries and other qualitative techniques that build in the opportunities for reflection and observation. Once we start to understand how and in what ways students move  – around cities, campuses, between spaces and places  – and their ‘prolonged or repeated movements, fixities, relations  and dwellings’ (Merriman 2004:  146) – we can begin to challenge the notion that ‘places marked by an abundance of mobility become placeless’ realms of detachment (Cresswell 2006a:  31) where feelings of belonging are necessarily hard to generate. Rhythmanalysis is as much a method as a theoretical framework (and we look at it again in Chapter 4) in which the researcher seeks to engage with the whole body  – listening, looking, smelling and touching  – to investigate the various intersecting temporalities of everyday life (Kullman and Palludan 2011); something we discuss in Chapter  4. Lefebvre claims that ‘everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2004: 15). This allows us to think about place as always moving – humming  – and therefore not static or contained within fixed boundaries. Indeed, the particular assemblages of rhythms within a place produce spatial and temporal fluidity but also the ‘repetitions and regularities that become the tracks to negotiate urban life’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 17). What this means is that places and spaces – like the library, the campus, the railway station – take on a sense of place that is linked to the different and overlapping rhythms that permeate it. Understanding the multiple rhythms of students and of higher education more broadly is important because of the ways routine features of everyday life in the university may provide a comforting rhythmic reliability

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and mobile homeliness (Edensor 2011) that directly shapes (or indeed works against) belonging and place-making. Lefebvre (2004) suggests that in studying the everyday life of social spaces we need to become ‘rhythmanalysts’, whereby observable patterns are examined alongside Lefebvre’s attention to the powerrelations through which space is produced (e.g. the ways in which society and capital shape rhythms). Beyond space and the environment, Lefebvre also draws attention to the body as both the site where rhythms meet and the metronome that can be used to apprehend them. Hence, mobile rhythms provide a backdrop to everyday life. Integrated systems involving a variety of technologies arrange the rhythmic flow of bodies, from rail station to university campus, seeking cultivate certain atmospheres (i.e. relaxing, high energy, scholarly). Scholars have turned to the language of dance and choreography to draw out the moments of agency and constraint that shape personal mobility performances (see Cresswell 2006b; Nash 2000). As McCormack (2008) argues, an explicitly choreographic vocabulary began to emerge in geography in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of an attempt to facilitate ‘an account of the “life-world” that attended to the details of everyday habitual movement’ (1824). Linked to Seamon’s (1980) notion of the everyday place ballet, McCormack reflects on the ways in which the language of dance and choreography allows scholars to think through the relations between bodies and spaces; the sensory experiences of everyday life; and the corporeal micropolitics which emerge through the ongoing and highly subtle negotiation between different bodies occupying similar spaces. It is in these ways and for these reasons that notions of rhythm-making, dance and choreography lend themselves to our framework for everyday mobile belonging. Although we find value in the notion that living at home students might experience belonging as a personalised choreography or set of rhythms which constitute a performative practice, requiring knowledge, repeated routines, the ability to freestyle and adopt intuitive movements (as well as more traditional ‘steps’), we follow Nash (2000) who argues that dance is not just about subconscious, instinctive or sensory movements as some have argued (Thrift 1997). The language of choreography (rather than performance, or dance) Nash (2000: 658) claims, has more analytical value for conveying the codes traditions and conventions people reproduce, rework, parody or upset, as well as the performative enactment of gender, class, sexual, ethnic, racial or national identities . . . [re-emphasizing] codes, traditions, the constraints and

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rules of performed identities – the regulatory system – as well as the possibilities of subversion within Judith Butler’s theory of performativity.

For the purpose of our analysis, we refer more to personalised rhythms, this way we avoid some of the pitfalls associated with the language of choreography and dance that Nash (and others) discuss. Personalised rhythms allow us to consider for example, the student who arrives late or leaves early from the seminar; or the student who is busy planning social events using their smartphone instead of listening to the lecture, and how this might tie in with their efforts to belong. A  focus on the different ways in which time and space come together for different students, thus allows us to see them as more than passive or shallow figures; indeed, they become much more agentic and we are able to recognise their (small and large) acts of resistance.

Summary In summary, this chapter set out to draw together many of the, often contrasting, theoretical viewpoints that underpin notions of everyday life, mobilities and belonging, taking account of how these are each relationally and temporally experienced, to help us to develop a more dynamic and inclusive framework for theorising student (im)mobilities (see Box 1). We have seen here how drawing notions of the banality of everyday life into discussions of belonging and the complex relationality involved in mobilities provides us with rich understandings of how living at home students might make sense of their trajectories through university and remind us that we must retain a critical lens when attending to these students’ diverse and multidimensional identities. This framework will be applied in Part Three of the book, where we analyse the different data sets and reveal the ways in which everyday mobile belonging is accomplished by students as they engage in routine but no less affective movements to, from and around campus. In moving forward, Part Two builds upon this conceptual work to examine more closely some of the existing methodological approaches to researching higher education students (Chapter 4), both in the UK and overseas, before outlining the studies upon which this book draws (Chapter 5). This gives us a strong indication of how space is (co)produced through students’ everyday and exceptional movements, as well helping us understand how students’ experiences of university life are temporally diverse and multi-scalar.

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Box 1: Through the everyday mobile belonging framework we intend to examine: ●

●

●

●

● ●

●

●

●

● ● ●

the unhelpfulness of oppositional binary categories in exploring living at home students’ experiences of university life; the multidimensionality of the everyday and how this applies to living at home students’ relative experience; the reflexivity of agents in strategising and coordinating their university experiences; the implication of different forms of contrasting mobilities upon placemaking activities; the privileging of certain mobilities over others; the opportunities to scrutinise the action of moving (or not) upon enlivening living at home students’ understanding of mobility; the effect of digital and imagined mobilities upon living at home students’ propinquity to a variety of actors and situations; the multifaceted attachments to places and belonging for living at home students; the ‘rubbing up against’ of newcomers and those with historical attachments in term-time and non-university spaces; the temporal shift of belonging over time; the complex power assemblages between different student groups; and the diversity present in seemingly unconventional student lives.

Part Two

Researching Mobile Belonging: Emplacing Students’ Experiences and Identities

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Methods for Researching Students’ Everyday Mobilities and Belonging

Introduction Part Two of this volume relates explicitly to issues of methods and methodology. While Chapter 5 presents practical details of the research upon which we have drawn in developing our framework of everyday mobile belonging. In the first chapter of this section we provide an overview of the various methodological approaches for investigating the experiences of higher education students, if proceeding from the starting point of mobilities and place-making. We decided to provide this summary and discussion of innovative and creative methods for two main reasons. First, when we set out to conduct our own research, we both felt that we were moving across disciplinary boundaries and – through our collaborative conversations – we were able to direct one another to studies of significance that may have been hard to find from our respective vantage points as sociologists and geographers. Thus, we wanted to bring this methodological discussion into one place for budding and more experienced higher education researchers, who wish to approach the issues of belonging differently, creatively and with mobilities squarely in focus. Second, our trajectory – as researchers in the field and later in compiling this volume – has been a journey. During this journey, we have become much more sensitive to, and knowledgeable of, mobile and creative methods and much of this has developed in an ad hoc way. Thus, we make no claims here to be trailblazers in mobile methods for higher education and we offer a caveat here that, while our research is certainly conceived with mobilities in mind, the research approaches and techniques described in this chapter are much more expansive and, perhaps, innovative, than those we have deployed in our own research. Consequently, we were conflicted about including this chapter – cautious not to over-promise on our own methodological stance but also feeling strongly that we should share

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our journey through methods so that other students, academics and researchers can understand our own intellectual mobility through and across disciplinary boundaries. We feel this is important in accounting for our own positionality as scholars and for situating the remaining chapters and the broader message of the book. As demonstrated in Part One, the idea of ‘The University’ as a fixed and bounded space is a problematic concept, largely due to the diverse and often simultaneously local and international nature of institutions, staff and students, which has a bearing upon feelings of belonging and inclusion. Understanding the porous and fluid nature of higher education requires different theoretical tools, as we outlined in Chapter  3. However, to ensure the dimensions of everyday mobile belonging are brought into view, we argue here that it is crucial to employ appropriate methodological approaches too. To begin this conversation, this chapter focuses on the ways methodological practice has been implemented in ways that enliven the research encounter, while also presenting exciting opportunities to do research with students. Crucially, the approaches we draw upon are not just creative methods for creative methods’ sake, but opportunities to think critically about the quality of student-centred research. Specifically, in the following we consider the epistemological benefits that may be gained from employing focused methodologies  – such as opening up new ways of knowing how space is (co)produced through everyday and exceptional movements, or understanding how students from diverse backgrounds might position themselves at various scales, including the home, the university, the city and the nation. This chapter is organised thematically according to place, everyday life, mobilities, belonging, and temporality and each theme is discussed in turn and examples of research undertaken in (higher) education research are identified where it exists.

Researching place(s) in higher education We begin this discussion by ‘locating’ the university, and in doing so we reveal how we as higher education researchers might better attend to the complexities of place and place-making through a range of approaches that respond to notions of place. Not surprisingly, we can learn a great deal from geographical research when it comes to ‘emplacing’ students and their experiences. Elwood and Martin (2000), for example, extol the value of place in the research encounter arguing that location itself actively produces ‘ “micro-geographies” of spatial relations

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and meaning, where multiple scales of social relations intersect in the research interview’ (649). In the context of higher education students, attending to and unpacking these micro-geographies is important because, very often, it can yield new insights into differing relationships with place  – a characteristic that has been particularly pertinent in the approaches taken in the analyses underpinning this book. This is an important point to remember, especially as decisions about where to place the research may often emerge out of convenience, or to suit practical concerns such as reducing background noise or ensuring a level of privacy (see Hall, Lashua and Coffey 2008). We continue by questioning how might we account for place when we start to imagine tools for researching student experiences of belonging and identity. According to Temple (2014: xxv–xxvii), [T]he buildings, the spaces within them, and the spaces around them, which make up the physical university, are often taken for granted, seen as merely the blank canvas on which the organizational and intellectual life of the institution is painted – along with large parts of the personal lives of the staff and students who inhabit [them. However,] far from being a blank canvas, the physical, material form affects what takes place in the university in important ways [making this] a two-way process, with a constant subtle interplay between material objects, people and their ordinary activities.

As Temple suggests, places associated with the university, and that are connected to higher education through a variety of other practices and processes that students are involved with, are essential to student experiences and the ways they engage in their own place-making. University campuses and buildings are perhaps the first ‘places’ that we think about when we imagine universities; these buildings are spaces for learning, socialising and participation in sport, debate, art and culture, as well as for eating, living and consumption. It has been argued that university buildings send messages and signals, ‘telling a story’ about the kind of institutions they represent and embody (Chapman 2006). It becomes possible then, for universities with their unique designs, historical (or highly modern) features, their scale and internal spatial relationships, to embody a kind of physical capital; when situated near the coast, by a river or a national park, a natural capital; and when based in the city, close to commerce or key tech-hubs like Silicon Valley, a locational capital (Temple 2014: 10–11). These different kinds of place-based resources – symbolic and material – impact upon student experiences and identities and the ways universities are perceived and experienced at various scales. This is evident in McCormack’s (2012) ethnographic

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study of young LGBTQ students’ experiences of transitioning into university from sixth-form college. McCormack’s combination of participant observation coupled with informal place-based ‘chats’ with students demonstrated how variously scaled spaces of education, including classrooms, canteens and other social spaces being seen to produce either formal or informal knowledges from participants. This significance of the ‘where’ of methodology is echoed in other research, particularly that which involves children and young people, and explicitly educational contexts. Jones (2008), for example, reflects on the ways certain places can influence the type(s) of knowledge or experiences that are accessed in research encounters. Jones was concerned with understanding teenage experiences of being ‘in-between’ childhood and adulthood and focused on the interplay of identity and spatial practices for young teenagers in a large town in North Wales, UK. Although the school setting was deemed practical in terms of facilitating quick entry to the research field, because ‘the school is a place imbued with significant adult/child power relations’ (Jones 2008:  328) it also carries certain ‘ethical baggage’ and has important implications when carrying out research around teenage experiences and identities. Jones reflects on how, in the school setting, adults are afforded natural positions of authority through repeated performances and interactions. This contrasts with what Valentine (2000) describes as the ‘informal world’ of students themselves, which can be characterised by peer group cultures and different network hierarchies. When interviewing teenagers on the school site, Jones found that they would whisper and employ other strategies to avoid the ‘panoptical view’ of the teacher. To make her participants feel more comfortable, Jones sought out alternative spaces  – including the storecupboard – which represented a ‘liminal space, in between the formal and informal worlds of the school’ (Jones 2009: 329). This ‘thirdspace’ was central to the willingness with which Jones’s young participants disclosed their spatial experiences of sexuality and their intimate emotional lives and was ultimately deemed a ‘safe space’ that was integral to the methodology. While place can be experienced directly during the research encounter, other approaches can be employed that draw out interpretations of spaces and spacing in other, more indirect ways. In a project that sought to examine the sociospatial contexts of students’ experiences of place studying at the University of Brighton, UK, Curtis (2015) employed photo elicitation as part of a larger multimethod approach that also comprised a survey and semi-structured interviews. Curtis provided her participants with a toolkit to undertake the work and asked them to provide her with a storyboard of up to twelve images that reflected their

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university experiences. Rather than simply analysing the images as a stand-alone medium, Curtis asked her participants to arrange them, substantiate them with short hand-written captions and to annotate the board using other medium to provide context to their individually narrated student experiences. As Curtis argues, this participatory approach can encourage, what may be seen as a set of seemingly dis-located images, to be anchored directly to the places in which they were taken by providing ownership of the spaces and places that are important to students’ everyday lives. Alongside the ‘where’ associated with researching higher education students comes a recognition of the diverse power relations and positionalities that exist within university spaces and how this may produce certain knowledges and experiences of university life. It is important to recognise whether and how different groups of students – mature, disabled, women, LGBTQ – use different parts of the university and feel a sense of comfort in place. Strayhorn and TillmanKelly (2013) warn against making assumptions about the ways in which minority groups may feel a sense of belonging on campus in their discussion of research with Black Gay Male Undergraduates (BGMUs) in the United States. They highlight the complexities of homophobia from within the black community, and racism/white-centric thinking elsewhere, which creates difficulties for BGMUs. They found that not all Black students experienced the campus cultural centre as welcoming, affirming, or as a place where they belonged and many BGMUs in the study saw the LGBTQ centre as principally serving the needs of white LGBTQ students on campus. In a similar vein, Hopkins (2011) and Fincher and Shaw (2009, 2011) drew upon the geographies of the university campus in co-producing feelings of inclusion/exclusion for Muslim students in Newcastle, UK, and international students in Melbourne, Australia. Hopkins’s (2011) focus on the campus itself exposed the dichotomous nature of university life for marginal members that ‘simultaneously construct[s] the university campus as tolerant and diverse and as discriminatory and exclusionary’ (157). Despite this, he also acknowledged that the complex power dynamics between himself (as a white, male, non-religious academic researcher) and his participants’ multiple positionalities meant that during the research process he occupied neither a full outsider nor insider role. Indeed, Hopkins reflects on various similarities and differences that emerged throughout the interview process. Likewise, Fincher and Shaw (2009, 2011) employed an interactive mapping approach that encouraged participants to extend their interpretations of belonging beyond the campus and into the city itself to reveal the ways in which social life was enacted differently across varying student and non-student spaces.

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Comparable instances of power were also evident in Sullivan’s (2012) research on LGBTQ students’ experiences of campus at the University of British Colombia, Vancouver, Canada. Sullivan (2012) used semi-structured interviews to explore the geographies of these experiences with her participants and it was in the placing of these interviews that Sullivan realised the exposing power dynamics that were produced by the spaces in which these encounters were held (specifically with those that were conducted in a senior Faculty staff member’s office). Sullivan’s participants would comment on how nice the room was and how challenging it must have been to read all the books on the shelves. Thus, this space – while providing a seemingly innocuous setting that was ostensibly an opportunity to provide privacy for her participants – was read in an altogether different way by her participants, who appeared to emphasise the need to secure confidentiality by leaning in and closing down the parameters of the room. Conversely, Strayhorn and Tillman-Kelly (2013:  94) maintain that because of such sensitivities, off-campus research locations were vital to their approaches to interviewing their BGMU participants: Since we wished for our interviews to be candid, we promised our participants confidentiality, which proved to be important to several of our respondents. For example, five interviews had to be conducted in clandestine locations away from central campus (e.g. a local coffee shop, a library study room).

Indeed, from an epistemological perspective Anderson and Jones (2009) argue that thinking creatively about where we emplace our research creates opportunities for revealing the emotional ties that bind individuals to places and for uncovering more dynamic and complex geographies of experience. Hence, campus cultures can be both uniting and differentiating, having regulatory and creative capacities, which may animate place in particular ways. According to Waite (2013), experiences of learning  – whether formal or informal  – and feelings of belonging to that learning, can be seen as occurring through the interplay between the physical and psychosocial. Thus, a ‘psychogeographic’ approach (the study of how geographical environments might influence mental or corporeal behaviours) can allow us to unpack the ways in which emotional and behavioural impacts of particular places shape individual consciousness (Coverley 2010). This has been achieved to some extent within research with higher education students, and there is a collection of studies which examines the ‘psychic landscapes’ (Reay 2005) of elite universities and their impact upon working-class and minority ethnic students (e.g. in the UK: Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2009; the United States: Warikoo and Fuhr 2014; Jones Brayboy 2004;

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Gasman, Hirschfeld and Vultaggio 2008; and in Canada:  Lehmann 2014). However, as these studies largely employ standard – and sedentary – interview techniques it is unclear how place is accounted for and explicitly made manifest in the methodology (other than being the object of a case study). Our discussion of our own mobile methodologies in the following chapter will demonstrate how these approaches may be enlivened further, to draw out a myriad of layered experiences of everyday life.

The everyday and lived experiences of higher education students As was outlined in Chapter  3, our everyday mobile belonging framework has within it the potential for creativity, subversion and resistance (Lefebvre 1991a; de Certeau 1984) and, this can be witnessed through the exciting methodologies that have been deployed when approaching students’ experiences of daily life. While the ordinary routines of everyday life and everyday mobile belonging practices may seem on the face of it rather mundane, researching these appropriately can powerfully reconfigure notions of the self and of relationships with the home and other social contexts in order to recognise how individual and collective identities become interwoven with(in) the broader aspects of daily life, and how these relate to the social world in dynamic ways. We make a strong case in Chapter 3 for the value of recognising the fluidity and mundaneness of everyday life, even though this might at first seem antithetical to the formal and bounded spaces of higher education. Indeed, it is crucial to understand that, increasingly, participation in higher education is just one aspect of a broader assemblage of commitments and identities that students must negotiate in their daily lives as parents, carers, siblings, part-time workers and so on. Thus, to interrogate these different domains of life and the mobilities that allow students to reconcile them, we require methods, which reveal the banality of everyday life, and the highly individualised and personal sensing(s) of different contrasting and competing everyday behaviours, routines and places for university students. Indeed, students are not simply passive spectators of their environments, but actively respond and reshape them, meaning that research can be dynamic and spontaneous if it sets out to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar (Rosaldo 1989), through ethnographic-inspired research practices.

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An example of this approach can be found in Malet-Calvo’s (2017) work that, using participant observation, elicited responses to students’ consumption behaviours in Lisbon, Portugal through informal conversations held during ‘pub-crawls, city walks, student parties, guided tours and a range of other events’ (3). These serendipitous encounters speak directly to notions of everyday life as holistic and multi-sited. Both Collins (2010) and Sykes (2017) took altogether different approaches to unpacking how students might perform their everyday lived experiences. Collins (2010) used a multi-method approach that included participant observation, diary and mapping exercises and discourse analysis of secondary data to build a picture of the everyday experiences of South Korean students living in Aukland, New Zealand. This multifunctional approach allowed Collins to explore his participants’ experiences more holistically and critically than by adopting a single method. Similarly, Sykes’s (2017) approach to researching within the confines of what she innovatively conceptualises as the university ‘student bubble’ for her British participants, employed a set of exciting and novel participatory approaches to gather multifaceted and inventive data that was co-produced with students rather than representing the experiences of students. Like Malet-Calvo (2017) and Collins (2010), Sykes’s approaches provide richly contextualised accounts of the how the physical, embodied weight of everyday university life can be effectively ‘carried’ upon the shoulders of university students as they progress through their degrees. These examples are not simply about employing a novel set of methods for novelty’s sake, but about finding ways of eliciting the right response in the right environment. While this may seem rather removed from more traditional educational research approaches there are several interesting and important examples of studies which seek to capture ‘lived experiences’ of students in educational settings. For example, Loveday’s (2016) research with working-class university students in the UK examines how the everyday judgements of classed and gendered embodiments (e.g. regional accents, signs of pregnancy, etc.) engendered feelings of shame among her participants, which then became part of daily affective practices. Loveday employed narrative-style interviews to document the complexity of her participants’ experiences, and this acknowledges the methodological limits of the interview for capturing the prereflexive, embodied dimensions of everyday life, and indeed the ‘hidden spaces’ of the private, the domestic and the ordinary. Wood (2014), on the other hand, employed explicitly ethnographic research techniques that brought the everyday into centre stage as the focus of inquiry (de Certeau 1984). In doing so, she is able to penetrate the taken-for-grantedness and apparent obscurity of regularised

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practices of marginalised groups. Reflecting on a study of youth citizenship, Wood (2014: 218) maintains that these approaches are important in ‘creat[ing] opportunities to attend to the everyday as a feature of the research, rather than viewing it as polluting or interfering’ the research encounter. Paraphrasing Hall, Lashua and Coffey (2008), Wood argues that this necessitate[s] an engagement with the nitty-gritty [through] a range of methodologies which ‘capture’ the everyday, [and recognise] that the prevailing tendency of much research is to ensure that the noisiness and unpredictability of the everyday are excluded. (215–16)

These examples suggest that the everyday ought to be elevated beyond being a seemingly boring and overlooked lens for enquiry to give it a rightful position as a fundamental tool for understanding, what de Certeau (1984) argues are our everyday practices, or our ‘ways of operating’, and that these knowledges should foreground understandings of daily life, rather than being considered ancillary to more extraordinary life events. This noisiness and unpredictability of the everyday emphasises the messiness of researching students’ everyday lives, particularly in terms of finding ways to elicit meaningful responses about everyday, banal behaviours. Ingram (2011) advocates the use of creative and arts based methods (such as plasticine modelling) to help think through the flexibility of identity and its relationship with the spaces of education. In a discussion of ‘live at home’ students interviewed as part of the Paired Peers project (a longitudinal research project that examined the experiences of students attending the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, UK, between 2010 and 2013), Abrahams and Ingram (2013) demonstrate how tactile and creative methodologies might enable students to describe their own relationships and connections to the different places and spaces they inhabit and seam together as part of their participation in higher education, making abstract discussions more tangible through creative endeavour. Making plasticine models can, of course, be a messy affair and in many ways a turn towards the everyday is a response to traditional, macro theories and approaches which generate ‘an overly passive and constrained view of the actor . . . failing to capture the complexity of the everyday world’ (Adler, Adler and Fontana 1987: 218). Several scholars have pushed back against this tendency to portray individual lives and choices in overly deterministic ways, highlighting in particular the ways that approaches to social research seek to turn mess into order (Law 2003). Indeed, as Law maintains, the methods which dominate

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the social sciences are ‘hopelessly bad’ at knowing and capturing mess and complexity, with some designed to repress the very possibility of mess as they try to make the world clean and neat (Law 2003: 3). In drawing this back to our everyday mobile belonging framework, Sinha and Back (2014) argue that everyday life is not only sanitised through traditional research tools, it is rendered fundamentally less sociable. As stated in the previous section, drawing the everyday into the research encounter (e.g. utilising everyday spaces to add different dimensions to participants’ responses) can create further complexity and messiness. Hence, finding a quiet place to conduct interviews can be a practical step taken to reduce background noise that often makes the clean transcription of a human voice captured on digital recorders more difficult. Sinha and Back (2014: 473–4) maintain that the problem with thinking of research approaches in this way is to render the everyday a sterile and clinical act that is ‘antithetical to the establishment of a genuine two-way dialogue’. Smart (2009) has written similarly on the need to keep the emotionality and richness of social life at the heart of approaches to researching the everyday. She argues that a much stronger and explicit focus on the everyday – of the ordinary and naturally occurring contexts  – can provide ways to avoid ‘flattening out’ the complexity of social experiences and achieve a more attentive and empathic research practice. Moreover, Stoller (2010: xv) suggests that it is necessary for research methods to capture the ‘sensuous body’, and to engage in ‘sensuous scholarship’ in which researchers ‘tack between the analytical and the sensible, in which embodied form as well as disembodied logic constitute scholarly argument’. Hence, we advocate for methods that allow us both to analyse and critique everyday engagements by investigating their various dynamic qualities which simultaneously anchor individuals to place, and provide opportunities to negotiate interactions in multiple spheres (e.g. home, work, university, family, social, etc.).

Multi-scalar student mobilities The earlier sections of this chapter have already hinted at the importance of movement and, of course, this book is concerned with everyday mobile belonging, so it is appropriate that we look to the ‘mobilities turn’ within the social sciences and the growing significance of ‘mobile methods’ (Sheller and Urry 2006; Hein, Evans and Jones 2008; Evans and Jones 2011; Merriman 2014). We have already

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indicated how individual experiences, when approached in particular ways and with ‘traditional’ techniques, can be removed from the places where social life takes place, losing sight of the power dynamics of the everyday. In a similar way, Fincham, McGuinness and Murray (2009) ask whether existing social scientific research methods – those that slow down and freeze experiences (the interview, the focus group, the survey) – can adequately capture mobile experiences, practices where the context of movement itself may be crucial to understanding the significance of the event to the participant, rather than being simply ‘read off ’ from the destination points and origins. (2)

For students who commute daily as part of their participation in higher education, mobility itself becomes central. Equally, for international students, and students who combine living away and living at home in regular and routines ways, sequential mobility is often integral to managing and maintaining participation, identity and feelings of belonging. This highlights the need to explore mobilities as multi-scalar and as relative to other mobilities, movements and moorings. There exists a large canon of academic work that has investigated students’ relative mobility practices, exploring the meta-mobilities through which students move between countries (Cairns 2015; Brooks and Waters 2009) or between regions (Duke-Williams 2009; Holdsworth 2009b) or through the smaller-scaled movements caught up in students’ daily routines (Chatterton 1999; Holdsworth 2009a). As will be discussed later in this chapter, these mobilities are, of course, time-bound and often contain variously scaled and iteratively negotiated movements between the home, the university, the workplace and the social life. Crucially, the point at which mobilities are present can often be overlooked in this type of research, meaning mobilities are caught in a particular place, context and time, being discussed as aspirational (Cairns 2009; 2015), or perhaps retrospectively as past experiences (King and Ruiz-Gelices 2003). Brooks and Waters (2009) have sought to mitigate this by adopting a comparative approach to investigating international student mobility, interviewing UK students with a propensity to study abroad and other graduates who had experienced time away. Their findings demonstrate the incongruities and relationships that exist between the imagined and material mobilities that constitute global circuits of education. Prazeres 2017) goes a step further by presenting a semi-longitudinal approach to interviewing her Canadian university students that focused interview encounters at three stages of mobility: pre-departure from home, in situ at the midpoint in the host country, and then again upon return to Canada. This staged approach

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allows for greater self-reflexivity among both participants and the researcher by encouraging discussion of how the extraordinary mobilities of moving between countries might influence interpretations of the smaller-scale, iterative and everyday movements attached to home and place-making. While the movements of students have been widely reported in academia, discussions of students while on the move, that is, being present during these mobilities has received comparatively less engagement. The mobile, or walking interview, while utilised in many fields has not been adopted so readily in student-centred research. It is here that we return to the where of methodology by incorporating the how and the why into this debate of mobile methods. Conceptually, this recognises how students’ everyday lives are affected by the process of ‘being in’ and ‘moving through’ locations both temporally and spatially (Büscher and Urry 2009). Here we argue that research with students can be enlivened through a consideration of how the act of movement might influence the elicitation of knowledge and potentially produce richly layered data related to the everyday, feelings of belonging and the performance of various identities. Along with Stevenson (2014), two of the studies within this book (see Holton and Riley 2014; Finn 2017) have employed student-centred mobile approaches, largely derived from Cresswell’s (2006a) idea of mobile place-construction whereby place-making becomes co-produced through the material, emotional and affective characteristics of walking through an environment and narrating that walk. This is more than simply experiencing place though, and accompanying participants through their journeys has the potential to challenge further our position as objective researchers whose knowledge and experience may be seen to guide participants through their narratives. Students are often the ‘experts’ of their own journeys – knowing the short-cuts, sharing expectations and irregularities  – and have the opportunity to take the lead in this process. Thus, as Stevenson (2014) evocatively states, by ‘learning at the elbow’ (6) of our research participants we become ‘sensory apprentices’, rather than simply being observers of narrated experiences. Research on student commuting is more limited and tends to focus on things such as the impact of journey time upon time spent at university, using quantitative methods (Kobus, Van Ommeren and Rietveld 2015), and transportation mode choice (Zhou 2012; Hu and Schneider 2015) rather than the lived experience and sensory/performative dimensions of the commute as it relates to belonging. There is, however, extensive research within geographical literature on commuting for employment and leisure mobilities. This body of literature reveals the value of visual and ethnographic research; for example, Edensor’s (2008) auto-ethnography of his commute to work, which includes

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photographs of a series of sites to which he is drawn on his daily journey to ‘highlight [the] inarticulate traces of a mundane, spectral Manchester’ (314). Edensor (2008: 314) explains how, [i]n focusing upon this regular commute rather than the central and spectacular sites of the city, I want to re-inscribe the significance of everyday urban space, that habitual realm within which most urban dwellers carry out quotidian practices associated with dwelling, working and leisure. I also want to emphasize the mundanity of haunting, which arises through both banal and spectacular processes of urban change and production of obsolescence.

Edensor’s focus on the interplay of the banal and the regular, with transformation and decline of place, offers a great deal to higher education researchers, particularly with regards to living at home students who may encounter  – or re-sense  – their home city as a changing and evolving place through their commuting practices. In addition to this, Bissell (2010) alerts us to the significance of commuting communities for everyday life and belonging. Based on semi-structured interviews with rail passengers in the UK, and combining extensive auto-ethnographic participatory observation, Bissell has important things to say about belonging on the move. Bissell describes his observations of collective atmospheres of passivity and coexistence as an integral aspect of daily railway travel and the ways commuters are able to feel part of something like a community. His ethnographic observations, and interviews that supplement this, allow him to tap into the ways belonging is cultivated through a complex negotiation of ‘the need to be part of a community, perhaps during the event of a delay, and the “surprise and satisfaction when relative independence from community is reaffirmed (Panelli and Welch 2005: 1608)” ’ (Bissell 2010: 285). Reiterating points raised in Chapter  3 then, we can see how this methodological approach reveals the commute to be far more than ‘dead time’ or simply a connecting space, devoid of meaning. Rather, it becomes recognisable as a highly significant socio-temporal space that has implications for passengers’ feelings of independence, community and belonging as they connect different domains of their lives.

Belonging, identity and representation When discussing approaches to researching the third arm of our everyday mobile belonging framework – belonging – things become a little more thorny, as there

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are many pitfalls involved in interpreting the question, ‘where do I belong?’ in research. May’s (2011; 2013) ground-breaking research in the field of belonging indicates the slippery nature of this concept and experience. She describes the misrepresentations, exclusions and self-segregations that contribute towards our categorisations, and siloing of identities that lead to the subsequent carving up of space and territory. Yet, capturing an understanding of such an abstract term as belonging is, at best, difficult particularly using traditional interview techniques (May and Muir 2013). For example, when Kember, Lee and Li (2001) employed face-to-face interviews with students undertaking a part-time distance learning programme, their questions, while focused specifically upon belonging, raised complex and tangled responses. This is because belonging is not a dichotomous experience (belonging/not belonging), but more a sliding scale of experiences which can be muddy, ambivalent and unresolved. Thus, very careful analysis of the data was required in their study. To mitigate this, other researchers in the field of belonging have taken to various creative methods, drawing upon storytelling, creative writing and focus groups as approaches through which to encourage participants to reflect on their interpretations of (not) belonging. We begin with May’s (2016b, 2017) use of the Mass Observation Project (based at the University of Sussex, UK, in its current form since 1981)  that invites a panel of around five hundred contributors to write about specific topics. As part of her research, May commissioned a piece on ‘(not) belonging’ as a way of drawing out the multidimensionality of the term in a more reflexive and self-critical way. What was most interesting about May’s findings was the ways in which her ‘participants’ expressed experiences of (not) belonging in their written accounts that would, perhaps, not have been so readily conveyed in a conventional interview, and in doing so emphasises the power of the projection of one-self into text through writing (May 2016b). In developing this notion of the self in the context of belonging we might argue that belonging captures the lived realities of longing and attachment and can often be viewed in conjunction with concepts relating to boundaries, borders, sense of place and identity. As we have discussed earlier, place is central to understanding how belonging is produced and experienced and it is in and through places that relational, cultural and other factors that produce belonging are negotiated and experienced. For example, Chow and Healey (2008) and Holton (2017a) have used place-based interviews conducted in their participants’ shared halls of residences to help develop a clearer understanding of how firstyear undergraduate students might make sense of their initial movements

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into university. In the case of Holton’s (2017a) University of Plymouth study, the morphological configuration of their private and shared spaces is seen to potentially foster different experiences of identity and belonging among sharers. Moreover, Moss and Richter (2010) employed a reflective log in their research of student halls, asking their participants to make reference to particular events in a diary in order to reveal the different time/space configurations of the student experience and how the morphology of halls disrupts interactions and belonging as there is no clear spatial organisation of the daily routines that are carried out. This emphasises how the ‘rubbing up against’ of newcomers against those with perceived ‘historical’ attachments (i.e. the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ student, or the ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ student) may problematise belonging, particularly in terms of the complexities of coupling the flexibility of mobility with the rigidity of belonging. Of course, not all research methods rely on human participants – or indeed the beloved interview – and place, mobility and belonging can be invoked and analysed in other ways. The places within universities can be captured through visual imagery, such as recruitment literature; through film; and through the (changing) plans and maps of campuses over time. For example, Magolda’s (2000) work on university prospectuses exposes the emphasis on how the ‘normal’ student experiences of university life may produce a sense of not belonging for those considered on the margins. Likewise, Holton’s (2016b) study of university accommodation websites highlights similar evocations that engender a homogenous ‘student experience’ that does not necessarily reflect the diversity of contemporary university life. Moreover, a focus on planning and design can tell us something, if not everything about students’ sense of belonging and placemaking, as Waite (2014: 74) reflects in his essay, ‘Reading Campus Landscapes’: There are two kinds of messages embodied in the landscape:  functional and symbolic messages. The functional messages can be as simple as a bench that communicates the functional message of ‘sit here’. A campus bike rack sends the functional message ‘park your bicycle here’. A symbolic message, on the other hand, transmits a message about institutional values and priorities. For instance, if a campus bicycle rack is located behind a building and adjacent to the garbage bin, it transmits a different symbolic message than if the bicycle rack is placed on the front of the building adjacent to the front entry. In both instances, the functional message is the same . . . But in the case of the bike rack by the garbage bin, the message is ‘neither you nor your bike are valued enough to place this rack at the front of the building’.

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Thus, it is not enough simply to reflect on the where of research – the research site as when interviewing students – but to interrogate the ways in which placemaking and belonging are made (im)possible for all students – those who cycle, those with caring commitments, those who do not drink alcohol, those with impaired mobilities – by the design and placing of activities and key nodes that support participation (see also Andersson, Sadgrove and Valentine 2012; Brooks, Byford and Sela 2015). Understanding the ideals of a university – whether it is entrepreneurial, engaged, ethical, useful (Benneworth, Charles and Madanipour 2010: 1615) – and how the shifting student body both connects to and shapes those ideals, can be understood through historical analysis of secondary data (see Benneworth 2014) that can help us to understand the evolution and changing spatial philosophy of universities. Moreover, we can build upon this notion of representation to include understandings of how vision and visuality develops our understandings of what is seen, along with how it is seen. As Rose (2016:  12) argues, ‘[images] enable us to understand the social relations in which visualities are embedded’. One such way that we can analyse people’s cognitive relationships with spaces are through maps and the reading of cartographic outputs. This practice has become an important way of understanding imaginations and interpretations of the world (Massey 1991). As suggested by MacFarlane (2010), in a Guardian newspaper review of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands and Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit, ‘maps seek to mark the world and fix its flux, but in doing so they also loosen it from its moorings’ (n.p.), highlighting that, whilst maps are an ostensibly rigid and objective medium, they contain agency and are imbued with memory that can transport participants ‘inside’ their two-dimensional framework to delve deep into experiences of place and of belonging. This follows Kitchen and Freundschuh’s (2000: 1) argument that cognitive mapping is ‘[concerned with] how we think about space, and how those thoughts are used and reflected in human spatial behaviour’, and researchers have employed various multifunctional approaches of talking/drawing/reflecting to encourage participants to think visually and critically about their practices by identifying relationships and contrasts in their behaviours and relating these to different socio-spatial contexts. In her work on ‘organisational cartographies’, Kate Carruthers Thomas (2016) has used this cartographic ‘storytelling’ approach to great effect to draw out various actors’ multiple, overlapping and sometimes contrasting representations of university life through the spaces that her participants expressed belonging. What these approaches remind us then is that we ought to be wary of the perceived neutrality of visual materials, particularly

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in terms of how a lens of representation ‘has challenged the idea of a single objective truth [by placing] emphasis on the partial, incomplete and contested nature of meaning’ (Nayak and Jeffrey 2011: 98).

Temporality and transition This final section acknowledges the importance of time and transition when considering approaches to studying higher education students. Time will be considered here in two ways  – first, through the passage of time and the liminalities associated with higher education as a time-bound process and second, using time as a method for capturing students’ experiences over time. This elucidates time as a slippery and complicated concept to approach in research design, requiring careful consideration with regard to when to research (too early and participants may not have had time to experience university, too late and they may slip through the other side into a post-student life) but also how to deal with time as a component of research itself (are responses captured in the moment or does a degree of self-reflexivity and/or future speculation need to be incorporated, and if so, how reliable is this?). Captured well though, time as a research lens can provide some exciting insight into the experiences of students’ everyday lives and articulate certain identities and experiences. As was outlined in Chapter  3, time is a fundamental component of our everyday mobile belonging framework as university life can be recognised as a liminal and finite experience. Existing research has approached this from different directions  – from planning and starting university (Hopkins 2006; Hinton 2011), to the considerations of post-student lifestyles (Holton 2017b) and the spaces in-between that express modes of everyday living for students (Chatterton 1999; Holdsworth 2006). Both Hinton (2011) and Hopkins (2006) have explored these aspirations to great effect using focus groups and workshop techniques that help tease out pre-students’ interpretations of the transition into and through university. Hopkins’s (2006 work in particular employed a participatory diagramming methodology to explore the motivations and aspirations of his young participants – providing flexibility in what was being produced and in how the participants might ‘work through’ the process of adapting and refining their diagram. Moving into the spaces of university themselves, Hollands (1995) adopted an ethnographic approach comprising semi-structured interviews and participant observation of over sixty ‘studentnights out’ in pubs in Newcastle, UK, to explore how students settled into their

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‘normal’ routines of social behaviour and how cultures and identities might adapt and develop over the course of the university degree. This emphasises, yet again, the importance of considering time and the passage of time in studentfocused research. More recently, Kraftl and Brown (2017) have outlined their ongoing work on ‘mis/fitting’  – an exercise designed to encourage final year students to reflect upon their experiences of university life and the relative ease and/or difficulty in performing identities at university by annotating a large ‘scroll’. This approach of collective annotation has garnered a degree of, what Kraftl and Brown (2017) have termed ‘cohortness’, through which students become galvanised in addressing, discussing and articulating certain identities and experiences. While these previous examples have pinpointed specific periods of the university life-course, they do ultimately remain snapshots that cannot adequately uncover knowledge of the passage of time involved in higher education. Qualitative Longitudinal Research (QLR)  – a method for illuminating the connections between past, present and future and how these different temporalities shape and become resources for personal narratives of selfhood  – goes some way towards ameliorating this. Pioneers of QLR, Rachel Thomson and colleagues (2014) have written extensively about the history, development and value of this temporally-focused research method, arguing that QLR ‘allow[s] for an empirical and analytic “scaling up” in order to understand micro-level changes and continuities across the life-course’ (Thomson et al. 2014: 2). Within the specific context of educational research, McLeod (2017) regards time as central to educational practice, arguing for its role of organising experiences of educations as well as the arrangement of institutional structures. This, she maintains, extends to much broader conceptions of ‘growing up’ and forming a sense of selfhood and identity ‘of becoming someone during or despite schooling’ (13) or as a result of more positive engagements with education. For McLeod (2017:  13) temporality is not offered as ‘a fancier word for time’, but as a concept, that signifies ‘the messy, moving relations between past, present and future’. Here McLeod reflects on the ways in which contemporary educational discourses tend to focus on orientations towards the future and to modes of social and individual improvement/progress. In her Making Futures (2016) project, McLeod employs a longitudinal and cross-generational study of secondary school students and their parents through which the experience and movement of time are central. Moreover, similarities exist with other studies of

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gender, generation and identity; for example, Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody’s (2001) longitudinal study of a group of girls from ages six to twenty-one, that examined the intersections of class and gender in shaping subjectivities and orientations to self, other and futures; Nielsen and Rudberg’s (1994) longitudinal and cross-generational comparison of three generations of Norwegian women’s accounts of navigating relationships, futures and education; and Henderson et  al.’s (2005) Inventing Adulthoods project that followed one hundred young adults for ten years. Thus, QLR as a method is viewed as an important means through which to investigate the complex and shifting experiences of identity, place attachment and belonging, particularly for young adults. Within the field of higher education research, longitudinal approaches have become more popular with studies like FutureTrack (see also the aforementioned Paired Peers project). FutureTrack is the most extensive investigation of the relationship between higher education and employment ever undertaken in the UK. Tracking students who entered universities in 2005/06, it has continued to provide robust and comprehensive data to clarify the socio-economic and educational variables that determine career decision-making, access to and use of career information. Paired Peers 2:  Moving On Up has taken this approach even further, tracking the same Paired Peers cohort into the next stages of careerbuilding and employment (in terms of class and gender differences, aspirations and approaches to career development) (see Bathmaker et al. 2016). Similarly, Allen’s (2016) longitudinal research illuminates the ways in which the lived realities of the education and labour market may have been further exaggerated by the financial crisis, particularly for women in their mid-twenties who participated in state-funded education and training oriented to careers within the performing arts and creative industries. The qualitative longitudinal methodology allows Allen to call into question the pervasive neo-liberal and post-feminist promises of ‘bright futures’ for aspirational young women, and examine how, in the context of uncertain education-to-work mobilities, these women are able to feel a sense of belonging to a version of the future that feels increasingly risky. The Paired Peers team locate the strength of their understandings of student experiences within the longitudinal design of the project, but reflect that such a study necessarily requires ‘enthusiasm and willingness to engage with a research project’ and people who are ‘prepared to spend time reflecting on their undergraduate experience as they progressed through [higher

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education]’ (Bathmaker et al. 2016: 29). Of course, not all students are willing or able to commit to research in this way and QLR is intensive in terms of time and resources. Another risk is to narrow the lens of temporality to the passage of time and the collision of temporalities over the duration and within the scale of a particular project. Longitudinal research is, by the nature of its design, typically future oriented – following people, events, communities and relationships, over time and into the future, waiting and watching a future unfold (McLeod 2017). Questions of temporality pertain to how research is done, not only to what is researched or to the themes and topics explored. In other words, temporality enters into research designs, practices and imaginaries, and, moreover, research methodologies mobilise intersecting temporalities (McLeod and Thomson 2009). For example, oral and life histories, while oriented towards the past, are also about how the past is remembered and remade in the present; ethnographic studies are putatively concerned with phenomena as they are happening, which end up being frozen in (research) time, representing a time that has passed yet more or less masquerades as the present.

Summary In summary, this chapter has examined the various approaches for investigating the experiences of higher education students’ everyday mobile belonging. By exploring methodologies that pertain directly to notions of place, everyday life, mobilities, belonging and time, we argue for the importance of critiquing applications of research design and practice in order to nurture new ways of knowing how university spaces are (co-)produced through everyday and exceptional movements, or to develop more nuanced understandings of how students from diverse backgrounds might position themselves at various scales, including the home, the university, the city and the nation. Moreover, in linking time, space and the everyday, we are able to think in terms of the rhythms that might constitute and make visible modes of belonging that live at home students invest in. In Chapter  5 we provide more detailed descriptions of the specific approaches we have employed and that have contributed towards our development of the everyday mobile belonging framework.

Researching Students’ Everyday Mobilities and Belonging

Box 2: Through this critical review of student-focused research approaches we recommend that researchers: ●

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●

●

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account for place in research design but also make appropriate attempts at (em)placing the research encounter in research practice and recognise how and why power and position might affect the research process and outcomes; incorporate the banality of everyday life into research while, ultimately ensuring that students’ lived experiences are accounted for and that the ‘messiness of students’ everyday lives are able to emerge during the research process but also become part of the analysis as well; talk to student about their mobility practices at appropriate points of their ‘mobility journeys’ to encourage reflexivity of how mobilities have affected (or may yet affect) the ‘student experience’. In doing so, researchers could also draw more effectively upon mobile methods when designing research with students to think more critically about the influence of journeys upon how everyday lives are portrayed; consider the role of identity and place in interpreting and conveying notions of (not) belonging and to think critically about representation and visuality in higher education research; and recognise the implications for time and liminality in the student experience and consider ways of drawing approaches that consider temporality into research design.

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5

Methodological Notes: Synthesising Our Research Approach

Introduction In this chapter, we provide methodological notes for each of the studies that inform our analysis and the discussion that follows in Part Three of the book. In the first three chapters we set out the patterns of student geographies in the UK and reflected on some of the problems inherent to much of the research around (im)mobilities that, crucially, has led to a particular theorisation of belonging and identity, transition and risk, and localism and place. In Chapter  4 we introduced a range of methodological challenges that stimulate opportunities for thinking otherwise about how we might best capture and represent belonging, mobility and identity. The methods employed in these cases paid particular attention to the spatio-temporal dimensions of students’ everyday experiences on the move, at home and within the liminoid, in-between and bounded spaces of the university. It is appropriate at this point, then, to situate our own research within this canon and provide some details about the studies that inform the analysis and discussion that follows. Three UK-based studies have been drawn together in this collective endeavour to re-theorise and re-enliven student mobilities research. All three characterise the complexity of everyday mobile belonging for living at home students, albeit in specific and contrasting ways. The sections below introduce the topic and context of each study, briefly outline the sample, location and methods used and how these reflect the methodological themes and the everyday mobile belonging framework outlined in previous chapters.

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Study One: Investigating students’ sense of place in Portsmouth, UK The first study investigates how undergraduate students participating at the University of Portsmouth, UK, negotiate place and mobility within their termtime location. With its strong focus on the complexities of managing multiple and contrasting mobile identities, this mixed-method approach – comprising a web-based survey and walking interviews – is closely aligned with our everyday mobile belonging framework. In particular, Study One unpacks some of the dominant categorisations of students, examining more critically the privileging of certain mobilities over others, and the ‘rubbing up against’ of traditional and non-traditional students in term-time and non-university spaces. Portsmouth as a research location characterises the complexity of living at home students’ experiences of university life very well. Portsmouth is a medium-sized city situated on the south coast of England. It is the UK’s only island city and thrives on its strong historic naval and maritime image. As an island, it has excellent but limited transport links that draw students from across Southern England into the city. While many of the Portsmouth participants made, on average, a 40-kilometre round trip to university, this journey did not distract from them identifying as ‘local’ students and these mobile identities will be unpacked in detail across the chapters in Part Three. The University of Portsmouth was established as part of the ‘post-1992’ initiative and currently sits in the middle of the academic league tables (although it is one of the top modern institutions).

Web-based survey This first phase of data collection is analysed in Chapter  6 by way of reinterpreting the more heterogeneous dimensions of term-time living. This mixture of quantitative and qualitative data provides a broad overview of the Portsmouth cohort for 2011/12 and in doing so offers an opportunity to rethink how we might consider the mobilities of undergraduate students beyond simplistic categorisations. A  web-based survey was disseminated among the entire undergraduate cohort of the university in the spring of 2012 and was distributed using departmental managers as gatekeepers. Respondents were asked a series of closed and open questions based around their experiences of university life, themed around accommodation, social practices and learning experiences. It was important here to ensure that a range of quantitative and

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qualitative responses were gleaned from this survey to assist with developing broader patterns from the cohort as well as more detailed information about the respondents’ experiences of university life. There was a strong emphasis in the survey upon the transition into university life that relates closely to the everyday mobile belonging framework outlined in Chapter 3. Questions relating to the respondents’ familial histories of higher education as well as their trajectories into university and motivations for choosing to go to university align with our desire to examine the multidimensionality of the student experience and to unpack the everyday mobilities of students more critically. A total of 1,147 valid responses were collected, constituting roughly 6 per cent of the 2011/12 undergraduate cohort (University of Portsmouth 2012). The respondent sample varies by gender: 60 per cent female, 40 per cent male, differing slightly from the student gender balance reported by the institution of 45 per cent female and 55 per cent male (2012a). Most respondents were aged twenty-one or under (78 per cent), but year of study was evenly represented: first year (35 per cent); second year (32 per cent); and third year (32 per cent). The sample was predominantly White (82 per cent) and comprised of British citizens (86 per cent) with the remaining 13 per cent1 from overseas (6 per cent from the European Union (EU) and 7 per cent from outside of the EU). These figures are similar to the officially reported University of Portsmouth data (87 per cent of students from the UK and EU and 13 per cent from outside of the EU (University of Portsmouth 2012)). Seventy-eight per cent of respondents stated they lived in student accommodation (comprising halls of residences and privately rented student housing) while 22 per cent stated that they lived either in their own home or with their parents. Finally, in keeping with this representation of a ‘young’ student cohort, 67 per cent of the sample had gone straight to university from school or college and 64 per cent were the first in their family to attend university, not untypical for post-1992 institutions like the University of Portsmouth (Patiniotis and Holdsworth 2005). Data were coded and analysed using the statistical package SPSS and the results were explored using descriptive and inferential statistical techniques. To ensure the analysis was linked to notions of mobility, the data were compared according to the students’ accommodation type. The rationale for this was to use accommodation type as a mechanism for intersecting the binaries of mobility and locality that we have discussed so far in this book. As the analysis 1

1 per cent missing data.

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in Chapter 6 will attest to, it is anticipated in the literature that those living in student accommodation are likely to have very different experiences to those living at home – particularly in terms of their everyday mobilities and senses of belonging. Respondents were asked to select one of four accommodation types – halls of residence, rented student property, living with parents or living in own home (for the purpose of this analysis the halls of residence and rented student property variables have been recoded into a single ‘student accommodation’ variable). These accommodation types were therefore made the dependent variables through which other independent variables could be tested. These included gender, age, ethnicity, family history of higher education and whether students went straight to university. These variables provide a profile of the students most likely to belong to each accommodation type. Alongside this, other independent variables were included to examine the motivations for going to university for the sample. These included: to gain a student experience and/or qualifications, to attend an institution close to home, as well as the key agents in making decisions to attend the University of Portsmouth. Alongside these quantitative profiles, qualitative responses were also gleaned from the survey. These were based around the question: What made you decide to choose the University of Portsmouth? This question, while specific to the institution, provided plenty of exciting responses that relate directly to notions of everyday mobile belonging. Hence, while this method might not reflect the more innovative approaches to mobile research advocated in Chapter 4, it is used in Study One to expose the differential (im)mobilities of students at the University of Portsmouth.

Walking interviews The second dataset of Study One is entirely qualitative and features in Chapters 7 to 9 alongside the data from Study Two to explore how everyday mobile belonging is performed and understood by living at home students. This phase of the data collection was conducted during the spring/summer of 2012 and comprised thirty-one walking interviews with undergraduate students recruited from the web-based survey. These students were asked to take part in a selfguided ‘walking tour’ of Portsmouth and were encouraged to consider their experiences of the city and how they might relate to different aspects of it. These walking encounters were essential in understanding how everyday practices are performed and their mobile, ‘place-based’ qualities certainly enhanced the elicitation of knowledge within the research. Anderson (2004), for example,

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suggests that much value can be derived from elevating the geographical context of interview locations above that of being an inert background, meaning place can simultaneously facilitate actions and be a product of actions. Hence, walking encounters can usefully produce knowledges of life histories (Riley 2010); everyday spaces (Kusenbach 2003; Porter et al. 2010); and ‘senses’ of place (Reed 2002). In keeping with the themes of everyday mobilities, the participants had full autonomy over the destinations they chose to visit and the routes taken. These included places where they socialised with friends, shopped, ate out or studied with colleagues; as well as some of Portsmouth’s popular tourist spots and communal spaces, such as the seafront, Southsea Common and the local parks. This aligns with Elwood and Martin (2000) who advocate interview sites as more than just convenient places. Moreover, referring back to the tradition of knowledge co-creation and participant-led research outlined in Chapter 4, the students were also given control of the voice recorder and were invited to take photographs, should they wish. Each walking interview lasted between 1 and 1.5 hours, with regular pauses for reflection. In profiling the sample, the participants were primarily young (68 per cent were twenty-one years old or under), female (65 per cent), white (90 per cent) and British (90 per cent). While this does not by any means constitute an evenly represented dataset, the distribution here does compare closely with the results from the survey. There is a continuation here with the distribution of students from within each residential group with a definite leaning towards students living in more traditional student accommodation (58 per cent) with the remaining 42 per cent living at home. It is important to note that the participants rarely resided in the same accommodation year on year, suggesting a great deal of heterogeneity in how students transition through university. For the purposes of this book and for advancing our everyday mobile belonging framework, we acknowledge the sub-sample of the dataset that privileges the experiences of the thirteen living at home participants who lived with parents or in their own homes and who had a diverse range of university and non-university commitments. As with the main dataset, this sample is predominantly female (n = 10) and White British (12), however, six of the participants were over twenty-two years of age. Eight participants were living with their parents; five were living in their own homes with partners, spouses and/or children. Only three of the participants lived in Portsmouth, while ten lived in towns and villages between 13 and 33 km away. Discussions of the different scales of mobility became prominent themes of discussion as the students walked around Portsmouth. Preliminary coding uncovered five dominant themes: ‘the home’, ‘going out’, ‘everyday spaces’,

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‘connections with space’ and ‘the university’. These were all primarily couched in terms of the participants’ experiences of everyday mobility and belonging. For example, for those who had moved away from home the interrelationship between home and university was very powerful and prompted them to discuss their experiences of mobility in conjunction with the spaces in which they had developed connections while at university. Conversely, those living with parents or in their own homes spoke reflexively during their walking interviews about how their attachments to the city had adapted over the duration of their degrees and what influence this had over their mobilities. These contrasts reveal important new dimensions about how living at home students’ experiences can be dynamic, rather than second-best experiences that are negotiated and performed in multiple ways. The implementation of creative coding and a more iterative data analysis technique therefore assisted in enabling a visual interpretation of the transcribed data as well as allowing the analysis of the data to remain in place and more importantly retain the context and integrity of the interviews themselves.

Study Two: Examining everyday student mobilities in Lancaster, UK There are strong methodological connections between the walking interviews conducted for the Portsmouth project and Study Two and these complimentary datasets have been brought together for the purposes of Chapters  7 and 8. Funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), Study Two explored the lived emotional and sensory experiences of living at home students attending Lancaster University, UK. This study focused specifically on how belonging and well-being are cultivated, or indeed hindered, by the act of commuting and the extent to which commuting works with or against some of the goals related to sustainability than most universities must sign up. ‘Sustainability’ is understood here as social, economic and environmental; thus, in focusing on this concept Study Two considered the relationship between living at home and cost-saving initiatives for individual students and their families; institutional approaches to widening participation and their obligations towards the local communities in which they are embedded; and the possible tensions between institutional environmental strategies (‘green initiatives’) and their commitment to attracting students from under-represented groups (i.e. those most likely to live at home).

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The focus on everyday lived experiences is closely aligned with the framework advanced in Chapter  3; the project was driven by the aim of capturing the elusive or pre-reflective aspects of studenthood, and the range of embodied and emotional practices that constitute or work against feelings of belonging in higher education, and that inform deeply ingrained attitudes towards travel and mobilities. In 2016, when the year-long study was undertaken, HESA recorded a growing number of students living at home, a point highlighted in Chapter 1. The aim of the Everyday Student Mobilities Project has been to foreground these often-marginalised experiences and reimagine concepts of belonging so that a broader range of students have access to this apparently essential experience. The study was structured around four research questions. First, it asked what challenges, tensions and opportunities living at home students experience, with particular focus on their travel and mobility practices. Second, the research considered how living at home students’ experiences of everyday (im)mobility impacts their sense of personhood, emotional well-being and attitudes towards sustainable practices (such as the personal and environmental costs of car use; cycling and so on). Next, it sought to understand what the institution, Lancaster University in the North West of England, is doing to recognise and respond to live-at-home students’ diverse experiences and needs. Finally, the study evaluated the relationship between university-wide approaches to student inclusion and initiatives that seek to promote and encourage sustainable behaviours among students. It is the data which relate to students’ emotional, sensory and embodied experiences of travel and mobility that are drawn upon here; however, as shall become clear, there is a close relationship between feelings of belonging and travel practices, such as independent car use, cycling and walking. Lancaster University is a plate-glass institution, built in the 1960s under the directive to create a learning community emulating the residential ideal of Oxford and Cambridge. Thus, Lancaster operates a college system – like others such as Durham, York and Kent – whereby students are assigned to one of nine colleges when they enrol, and these determine where students live (i.e. in halls of residences) and with which cohort they eventually graduate. In Chapter  1 we reflected on the increasing internationalisation of universities, the more general growth in student numbers, and the increasing privatisation of funding onto the student themselves, and this has undoubtedly challenged the spatial boundaries of Lancaster’s closed campus. Thus, the residential ideal from which the university originated has changed somewhat and many students live both in the city itself (5 km from campus) or remain in their home region and commute to university. Lancaster has good mainline rail links and is located on the side

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of the M6 motorway that connects North and South. As a highly ranked but relatively young institution, Lancaster attracts a diverse range of students, many of whom belong to the ‘non-traditional’ category that we describe and discuss in Part One; they are located within the local coastal region, within the more rural parts of Cumbria, and the conurbations around Preston and West Lancashire. Around 90 per cent of entrants come from state schools and colleges with 26 per cent coming from the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS SEC) 4–7, which includes small employers, lower supervisory and technical occupations and semi-routine/routine occupations. Participating students self-identified as ‘commuters’; that is, they felt they had not engaged in traditional forms of residential relocation to attend university, however, they did not necessarily regard themselves as local. This demonstrates the unhelpfulness of oppositional binary categories in exploring living at home students’ experiences of university life, reinforcing our earlier arguments. A  total of thirty-five students were recruited which resulted in twenty-one interviews. The interview sample included fifteen undergraduate and six postgraduate students, of which eight were young (under twenty-one years old) and thirteen mature. The majority were female (sixteen) and White British (sixteen). A significant number of participants were studying Law and Social Science programmes but overall, students in the study represent a broad range of disciplines, including mathematics, natural sciences and arts. Only four participants lived within the city of Lancaster. The remaining participants were located around the North-West region; with eight participants living over 50 km away from the university campus. Seven participants said they were living with parents, others were co-habiting with a partner and/or family (ten) or friends (one), and three were living alone. As with Study One, the project involved a range of research techniques collectively understood as ‘mobile methods’ (Buscher, Urry and Witchger 2011). Go-along, in situ and campus walking interviews (depending upon participants’ needs, preferences and mode of transport). Interviews lasted between thirty minutes and two hours, again being contingent on the types of journeys participants had to make to engage with university. Often these involved combination mobilities (bus-train-walk), revealing the complex transitions and negotiations that underpin live at home students’ experiences. There was also, inevitably, periods of stillness, waiting, immobility and liminal spaces. There are parallels here, then, with Study One, in terms of capturing those in-between spaces that may appear as ‘dead’ spaces/times but are in fact intrinsic to students’ everyday mobile belonging. To further elucidate these moments, students were

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encouraged to take part in participatory visual research in which they shared images of their journeys and experiences to the project’s Instagram page. This was followed up by an informal end of project feedback event with participants and representatives from Lancaster University including staff from the university travel team, mental health and student services and the Provost for Student Experiences, Colleges and the Library. Data from this study was analysed using a rhythmanalytic approach; that is, during the interviews and in subsequent work with transcripts, the aim was to identify the multiple and overlapping rhythms which participants both encountered and actively created/maintained/resisted as they moved in, around and through the university and in their reflections on what it meant to belong there. As with Study One, this way of coding allowed the data to remain within the spatio-temporal contexts in which it emerged, rather than ‘cutting it up’ into themes that sit neatly on the page but abstract the experience of movement and rhythm-making. Moreover, again as with Study One, a rhythmanalytic-inspired approach makes it possible to see belonging through the commute as a dynamic, rather than second-best experience.

Study Three: Expectation and everyday relationships – before, during and after university If the previously outlined studies privilege space, physical movements and attachments to different place locations, then Study Three can be understood as picking up on the themes of temporality and how relational positionings shift and change over time for students, particularly as the binaries of home/ university and student/graduate become increasingly unstable at different transitional moments. Study Three is a seven-year qualitative longitudinal methodology (2006–13), undertaken with twenty-four female students as they moved into higher education in the UK, and later transitioned into graduate employment. Its design emerges out of the concerns set out in Chapter 4 around changing contexts and time, and is informed by many of the studies of youthful and student transitions that we discuss in that part of the book. Unlike the other studies, this project involves students who participated in university before the Browne Review of 2010; they paid lower fees and, thus, the neoliberal discourses linking higher education and self-investment were perhaps not as pervasive as they are today. Notwithstanding, the women in the study graduated in midst of the global financial crisis of 2008/9 and their first years as newly graduated

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knowledge workers were lived out against the backdrop of high graduate unemployment (8.9  percent),2 a housing crisis in the UK, and low levels of economic confidence. As with the quantitative data from Study One, we thus include this study here because of the ways in which it helps us to theorise the onward mobilities of graduates (although this suggests a linearity we try to challenge here). By placing higher education mobilities in a longer-term context, we can start to see university-related mobility as part of broader patterns and performances of movement and stasis that shape, and are shaped by, shifting notions of success, the life-course and careers. This helps us to challenge the binary categories that we outlined in Part One. Notwithstanding the emphasis on the temporal dimensions of student and graduate identities and belonging, Study Three also foregrounds place insofar as it is a locality study, with all twenty-four participants originating from the same town in North-West England, ‘Millthorne’.3 Even though the women attended universities on the south coast of England, London, the Midlands and Scotland, they ostensibly began their transition into higher education from the same place: a former mill town, known for its complex social problems related to deprivation and deindustrialisation, but with a strong working-class identity. This meant that for some participants, university offered a chance to escape Millthorne and shake off its class-based associations, an experience others have noted elsewhere (Reay and Lucey 2000). However, this desire to disentangle oneself – to no longer belong – was mostly experienced as messy and uneven, particularly following graduation, as Chapter 9 discusses. In terms of our focus on living at home students, this third study had only four participants who identified as such, and all four women were of South Asian heritage. Notwithstanding, within the broader sample there was a clear preference for institutions within the region (North/North West) and the women exhibited highly structured mobilities that connected home and university on a daily and weekly basis. Only a small number of women engaged in the kinds of semi-permanent de-location we discussed previously in this volume. Moreover, the women in this study were, by the fourth phase of the longitudinal research, experiencing new ways of living at home as post-students, a process that brought its own complexities to reconciling everyday mobile belonging that, in many ways, revealed parallels with the undergraduate circumstances discussed in the other two studies. These complex relationships with home and university – and

2 3

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11652845. The study location has been given a pseudonym.

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the family, friends and other close personal ties who were located in these spaces – were explored during in-depth qualitative interviews conducted over four temporal phases. The first three stages of the study were conducted over a fifteen-month period during which the women were anticipating, experiencing and completing their first year of study. The first interviews took place prior to the beginning of the first year of study, most often within the women’s homes in Millthorne. The second interviews were conducted during the first Christmas holiday in 2006/7, often in a café or public space in Millthorne or in university locations, as the content of the interviews became too personal or sensitive and ties to home more complex. Finally, the third stage of interviews were conducted in the summer months at the end of the women’s first year of university, again in locations that suited and reflected the changes that had taken place in their lives during the course of the year. Five years later in 2012, funding was secured to conduct a fourth phase of interviews, revisiting ten of the original twenty-four participants as they navigated the uncertain waters of their new post-university, post-financial crisis context. Interestingly for our focus on graduates, as Chapter 9 explains, in the two years since graduating eight of the ten women had engaged in return mobilities, living at home with family for shorter and more extended periods, revealing this practice to be as significant for university leavers as for those entering higher education. The interviews with women graduates were emotionally charged, revealing complex narratives of (not) belonging, fractured identities, ambivalent relationships and tricky (and sticky) interdependencies within the women’s family networks. Hence, this methodology, which yields seven years of in-depth reflection and interrogation, enables us to unpack the interconnections of geographical, social and temporal mobilities engendered by the transition to university and graduate employment. Analysing qualitative longitudinal data is difficult and, at times, all encompassing. The first three stages of fieldwork were undertaken as part of a doctoral study and the emphasis was on the personal lives of the women  – their relationships with family, friends, partners, housemates and sexual partners  – as this kind of detail about women’s wider everyday connections during university were absent from the literature (Finn 2015). However, this focus necessarily entailed a focus on risk and belonging, fitting in and standing out, and the temporal dimensions of selfhood. Cross-sectional analysis is useful in qualitative research; however, in longitudinal studies this kind of thematic approach is benefited by the development of individual case stories that prevent participants from simply being ‘cut up’ to illustrate ‘findings’ (Thomson 2007).

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As Thomson (2007) has argued, the purpose of qualitative longitudinal research is to understand the richness of temporality, particularly in relation to identity work. Thus, formulating case histories ‘provide[s] a compelling account of the individual, of how and why events unfolded as they did and of the transformation of the individual over time’ (574). These case stories were especially useful – and indeed more manageable – for making sense of the fourth stage of fieldwork interviews, as standalone narratives but also in the context of what participants had shared previously. These data have been re-visited and re-analysed in the writing of this book in order to develop our framework of everyday mobile belonging so that ‘students’ are not theorised in isolation from the graduates they imagine themselves becoming, and graduates understood as a class constructed in the context of the changing notion of what it is to be a student.

Summary This chapter has provided important methodological notes relating to the three studies that we draw upon in our analytical discussion in Part Three of the book. The studies outlined here generated rich, empirical data, and were conceived with the issues of mobility, temporality and experiences of space and place at the heart of the design. While they exist independently of one another, and employ different methods for eliciting and analysing data, they have been brought together in this book to allow us to develop our everyday mobile belonging framework which offers new insights into the ways in which live at home students and recent graduates negotiate different performances of belonging through time and space.

Part Three

Empirical Explorations: Students on the Move in the UK

6

Disassembling the Binaries? Characterising the Heterogeneous Living at Home Student

Introduction In this chapter we now put the everyday mobile belonging framework to use, to unpack the monolithic binaries discussed in Chapters  2 and 3 that have sought to categorise higher education students and their (im)mobilities. As we will argue, these binaries (traditional/non-traditional, mobile/immobile, local/ non-local) merely serve to stereotype and stigmatise living at home students as fixed, inexperienced and ultimately, at a disadvantage when it comes to feeling a sense of belonging. Starting from the point at which students enter into higher education, this chapter examines the social and geographical mobilities that are attached to students commencing university. Through a critical discussion of these binaries, this chapter will draw upon the findings from the University of Portsmouth survey (outlined in Chapter  5) to examine the characteristics of students’ transitions into university, their prior experiences of higher education and how this affects their motivations for choosing to stay at, or leave, home. This analysis explores the various education trajectories – such as experiences, motivations, expectations – and locations – including accommodation, campus spaces and non-student spaces  – as well as demographics to unpack these characteristics. To achieve this, we first examine the quantitative data to explore the divisions between the ‘student accommodation’ and ‘living at home’ pathways; following this, we then scrutinise the living at home pathways in greater detail to reveal some of the relationships and differences within this cohort. Having set these differences out, next we turn to the qualitative responses to unpack notions of mobility and belonging among the sample and how this may shape living at home students’ experiences of higher education. Finally, in drawing these findings together we set out to achieve, not simply a replacement of one set of

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binaries with another, but an understanding of the fluidity of, and the ‘bleeding’ between, these categories and how, by critically examining these categories we might allow a more heterogeneous ‘student’ to emerge.

Typical versus non-typical pathways It is important to first unpack the broader characteristics of the University of Portsmouth student sample as a way to reveal the unhelpfulness of employing oppositional binary categories when examining living at home students’ experiences of university life. Here we focus upon the demographic features of the sample and their motivations for going to university. This helps us to understand some of the relationships and differences between those following two different mobility pathways – ‘living in student accommodation’ (the more typical route) or ‘living at home’ (the perceived less-typical pathway)  – in order to get a sense of the ‘type(s)’ of students attending university. Figure  1 reveals some interesting variances between the two different accommodation pathways in terms of demographics. In general, those students living in student accommodation were young (86 per cent), white (82 per cent) and male (64 per cent). They had mostly transferred straight into higher education from school or college (72 per cent) and had some form of familial understanding of higher education (68 per cent). Of this sub-sample, 64 per cent reported having a parent with a degree and 68 per cent having a sibling who had attended university.1 This follows the suggestion that access to knowledge of the mechanics of higher education is a key driver behind how students experience their time at university and can be highly influential in the smooth, and as the data later demonstrates, fairly seamless, transition into higher education (Leese 2010; Mangan, Hughes, Davies and Slack 2010). When examining the characteristics of the living at home pathway, the respondents within the sample shared some features with the student accommodation route in that they were primarily white (85 per cent), but in relation to the more typical pathway, these participants were more likely to be female (67 per cent). These students were not necessarily young (only 50 per cent were under the age of twenty-one) and they were less likely than their more traditional peers to have attended university straight from school or college (50 per cent). Most strikingly though, these students were less than half as likely to 1

In some instances the respondents stated both parents and siblings.

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86

Age (under 21)

50 82

Ethnicity (white)

85 46

Gender (female)

67 68

Family history of ŚŝŐŚĞƌĞĚƵĐĂƟŽŶ

29 72

Straight into ŚŝŐŚĞƌĞĚƵĐĂƟŽŶ

50 67

Student experience

26 89

Gain qualiĮĐaƟons

86 47

Parent decision

25 47

School decision

27 57 55

Own decision 27

Close to home

71 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Percentage Student accommodaƟon

Living at home

Figure  1 Percentages of respondents living either in student accommodation or at home according to their demographic profile and motivations for attending university. Source: Author’s own data

have had previous familial experience of university (29 per cent) than their more typical counterparts. Of this, fewer reported their parent(s) having attended university (55 per cent), although 72 per cent had a sibling who had a degree. This is particularly interesting when comparing these figures to European contexts of familial higher education (HE) legacies. The EUROSTUDENT VI (2018) study, for example, depicts this differently with a cross-country average of 45 per cent of first-generation students living with parents, compared to 47 per cent not living with parents. While these categories are ostensibly different to those within our analysis we can still confidently infer the UK context to differ to other international modes of approaching university. Hence, this accords with much of the literature that suggests that living at home students are more likely to be first-generation attendees with little or no experience of higher education (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003; Patiniotis and Holdsworth 2005; Christie

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2007). Yet, these familial characteristics indicate the potential for a shift in generational knowledge from a more linear/vertical parent–child transmission of higher education experience to include more horizontal sibling-to-sibling relations (Heath, Fuller and Johnston 2010). Something that has been mostly neglected in higher education research on family influences/capital. In terms of the motivations for attending university, those living in student accommodation stated that gaining a good degree (89 per cent) and having a ‘student experience’2 (67 per cent) were primary drivers for attending university. While gaining a qualification was comparably important for living at home students (86 per cent), these respondents were almost two-thirds less likely than their more typical peers to be motivated by having a ‘student experience’ (26 per cent). This adds further weight to the associations between social activities and going away to university discussed earlier in this book (Chatterton 1999; Holdsworth 2009a; Holton 2017b). Linked to these motivations were three decision-making variables. The first and second of these related to the influence of families and of schools and colleges over whether to go to university, while the third captured instances where respondents felt that neither their families nor institutions had a great deal of influence over decisions to go to university. There were similarities here between how the participants responded to these questions in terms of the parental and school influences with 47 per cent of those living in student accommodation being influenced by their parents or their school/college. This dropped to 25 per cent and 27 per cent respectively for those living at home suggesting other factors might also be influential in these students’ motivations for attending university. This supports Hopkins’s (2006) argument that, for many non-traditional students, their knowledge of the practicalities of university life (finances, debt, workload, accommodation, exams, etc.) can be extremely fragmented, meaning they can often end up picking up information along the way, even after they have enrolled on a degree programme. It is worth drawing attention here to the higher percentage across both pathways for choosing the ‘own decision’ category (57 per cent for those living in student accommodation and 55 per cent for those living at home). In advancing Hopkins’s (2006) suggestion, this implies that there may be some greater complexity in the composition of this sample in terms of previous familial experiences of going to university. Here we may infer that some of these respondents were exercising certain amounts of agency in their decisions. Yet,

2

For the purpose of the survey, a ‘student experience’ meant being interested in student-centric social activities such as clubbing, student societies, etc. (Chatterton 1999; Holdsworth 2006; Hubbard 2013).

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while this level of agency may be anticipated in the living at home category – with perhaps higher levels of older students that have experienced gaps between compulsory and tertiary education – we may also be witnessing greater numbers of young adults approaching higher education from families (or schools) whose ‘education biographies’ mean they may be unable to give appropriate advice about making successful transitions into university life. Finally, when considering the motivations for attending the University of Portsmouth there were, again, some interesting contrasts in the different pathways. Crucial to our everyday mobile belonging framework is the notion of mobility, and those living at home appear to choose the university because of its close(r) proximity (71 per cent) as opposed to those living in student accommodation who were far less likely to want to be close to university (27 per cent)  – although, as the qualitative responses will demonstrate later, this may not always necessarily be the case. While these relative (im)mobilities may not sound surprising at this stage of the analysis – particularly once the living arrangements of these respondents have been factored in  – acknowledging distance and proximity in this investigation uncovers some incongruities and implications for accepting notions of (im)mobility as a primary impetus for students in transitioning into and through university (Holdsworth 2009b; Christie 2007).

Unpacking the ‘living at home’ pathway Though, as we say, many of the differences between these pathways may appear unremarkable at first, Figure 2 reveals some deeper intricacies in the responses once we begin to disassemble the ‘living at home’ route into those ‘living at home with parents’ and those ‘living in their own homes’. While Reay, Crozier and Clayton (2010), Leese (2010) and Mangan, Hughes, Davies and Slack (2010) have sought to problematise claims that all students follow a linear, normative pathway through university, we go further to argue here that the characteristics of the non-traditional student take on new dimensions and indicate there is much more complexity to the term ‘living at home’ than much of the literature suggests. The differences within the living at home pathways were starkest in terms of age, with 75 per cent of those living with parents being under twentyone years of age and 27 per cent living in their own homes  – indicating that those living with parents might share similarities with those taking a more typical pathway (Hinton 2011). While there were no significant deviations in

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86

Age (under 21)

75 27 82

Ethnicity (white)

88 82 46

Gender (female)

64 70 68

Family history of ŚŝŐŚĞƌĞĚƵĐĂƟŽŶ

24 34 72

Straight into ŚŝŐŚĞƌĞĚƵĐĂƟŽŶ

75 25 67

Student experience

31 21 89

Gain qualiĮĐaƟons

84 85 47

Parent decision

34 18 47

School decision

35 20 57 57

Own decision 53 27

Close to home

77 66 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Percentage Student accommodaƟon

With Parents

Own Home

Figure  2 Percentages of respondents living either in student accommodation, with parents or in their own homes according to their demographic profile and motivations for attending university. Source: Author’s own data

ethnicity between the categories, the sample was markedly uneven in terms of gender, with a far greater likelihood that the students in this sample would be female if they were living at home (67 per cent) than those living in student accommodation (46 per cent), and this increased further still to 70 per cent for those students living in their own homes. These figures follow broader trends of student mobility that suggest that while local study is increasing in general, there is a greater propensity for this among women more than men (McClelland and Gandy 2012). In addition, there are also noteworthy differences between the familial knowledge of higher education within the sample. Within the student accommodation category, 68 per cent of participants stated having a family member with a degree. This was markedly lower for both living at home

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categories, particularly for those living with parents, of which only 24 per cent reported having a family member with a degree. That said, when examining the route into university, 75 per cent of those living with parents had entered university straight from school or college as opposed to 25 per cent of those living in their own homes. Once again, this may be unsurprising given the age difference between these two categories (52 per cent of the students living in their own home had reported a gap of five years or more between secondary and tertiary education, as opposed to only 3 per cent of those living with parents); however, in unpacking the living at home pathways, our analysis reinforces the claim that the links are stronger between the typical accommodation route and the experiences of students living with parents among this cohort. This tells us that it is problematic to assume clear distinctions between these categories, or that students will ‘neatly fit’ into the living at home or student accommodation pathways when they approach university. Indeed, institutions and policymakers need to understand the diversity of their cohorts – particularly of those living at home – in order to provide a university experience that is more bespoke to an increasingly manifold set of needs. When examining the motivations for going to university the variables ‘student experience’ (living with parents – 31 per cent and living in own home – 21 per cent) and ‘gain qualifications’ (84 per cent/85 per cent) both share similarities with the previous analysis. Yet, in terms of the three decision-making categories, while there are similarities in the ‘own decision’ category (57 per cent/53 per cent), those living with parents appear much likelier to have been influenced by their parents (34 per cent) and/or their school (35 per cent) in their choice of institution than those living in their own homes (18 per cent and 20 per cent respectively). This alludes to Reay, Crozier and Clayton’s (2010: 111) notion of an ‘institutional effect’ in decisions to go to university. They argue that this effect is a semi-autonomous means by which class processes are played out in the higher education experiences of students, and provides the parameter of possibilities in terms of identity work and the range of learner identities.

Consequently, this means that students entering into higher education may calculate certain familiarities and risks that are likely to affect their experiences of university life and for younger students may mirror prior educational pathways of parents. So, what might we infer from these results? From a brief overview of the survey sample, it could at first be implied that the binary of student accommodation and living at home fit the expected characteristics of the

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respondents well. Those taking student accommodation routes appear to be predominantly young, knowledgeable of higher education and residentially mobile, whilst their counterparts living at home are comparatively older, less experienced in the processes associated with higher education and their experiences and prospects appear to be shaped by their relative residential stasis. This highlights many of the oppositional features of ‘going’ to university for these students and captures the different mobilities (both geographical and social) that comprise many students’ divergent educational pathways. Yet, is it enough to label students in this way – as relational beings who are (dis)advantaged by their residential circumstances? To problematise this relationality, we further disassemble these modes of approaching university to reveal additional layers of intricacies to the living at home pathway. We argue that, in doing so, we can accentuate the complexity involved in living at home during study, and how this produces different passages and trajectories for living at home students that are more heterogeneous and emphasise the agency involved in these students’ university experiences. Over the course of the next two sections we will develop these results by examining two themes that have arisen as important drivers for the formation of living at home students’ everyday mobile belonging: mobility and proximity; and belonging through experience and precarity.

Living at home students’ (everyday) experiences of mobility and proximity This section unpacks the aforementioned notions of mobility and proximity to provide opportunities to scrutinise the action of moving (or not) upon living at home students’ understandings of mobility. As the quantitative analysis has revealed, there were contrasts in how the students in this sample considered notions of distance with a marked difference between the accommodation pathways. The importance of propinquity – of nearness, closeness and proximity – was far more apparent among those living at home than their counterparts who were living in student accommodation and this was articulated in the qualitative responses given by the students to the question What made you decide to choose the University of Portsmouth?: ‘It was a chance to escape really. A good distance from home – far enough to be independent.’ (Female, Student accommodation [LSA])

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‘Far enough away from home where I feel independent and have a bit of freedom.’ (Male, LSA) ‘Portsmouth University [sic] is not far from my parent’s home so I saw no point in leaving.’ (Female, Living with parents [LWP]) ‘It is the only university around here running my course, plus it is where my family live – too complicated to move.’ (Male, Living in own home [LOH])

While the participants living in student accommodation spoke of ‘escape’ and ‘freedom’ as drivers for mobility, the living at home students’ responses above appear to equate proximity with practicality – ‘no point in leaving’ and ‘without too much difficulty’  – suggesting these participants were considering their university experience as a component of an already developing set of identities, rather than as an opportunity to start again by leaving home (see Brooks 2002). This is not altogether unusual, and Christie, Munro and Wager (2005: 3) describe the role of the ‘day student’ as one of ‘liv[ing] at home and combin[ing] studying with commitments to family or to paid employment’. These multiple roles were apparent across the sample with evidence of the family/home/work-life balance being a clear dimension of these students’ institutional choices: ‘Portsmouth uni [sic] is close to where I work. I also needed to be close to home due to being a carer.’ (Male, LOH) ‘The university is near to where my husband works.’ (Female, LOH) ‘Portsmouth offered a degree that was a perfect option for me in terms of distance from home and work as well as some really good flexibility.’ (Female, LOH)

These quotes clearly emphasise the ways in which approaching university as a living at home student is not a solo venture but is caught up in a constellation of different activities, people, emotions and identities that co-produce and shape specific patterns of mobility for living at home students. O’Donnell and Tobbell (2007) argue that this presents challenges to mature students as they enter the higher education arena with a certain degree of ‘baggage’. This can be exacerbated through responsibility conflicts relating to work or family that make it difficult for older students to adjust to, and integrate within, life at university (Tones, Fraser, Elder and White 2009). O’Donnell and Tobbell (2007) advocate the use of a communities of practice framework that examines how the interaction of social and historical practices might help older students develop, over time, the necessary skills required to strike more successful work/study/life balances. Hence, we argue that it is important to recognise these entanglements as necessary and vital coping mechanisms for living at home students, particularly

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in terms of the flexibility of drawing together these multiple dimensions of everyday life. Yet, in line with the quantitative results demonstrated above, while these multiple (and largely conflicting) identities were certainly evident among those older students who were living in their own homes, those, mostly younger, students living with their parents appeared to approach university with a different level of pragmatism that was inflected with cost and necessity: ‘It was cheaper to live at home and commute three times a week as I’m only in uni [sic] 6–8 hours a week.’ (Female, LWP) ‘Portsmouth is the nearest university to my home and they did the course I wanted so it seemed silly moving away – so basically cost.’ (Female, LWP) ‘It didn’t make sense to leave home in the first year as my parents’ home is in Portsmouth.’ (Female, LWP)

These responses contrast with those living in their own homes and suggest an altogether different understanding of everyday mobile belonging that reveals a ‘flatter’, more practical interpretation of the student experience and how this applies to living at home students’ relative experiences. Here, the notion of ‘moving away’ from home appeared ‘silly’ or not to ‘make sense’ for many of these students. This is interesting as the non-traditional pathway is usually couched in terms of disadvantage, as discussed here by Christie (2007: 2447): [W]ithin the UK, living at home continues to be constructed as a barrier to full participation in higher education precisely because it creates an immediate social and spatial distance between the students and life at university. . . . The time and expense of commuting, more limited opportunities to participate in student life, and exclusion from important networks of information are presented as evidence of an impoverished and disadvantaged student lifestyle engendered by living at home.

This notion of disadvantage is a prominent theme in the literature when discussing the experiences of living at home students (see Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010; Abbott-Chapman 2011; Christie, Munro and Wager 2005; Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008; Christie 2009), and as Holdsworth (2006:  505) suggests, by not having access to what could be considered an ‘ “authentic” student experience’, living at home students are very often cast as having a lesser, or even second-best experience of university life. Yet, nowhere in these students’ responses did they identify themselves as disadvantaged in this way. Their comments suggest instead that living at home was a rational rather than

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relational response to approaching higher education – particularly in terms of seeking a continuation of the same social, familial and/or employment patterns they had prior to university, all of which were intrinsic to their sense of belonging and identity. As well as these more practical considerations, the sample also expressed quite emotional characteristics in their decisions to remain living at home while at university – for example, 26 per cent of those living with parents chose not to leave home in order to maintain long-term friendships with non-student friends. As the following quotes imply, for a portion of this sample, aspects, such as a desire to buffer against homesickness or to maintain relationships with their non-student friendship groups were significant in their choices: ‘University can be stressful enough and the thought of being elsewhere was really stressful [sic]. I wanted to get reassurance from friends and family that I was doing the right thing.’ (Female, LOH) ‘I was worried that I  would get homesick and miss my family and friends at home.’ (Female, LWP)

These students’ comments hint at motivations to live at home that may emerge from a desire to maintain familiarity and thus prevent risks of failure and/or rejection. As Hinton (2011) argues, young people often shape their higher education aspirations according to their ideological representations of home. In these responses, we can view this according to the implications for everyday life being disrupted by ‘going away’ to university. Yet, it is important to reiterate that these students may not necessarily be disadvantaged by living at home. As Thomas and Webber (2001) suggest, the complex interplay between family, other social interactions and social norms and behaviours can collectively contribute towards how (and where) living at home students might invest their time, knowledge and capital. To unpack the notion of mobility further we move on now to examine the action of moving (or not) itself. In doing so, we question how we might adequately interpret the terms ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ that have been used to categorise living at home students’ experiences (e.g. Holdsworth 2009a; Abrahams and Ingram 2013). Here we can enquire, more critically the value of these terms – particularly their associations with mobility and immobility and the ways in which students might consider their relative proximity to university. This has implications for our everyday mobile belonging framework in that terms like ‘local’ may infer notions of the everyday and of belonging, and it is through our analysis here that we start to problematise these relationships. It is clear from

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the placement of the students’ residential postcodes3 in Figure 3 that the living at home students within the sample could not simply be defined as ‘local’ in the geographical sense of the word. While most of these students were at least proximate to Portsmouth, many were commuting from towns and cities such as Salisbury (66 km), Guildford (68 km), Bournemouth (76 km) and Reading (80 km), as well as a few from as far as High Wycombe (105 km), Eastbourne (106 km), London (116 km) and Oxford (121 km). This chimes with Donnelly and Gamsu’s (2018b) research and allows us to argue that ‘locality’ is actually being expressed as a relative set of performances that align with assumed ‘normal’ – yet often elite (Holdsworth 2009b) – mobility practices associated with university life in this contemporary UK higher education system. As the quotes below attest, the living at home students in the study were accustomed perhaps, to being more mobile than their peers living in student accommodation who, while being residentially mobile in having left home for university, performed their identities in distinctly less-mobile ways once in their term-time location: ‘Close enough to go home easily, but far away enough so I don’t go home every day.’ (Male, LSA) ‘Good distance from home – not too far but far enough to be independent. Also, it is a small city, so it is easy to get around.’ (Female, LSA) ‘Portsmouth is not too far from home, about an hour [sic] drive which made it very ideal in my mind. It’s a different city but I can get home without too much difficulty.’ (Male, LOH) ‘I have a car so I can go back and forward whenever, so didn’t make sense to move out this year.’ (Female, LWP)

For those living in student accommodation, mobility meant the physical residential move from home to university. This represents the upheaval of leaving (albeit often temporarily) and the in(ter)dependencies that are associated with this. This can be viewed through the churn of social interactions (Chow and Healey 2008), the shifting of personal belongings (Holton and Riley 2016)  and the adaptive and iterative configurations of living with students year on year (Christie, Munro and Rettig 2002; Hubbard 2009; Kenyon 1999) that become caught up in this movement away from home for university.

3

Respondents were invited to share their postcode but not to divulge any other identifying information. These postcodes have been disaggregated from the demographic responses for the purpose of this analysis.

Figure  3 Mapping the proximity and distance of living at home students to the University of Portsmouth. Source: Lewin 2017

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Here, the respondents expressed this in terms of finding the ‘perfect’ distance for a balance to be struck between leaving and returning. Yet, as both of the quotes above from participants living in student accommodation imply, such mobilities are linked to the event of leaving and returning home rather than through everyday movements, suggesting once these students had arrived in Portsmouth their propensity for mobility was reduced considerably. Conversely, those students living at home considered a range of scaled mobilities (long commutes alongside everyday movements) as a significant part of their everyday university experiences when choosing to enter higher education. Both of the living at home responses featured above indicate commuting being factored into students’ decisions, and tellingly, neither referred to commuting as being an issue, instead discussing it as a positive component of their daily travel biographies. The intricacies of this will become more apparent in later chapters when we unpack the everyday mobilities of our qualitative Portsmouth and Lancaster samples to explore the routines and daily practices that constitute their student experiences. Before closing though, it is worth noting that there may be a degree of temporality involved in these decisions to live at home while at university. The final quote from the student living with their parents implies that she has considered living at home as a temporary measure in the first year, rather than perhaps it being a permanent living arrangement for her entire degree pathway; a point which is, again, explored in more depth in Chapter 8, where mobility practices are conceptualised and rhythmic and choreographed to respond to students’ shifting needs, desires and socio-economic contexts. While the literature often infers living at home to be a fairly fixed procedure (see Christie 2007), this quote assumes it to be a stepping stone into a potential set of residential mobilities in subsequent years and, as we argue in Chapter 10, beyond graduation. This further emphasises the differences that exist within this living at home category – and the fluidity of the student body as a whole – and that caution must be taken when assuming fixity, stasis and/or mobility as a given among these types of students.

(Re)shaping belonging though experience and precarity This final section moves on from notions of mobility and distance to examine how the multidimensionality of everyday life applies to living at home students’ relative experiences of higher education. This will focus on the themes of experience and knowledge that were revealed in the quantitative analysis, and

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using our framework of everyday mobile belonging framework, we explore notions of belonging through a lens of precarity and risk. While familial knowledge appears to be lacking among living at home students in this cohort, the qualitative responses tell a slightly different story that makes us question quite how these students were being advised and influenced in their decisions to attend university: ‘Both of my parents came to Portsmouth and they loved it so they recommended that I do the same.’ (Female, LOH) ‘My girlfriend started here last year so it felt right to come as well to maintain our relationship. Plus it’s really close to home, which is great.’ (Male, LWP)

In line with the earlier discussions of mobility and distance, these comments emphasise the multiple dimensions of these living at home students’ experiences as they made their transitions into higher education. From the recommendations of family members to the maintenance of intimate relationships, these students clearly factored more into their decision to attend the University of Portsmouth than the subject and qualification. Here, we might assume everyday belonging to take on new dimensions that incorporate both student and non-student qualities, that facilitate continuity, while simultaneously drawing upon a familial/intimate set of histories that are rooted in place.

Figure 4 Word cloud of living at home students’ thoughts about ‘going’ to university. Source: Jason Davies 2017, https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

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To help identify some of these characteristics, the living at home participants’ qualitative comments were combined into a word cloud (Figure 4). The results in Figure  4 highlight that, as well as choice, knowledge and experience, the respondents factored some interesting interpretations of belonging into their decisions to live at home during study. For example, alongside the notions of caregiving, family and continuity discussed earlier in this chapter, phrases such as ‘money’, ‘cheaper’ and ‘save’ were given prominence alongside ‘home’, ‘close’ and ‘stay’, suggesting a synergy between the consistency of home as a familial space but also as a means to shelter from increasing (and perhaps even unnecessary) debt.4 This was articulated clearly in the participants’ responses: ‘I live close enough to uni [sic] that I don’t need to move. Plus, it was the cheaper option for my partner and I to live with my mother and study so we can save for a house deposit.’ (Female, LWP) ‘How could I move? I’m married and I have a job in Portsmouth. It would have been too much of a risk going anywhere else.’ (Female, LOH) ‘Wanted to save money. Wanted to stay at home.’ (Male, LWP)

These quotes indicate the importance of drawing upon notions of risk, and the risks involved, in going to university as a living at home student, and in recognising this, we can explore further the divisions that exist within the binaries that define UK students. As we have inferred in earlier chapters, higher education has been regarded as a risky business for many living at home students – often being linked to extreme upheavals in home-life-work balances (Archer and Hutchings 2000), as well as shifts in self-identity and knowledge (Baxter and Britton 2001). So, how might this be ameliorated? As Tett (2004) argues, there is immense risk involved for living at home students as they seek out higher education, particularly in terms of the risk of failure. Baxter and Britton (2001) draw upon Rutherford’s (1990) theory of the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ myth to explain this, indicating that mature students might experience a sense of dislocation when considering university. Here Rutherford’s (1990: 9) argument that ‘the desert left Lawrence neither Arab nor English’ implies that the process of transition ‘out of ’ previous non-student identities and ‘into’ higher education means that living at home students – particularly those who may be older – can lose the certainty of their old identities as they embark on discovering new ones at university.

4

This survey was conducted in 2011/12, the last year of the £3,225 p.a. tuition fees in England.

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Hence, ‘belonging’ to a non-student life might appear to ‘fix’ living at home students to a locality, implying that location can being restrictive, effectively immobilising living at home students by place and/or by circumstances. Yet, as our analysis has shown, while living at home students can feel restricted by their perceived immobilities (Reay 2003), embarking upon a pathway of higher education can encourage greater reflexivity regarding ‘non-student’ identities, particularly as Beck (1992) elucidates that education makes people upwardly mobile in that it acts as a buffer against becoming downwardly mobile.

Summary In drawing these sections together, this chapter has sought to disassemble the monolithic binaries that predicate higher education pathways in the UK. In doing so we have drawn upon three aspects of our everyday mobile belonging framework to explore and challenge these modes of classification that have come to dominate student geographies and notions of educational belonging. First, we have sought to disentangle our living at home students from the monolithic binaries associated with UK higher education, and in doing so we infer from this that living at home students’ experiences are far from relative, disadvantaged or inferior to those who have left home for university. For the students within this sample, the decisions they made about going to university, and in particular, attending a specific/manageable/local institution were steeped in thoughts of social and geographical mobility and it’s affect(s) upon everyday routines and notions of belonging. Hence, we caution against oversimplifying students’ higher education trajectories in order to establish neat, classifiable categories. Instead, we support Lefevbre’s (1991b) consideration of the complex intersectional components of the everyday when examining our respondents’ transitions to argue that, in practice, boundaries are opaque and variable (Burkitt 2004; May 2013). This has been articulated by our participants whose comments clearly demonstrate individual pathways that are shaped through the contrasting experiences of identity, place-making and (not) belonging which are enacted through the routines of their everyday lives. Second, and linked to the above, our analysis has sought to unpack notions of student mobilities – not simply as relational (i.e. mobility vs. immobility) but to expose the varying degrees of mobility contingent within the higher education experience. This has provided us with opportunities to scrutinise the mobilities of living at home students at a more micro scale, exploring specifically how their

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routine mobilities might contribute towards (retaining) a sense of belonging while at university. Here, we have witnessed that living at home students’ mobility practices, while different from the residential mobilities exhibited by those following the ‘leaving home’ pathways, are no less important or valid. Indeed, many of the respondents in the sample expressed their mobilities as malleable and porous – that is, they ostensibly drew upon both pragmatic and more extraordinary motivations for being mobile that helped reconcile their often multi-sited identities. This, therefore, accentuates a much more complex suite of mobility practices for living at home students that move beyond the (dis)advantaging of one form of mobility over another. Third, our analysis has accentuated the need to explore further how understandings of risk and belonging might tease out some of the multidimensionality of living at home students’ experiences of, and transitions through, higher education. We note here the interplay between possibilities and constraint, scripting and creativity, habit and change that were evident in our respondents’ comments and how these shaped their interpretations of, and considerations for, making decisions about university life in an increasingly neo-liberal and individualised context. In many ways, these living at home students’ experiences shirked the ‘typical’ pathways associated with university trajectories (leaving home, drawing upon (others’) past experiences, ‘fitting in’, etc.), instead exhibiting some interesting signs of resistance and innovation in how they chose to approach higher education. Here, we might infer then that these students, rather than being paralysed or necessarily disadvantaged by risk and inexperience, were perhaps more emboldened by the lack of expectation to perform higher education in a more predictable way. The freedom from the shackles of the ‘traditional’ might, therefore, be highly beneficial for living at home students in allowing them greater opportunities to forge their own feelings of belonging that focus on moving forward rather than being fixated upon historical (and perhaps outdated) notions of student life.

7

Inhabiting Everyday Mobilities: The Relational Belonging and Not Belonging of ‘Movers’ and ‘Stayers’

Introduction In this chapter we extend beyond the meta-movements attached to going to university that were discussed in Chapter  6 to examine how more mundane, rhythmic, everyday mobilities contribute towards living at home students’ daily experiences of term-time locations. Here we seek to explore the activity spaces of living at home students and how these might contrast with those students who have left home for university, thus occupying more traditional positions. Through this juxtaposition of experiences, we question the spaces in which students form and operationalise their identities and consider the ways in which the (in)accessibility of these spaces might facilitate (or potentially hinder) everyday mobile belonging. For example, we ask whether there might be differences between how students living at home perceive everyday activities and movements through space in comparison to those living in student accommodation; how different social practices might emerge and become routinised for students who are not necessarily residentially proximate to ‘traditional’ student spaces; and, lastly, how living at home students negotiate their multiple and competing student and non-student identities when moving in and through term-time locations. These questions motivate the discussion in this chapter and enable us to problematise the perceived disadvantages associated with being a living at home student, vis-à-vis (not) belonging. Moreover, it allows us to argue that these students may exhibit certain strategies for self-segregating that assist with supporting their own individual trajectories through university. Throughout this chapter we examine how belonging, crucially the ability to ‘not’ belong is

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performed in term-time spaces and how this subsequently develops competing and contrasting representations of studenthood. As with the previous chapter, the analysis here links explicitly to the everyday mobile belonging framework outlined in Chapter 3. We begin by examining how living at home students perform their identities in term-time spaces. Here we consider the implications of different forms of contrasting mobilities for those living at home and living away from home upon their place-making activities and how this contributes towards the shaping of seemingly differentiated termtime spaces which coexist within defined boundaries of ‘The University’. Next, we explore notions of everyday meaning-making to help understand how and why living at home students use geographical spaces of refuge, while also drawing on their digital and imagined mobilities as methods for supporting multiple and contrasting identity performances. Thus, we extend contemporary analyses of commuter students by focusing on their creative, rather than merely their constrictive, uses of term-time spaces (Thomas and Jones 2017). In doing so, we argue that living at home should not be a problem that needs to be solved, rather it should be viewed as providing a set of alternative opportunities through which students may successfully transition through their degree pathway. Finally, we highlight some of the ways in which separations exist between students living in traditional accommodation and living at home students within term-time spaces. Here we acknowledge the importance of providing living at home students room to ‘not belong’ to the university structures and how everyday mobilities may contribute towards embodied separations away from the mainstream student network.

Observing students’ differentiated activity spaces Drawing upon Torsten Hägerstrand’s (1970) conceptualisation of activity space (see Chapter 3), this section examines the ways in which living at home students might perform their identities in term-time spaces and how this contributes towards notions of everyday mobile belonging. Understanding activity spaces is vital for interpreting the different attachments that living at home students might have to locations that build and develop (as well as erode) over time. Put simply, while term-time spaces might produce a sense of belonging among those situated within them (Holdsworth 2006), we argue that it is important to provide users enough room to ‘not-belong’ as a mechanism for seeking refuge away from university life in and among non-student spaces. This ability to not

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belong  – to resist the student-centric structures within term-time spaces, not through disadvantage but by choice – is an important component of our everyday mobile belonging framework. It challenges notions of the disadvantaged living at home student that does not neatly ‘fit in’ among the more traditional cohort. By exploring the tactics employed by our participants we critique the perceived linearity in which students essentially ‘learn the rules of the student game’ (Chatterton 1999:  120) by suggesting that students can be experimental with their socialising in order to ‘unlearn’ these rules and develop more individual identities.

Performing ‘The Commuter’: Living at home student identities In exploring how these activity spaces might be influential in the production of living at home students’ everyday identities and in their performance of ‘The Commuter Student’,1 we draw on the experiences of Millie and Carl, from the Portsmouth study, to indicate the competing pressures of university life and how these are differently managed by living at home students and their peers in student accommodation. Specifically, we consider how these ways of coping might diverge, overlap or ‘rub up against’ one another. We focus on the differing perceptions of the student identity and how these may produce different representations of student life that, as Holloway et al. (2010: 592) caution, do not necessarily ‘conform to (British) media stereotypes of being consumer orientated and alcohol-fuelled’. Millie came to Portsmouth after taking a gap year and lived for her first year in a rented student house in the city with a school friend. Carl, like Millie, also took a year out from university but chose to live at home with his family approximately nine miles from the campus. Through their quotes below we can see some of the incongruities that emerge between how students might perceive their positions within narratives of student life, particularly in their first year: Millie: one of my friends has a curfew because she still lives at home because she’s from Portsmouth so it makes going out a bit difficult, I  have to make sure I see her home but a student night out doesn’t end until about

1

Thomas and Jones (2017:  5) define commuter students as ‘[t]hose who travel to their higher education provider (HEP) from their parental or family home, which they lived in prior to entering higher education  – rather than having re-located to live in student accommodation (or close to the HEP) for the purposes of studying. This includes full-time and part-time, undergraduate and postgraduate, and in all disciplines and types of institution’.

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two or three o’clock in the morning, particularly on a Monday when its student night. Carl: I wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that were offered at uni, [sic] not necessarily all the drinking and clubbing and stuff . . . but different activities that the University offers.

What these comments allude to is a portrayal of the student life lived differently, of a cleaving apart of the lifestyles of students living at home and in student accommodation, with very differentiated expectations of how the student life ought to be performed. As Millie implies, the temporalities associated with living at home and living away from home do not necessarily align with one another. The residentially mobile student has, perhaps, the potential to determine new and different rhythms  – going clubbing and functioning at different times of the day and week – to more typical students (Moss and Richter 2010). In contrast, living at home students may have (or desire) other interests and tastes, or indeed circumstances, that are incompatible with this particular student lifestyle, and in the case of Millie’s friend, that may be constrained by curfews and by the rules and regulations of the family home. Conversely, Carl’s comments represent another university life, very different to the experiences of Millie and her friend, that exists away from the hedonism of ‘drinking and clubbing and stuff ’ and that potentially provides opportunities to experience new social activities that might further or advance his life and opportunities for self-development. Yet, as we have attested to in Chapter  6, very often, the living at home experience is couched in disadvantage, as relative to the pleasure-seeking and hedonism (Hubbard 2013) associated with ‘typical student’ identities (Holdsworth 2006). Emma, a final year student living in a rented student house in Portsmouth suggests the following: Emma: I know full well that my friends that were stuck with their parents felt very left out socially, by the uni [sic] especially because we would have reps and stuff coming to our doors, encouraging us to go out and letting us in on the student nights and they just had none of that.

Emma’s comment emphasises this notion of disadvantage very clearly  – specifically that living at home students might even recognise themselves as ‘left out socially’. These types of relational identities were evident throughout the discussions and often indicated the typical route of the residentially mobile student as the only valid way of inhabiting a student self. That is not to say that living at home students could not enjoy the same types of lifestyle activities

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as their peers, though. Indeed, many of the living at home students in the Portsmouth study spoke of going to nightclubs and bars, yet as Cleo, a first-year student living with her grandparents in the north of the city, implies here, these venues were not necessarily part of the student infrastructure: Cleo: I  go to different places than most normal students. There’s a place called Minibox [north of the city centre], I really like that because it’s not very studenty [sic] and it plays my style of music. That’s where I like to go.

So, when examining Cleo’s remarks in the context of Emma’s reflections, we start to see some contrasts emerging. Both Cleo’s and Emma’s comments indicate clear separations between competing activities and the different spaces in which these are performed in terms of belonging and propinquity. Most student activities were concentrated around the Guildhall Walk area of the city (adjacent to several halls of residences and the main concentration of student bars and nightclubs) and the waterfront area of Gunwharf Quays, which contained most of the city’s larger chain nightclubs and bars. Crucially, many of the living at home students socialised away from these spaces in bars, pubs and clubs not usually associated with student activities. Moreover, the language used in these comments is important too. Cleo’s preference for Minibox allows her to separate away from ‘normal students’, while Emma appears to pity her friends who were ‘stuck with their parents’ for not having the same experience as her. We can draw here on mobilities literature involving stillness and immobility to make sense of how (and why) these discourses of being separated or ‘stuck’ are communicated negatively. Stillness may carry negative connotations associated with emptiness or being devoid of activity (Cresswell 2010). In the context of Emma’s comment, we may certainly infer the negativity here – particularly in the assumption that the university machine operates in such ways as to exclude non-traditional practices by focusing upon halls of residences as legitimate conduits through which to promote social activities. Bissell and Fuller (2011) argue, however, that stillness is thoroughly incorporated into the practices of moving, and as Cleo’s remark about performing social activities away from the ‘normal’ student-centric spaces suggests, it is therefore important to recognise stillness as a process of movement, or as an interplay of both immobility (her status as a living at home student) and mobility (her agency in traversing the city in alternative ways to her peers). Furthermore, these contrasting interpretations of Portsmouth as a term-time activity space cast the city as a somewhat paradoxical environment, existing simultaneously as a locale for both student and non-student activities, as well as

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influencing the geographies of different ‘types’ of students too. This, of course, reinforces much of the heterogeneity that we hope is present within term-time activity spaces. Yet, as Axhausen (2007) argues, the dimensions of a person’s activity spaces might change according to the selectivity of their social networks, and in the above quotes this was evident through the students’ interpretations of the acceptability, desirability or appropriateness, of certain activities performed in certain spaces at certain times of the day or week. Moreover, these perceptions may also be symptomatic of increased knowledge and experimentation  – of having access to a new set of spaces and activities that may, perhaps have been ‘off limits’ prior to university. Hence, it is important to recognise the relationships between people, places and activities as dynamic in producing particular ‘types’ of identities among students – particularly in terms of living at home students whose varying degrees of proximity may influence how they navigate their termtime location and indeed their sense of student self.

Reconciling place(s), memory and distance Alongside these perceptions of ‘acceptable’ (and ‘authentic’) student activities were competing interpretations of where these activities should be performed. Here we question how living at home students might balance their competing ‘worlds’, prioritising and re-placing certain dimensions of their everyday lives depending on the activities, places, people, and so on they are involved in. We are inspired here by the experiences of Nina and Greg, both from the Portsmouth study, who, as living at home students, both discussed the challenges of making sense of their term-time locations but in very different ways: Nina: Umm (thinks) I feel like when I’m here as a student I’m a visitor. I feel different when I  come here at the weekend which is why I  picked two places, for me this [the Fleet pub] represents me being a student whereas Gunwharf [Quays] represents me being me, away from uni [sic] because I use different places with different people. I’m very aware that the four people [students on her course] that I’m very good friends with aren’t from Portsmouth so I spend a lot of my time feeling like a tour guide, showing them where places are (laughs), not so much now but especially in my first year but, I dunno, I suppose I do feel like a visitor, because a lot of our coursework has been about Portsmouth and I sort of knew it, but I suppose with the students here I’m still learning it.

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Greg: I come down [to Portsmouth] more regularly nowadays. I can just sit and work on the computers in the university library because someone at home wants to use the computers at the same time. I just like being at uni [sic] anyway, it’s a nice place to be. . . . If I wanted to be down in the evening it used to be a problem because there weren’t many late buses back home in the evening. But now it’s not such a burden because the last bus is at 23:40 so I can spend time in the pub if I want to. I think also if we go to a night club I can sleep over at a friend’s in Portsmouth rather than getting the bus home so it’s not such a barrier nowadays.

While there are contrasts in the ways in which these students reconciled their term-time spaces – Nina’s concerns related to her changing interpretation and use of the social spaces of Portsmouth and her adapting knowledge of it as a ‘student city’, while Greg’s reflections were a way of orienting his sense of self between home and university – they share similarities in generating, what we define as a sense of ‘reflexive experimentation’. By this we mean that rather than shirking the student identity completely, living at home students may flirt with exploring their multiple identities to see how (or if) they might fit within different social spaces and situations. This links back to the notions of the everyday and belonging that we have critiqued in earlier chapters, whereby the action of becoming a university student has affected how their everyday movements are operationalised (for Nina, reconciling familiar spaces, while for Greg, balancing a life between home and university). In considering reflexive experimentation we might interpret living at home students’ experiences of (re)negotiating term-time spaces as providing both a mechanism for ‘fitting in’ among various peer groups but also affording opportunities to move more fluidly within and between social groups, thus developing the potential to build more meaningful place attachments within their respective multiple worlds.

Everyday meaning-making In this section we extend these notions of activity spaces beyond the campus and student-centric activities to consider those environments through which living at home students might seek refuge away from the pressures of everyday student life. Here we draw on both corporeal and imagined spaces (e.g. ‘hidden’ places and digital/imagined locations) to explore the ways in which living at home students might enact separations away from their more traditional

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peers. Through this we seek to problematise notions of everyday meaningmaking that privilege certain types of belonging. We examine how a sense of mobile ‘belonging-ness’ may be developed that facilitates the multiple identity performances discussed earlier in this chapter through the creative uses of termtime spaces. This part of the discussion examines how everyday practices and senses of mobile belonging-ness might be performed away from the campus, or from other students, and how this might challenge what it means to ‘stay local’.

Spaces of refuge Ruth and Sarah, both students from the Portsmouth study, had previous knowledge of living in the city but, at the time of the study, lived approximately 15–30 km away from the university campus. Both had different experiences of living at home, Ruth lived with her parents after two years residing in student accommodation, while Sarah was living with her husband and two young children during her first year of study. In both cases, these participants chose to visit self-identified non-student spaces on their walking interviews that held a great deal of personal attachment, and that provided a sense of relief and refuge away from student life: Ruth: I wouldn’t say that I’m a loner, I do like to go to the pub with my friends and stuff, but I do like to be by myself. I don’t like to sit in a canteen full of noise. I find it quite relaxing to come out here [botanical garden] and sit and see people walk past and I find it interesting, you see things that you wouldn’t normally see, like for example those flowers (points to flowers and laughs), they’re really pretty. It’s just sort of a calming place really. I’ve come up here a few times when I’m feeling angry and I just want to get away from uni [sic] or something . . . it was an escape from the intense hustle and bustle of people further down and I like it here. Sarah: This [Canoe Lake] would be my leisure place in town, far away from uni [sic]. It’s safe, well, nowhere is completely safe for children but it’s enclosed. There’s the water, there’s the park, the toilets. There’s a cafe so if I came with my friends we might sit all day and chat and they’ll [children] just play, because they’re old enough to do so, so for a social point of view that’s brilliant. We might wander down to the beach or get an icecream but apart from that we just sit and catch up. . . . I wouldn’t take my children anywhere where other students are (laughs).

These comments indicate a significant sense of emotional work that was invested in belonging to these spaces. Crucially, these locations held resonance

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but were not in or near their homes. For Ruth, the botanical garden near the seafront was a place of solitude away from the stresses of her degree. This was a serendipitous place that she  – in her own words  – ‘stumbled across’ and quickly became a location in which to visit regularly to read, listen to music and study. The site that Sarah visited, Canoe Lake, is a family-friendly boating pond, located in the south-eastern corner of Southsea, which held a significant amount of historical, familial connection for Sarah. She visibly relaxed here and spent a lot of time unpacking the space and detailing the activities that she and her family and friends would do – far more than any other of the sites we visited. While these participants experienced their respective locations in different ways (as refuge, as familial, as social), what was common between their responses was a sense of belonging away from the everyday pressures of university life. Ruth’s and Sarah’s experiences draw similarities to Tuan’s (1974) humanistic theorisations of topophilia that explores how individuals might develop deep and lasting positive connections to places through their appreciation of the aesthetics of it. Both Ruth’s attraction to the botanical garden and Sarah’s connections to Canoe Lake are charged with emotion, of a love for their respective refuges that is expressed through the environments themselves, and through their entwined memories of the emotions they experience through being in them (Davidson, Bondi and Smith 2005; Bondi 2005). Moreover, Ruth’s acknowledgement that her garden was ‘just sort of a calming place really’ and Sarah’s chance to ‘just sit and catch up’ by the pond both indicate a change of pace from the perceived business of their student and home lives. Emotional geographies have often been criticised for privileging proximity and closeness as conducive to expressing emotion (Pile 2010), yet these spaces appear to constitute an ‘in-between-ness’, a chance to occupy spaces that disengage with the multiple strands of their everyday lives. Crucially, these include both ‘home’ and ‘university’ but are not limited to one of these, nor are they necessarily in conflict, as is often assumed in other research. Hence, by exploring emotions in the context of mobility we can observe how opportunities to pause, to linger and to reflect might be positive attributes to invite into living at home students’ experiences of university life, particularly in terms of fostering more meaningful senses of belonging that is situated away from the pressures of university (and home) life.

Digital and imagined senses of mobile belonging-ness Importantly, these experiences of mobile belongingness were not confined to geographical space. There were various accounts across both the Portsmouth and

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Lancaster studies of how digital and imagined spaces and mobilities contributed towards this sense of escape for living at home students and providing opportunities to foster and manage their multiple identities and senses of wellbeing and belonging. In contrast to the more emotional belonging characterised by the previous experiences, these, more virtual activity spaces often comprised filling voids, or occupying snatched time away from studying (e.g. commuting time, periods between lectures, exercise, etc.) to help carve out time away from student and home life: Fleur: I like travelling. I have always commuted. Because I’ve got kids and I’ve got a lot going on, I find that my time on the train is my switch off time. . . . Thursday is my heavy day; I have a lot of lectures and my big seminar so by the time I’m done with uni [sic] on Thursdays my brain hurts. So, I get on the train and I put my head phones in and I just zone out. It gives me 40 minutes where I can just, I dunno . . . . Timothy: If I’m in for 9.00 then I’m up at 6.45. That’s quite early and there’s a tendency for trains to get delayed. When you get [to the station] at 7.45 and its delayed 20 minutes, well I  used to find it quite frustrating. It’s alright now though, more time to listen to my iPod. I sit and look out of the window mainly; I don’t work on the train. It’s only a 30-minute journey so not long enough for any meaningful work. I like to just be in my music. Radiohead or Arctic Monkeys. Depends on my mood. I try not to think about much when I’m travelling. Particularly at the moment because my mind can drift, like, to what’s next. What I’m doing after [graduation]. Cleo: I’ve always loved the sea. I suspect that’s another reason why I stayed [in Portsmouth]. It’s sort of fresh air. Because Portsmouth’s so flat as well, I love coming down to the sea front for a run as well. The main reason I’d say is that you can be alone, you can think things over and because there are other people there you don’t necessarily feel like you have to engage – do you know what I mean (laughs)? . . . I enjoy socialising and stuff but I enjoy more my own company and that’s what the seafront really gives me.

These comments demonstrate the importance for living at home students in responding to different social and environmental pressures in productive and supportive ways. As Urry (2002: 256) argues, all forms of social life involve striking combinations of proximity and distance, combinations that necessitate examination of the intersecting forms of physical, object, imaginative and virtual mobility that contingently and complexly link people in patterns of obligation, desire and commitment.

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These experiences of ‘being’ living at home students clearly emphasise Urry’s argument by considering the disruptions and negotiations in space and time that everyday movements bring through the various torsions of mobility (Bissell 2014)  and how the stops and starts involved in everyday life might mutually support their relative student and non-student lives. These iterative mobilities between home and campus (Fleur and Timothy), or purposeful movements associated with exercise (Cleo) provided similar chances for solitude as with Sarah and Ruth’s experiences (opportunities to use music to ‘switch off ’ (Fleur), to ‘drift’ (Timothy) or to ‘be alone’ (Cleo) that, albeit temporarily, encourages respite away from other aspects of the daily routine that may later need prioritising). Yet, through their everyday mobilities, these students also exhibited agency and dynamism, employing ‘strategies and tactics to struggle and juggle with mobility constraints’ (Kesselring 2008:  94) that allow, for example, university tasks and home lives to be kept separate from one another. For Fleur in particular, her approach to segmenting university and home using the imagined escapism of her headphones highlights a way around some of the barriers that are present in the lives of living at home students  – particularly those with families – whereby the multidimensionality of parenthood intersects with university to form complex understandings of how everyday mobilities might strengthen belonging by offering a chance to pause. Notwithstanding, the virtual and the imagined does not always offer refuge and security and in the case of Faheema, a British Muslim Creative Writing student living with her parents and siblings in a small town 72 km away from Lancaster University, we can observe how mobile technologies and imagined geographies might fracture and destabilise interactions within term-time spaces. Faheema suffers from anxiety and through her account below we can observe how this appeared to inhibit her mobilities to, from and around university: Faheema: I relied on my dad such a lot [during her first months]. I was like ‘dad, I actually don’t know what I’m doing’ and he said, ‘look, you’ll find your way around’. I had to sort of, once I left a certain lecture I would just look at my map. I had a real fear of getting lost. So I did have to ring my dad several times for his help. I didn’t want to ask other students. I didn’t want to stand out.

Faheema’s experience is important to our discussion of imagined and digital mobile belongingness. Through her father’s knowledge of Lancaster and of the university campus through his work, Faheema had created a mental map of the institution. As she alludes to in her account though, this was much more than

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simply understanding the spatial organisation of the campus. Faheema’s map was infused with emotion, with anxiety and crucially with uncertainty about her position as a legitimate undergraduate student. For her, the support provided by her father – while parental and unselfish – also appears to have acted as a prop through which she could legitimise her desire not to belong to the student community. Her (over)reliance upon her father’s knowledge and advice seems to have an impact upon her capacity to belong to the university as an individual with her own journey to make. Faheema turned to her family for support and guidance over that of her peers: Faheema: There are times when I am just sitting there and I want to be at home. I like that I can just be in touch and [her parents] will set off early. If my plans change I will actually let them know. One of my meetings got cancelled the other day and I text home and I was so, itching for a reply because I wanted to know what I was doing, staying or leaving early, and I was in a lesson and I couldn’t contact them.

Whereas Fleur and Timothy used technologies to aid escapism and the carving out of time from the stresses of the day, Faheema’s use of her mobile phone above appears to facilitate a more literal means of escape. This appeared to manifest as a desire to manage seamless mobilities between lectures and early finishes, leaving fewer opportunities to be left lingering on campus. Faheema spoke of this as a way to avoid standing out as a young traditionally dressed Muslim woman, and it was during these empty pauses that she felt lost and unaccomplished in her everyday, on-campus mobilities, and this exacerbated the experience of being a ‘body out of place’ (Loveday 2016). What we infer from Faheema’s experience is a sense of urgency in how her everyday mobilities are performed. These, almost hyperactive mobilities, are enacted as a method to avoid being caught in dead time and to bypass having to negotiate belonging on (or even to) campus, suggesting a very different sense of everyday mobile belonging than what we have revealed so far in this chapter.

Spaces of not-belonging – de-linking the ‘two-worlds’ So far in this chapter we have explored some of the contrasting ways in which living at home students carve out space in term-time locations – often reconciling multiple and competing lifestyles and occasionally establishing place-making in spite of their peers in student accommodation. In this section we talk more

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explicitly about how these divisions may be spatially organised, drawing upon Paul Chatterton’s (1999) notion of ‘exclusive geographies’ to highlight the agency living at home students have over separating out their student and nonstudent lives. In his seminal paper, Chatterton (1999) argues that students living away from home often self-segregate away from the non-student population, territorialising spaces as ‘our spaces’ and ‘their spaces’ (Holt and Griffin 2005). This is espoused through a popular culture infrastructure that is aimed directly at the student market, meaning student spaces can represent divisions within term-time locations by separating students away from the rest of the city and fuelling potential tensions between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ (see Chatterton and Hollands 2002, 2003). In relating this to our everyday mobile belonging framework, we focus upon two crucial dimensions of Chatterton’s argument:  first, that students are active agents in these divisions, both producing and consuming the student infrastructure during term-time; and second that these divisions are primarily concerned with those students who have left home for university. Our analysis extends these dimensions by arguing that living at home students have the capacity to exert similar types of agency in how they shape their term-time locations. The difference here is that this can be achieved in more individualistic and less visible ways through what we define as methods of ‘selective engagement’ that potentially disentangles some of the elements of the student lifestyle that appear undesirable or unnecessary to living at home students. In proposing this an alternative prism through which to view living at home students’ perceived immobilities, it is possible to recast their experiences less in terms of disadvantage and more as a process of agency as they facilitate divisions from their peers in student accommodation. As the following quotes attest, self-segregation is not simply a privilege for the residentially mobile, and our living at home students, exhibited some interesting methods for de-linking their student and non-student lives: Carl: they’re [student friends] nice people and if I were to bring them back to my house they’d be very respectful of it I’d imagine, but I do feel more of a co-sharer of the house now, not just a child in it, so I don’t feel it would be really appropriate to bring university people back to that because I feel that maybe wouldn’t be right for my parents. They probably wouldn’t be comfortable with that, so I wouldn’t do it. Nina: [As] I  mainly socialise in an area which would mean that students would have to drive it obviously then puts them at a disadvantage. They

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would have to not have a drink, and drive which, for them is probably quite a long way and an area that they don’t know. Dawn: [As a child] I would never have come to Southsea with my parents, we would always have gone to [nearby coastal beaches]. . . . I think I’ve gone to Commercial Road [in city centre] less since coming to uni [sic]. I think because I’m here for uni [sic] and I also work in Gunwharf [Quays] I just don’t want to spend any more time here, I’d rather go to [West Sussex town] shopping, somewhere away from the students.

Here, approaches for self-segregation are nuanced  – Carl’s resistance to bringing student friends home, Nina’s assumptions that students would not appreciate her social spaces/activities, Dawn’s preference to avoid studentified spaces – but ultimately coalesce to provide living at home students the capacity to ‘not belong’ to the university structures and cultures in terms of socialising, friendships and so on. This differs from Chatterton’s (1999) argument in that, for living at home students, self-segregation may not be about creating a temporarily secure community, but may be concerned with how they might utilise their everyday mobilities to embody separations away from the mainstream studentcentric infrastructure. We continue with Helen, a second year English Literature student from the Portsmouth study who was living with her parents, approximately 3 km away from the city centre. Helen’s experience is interesting as she articulates very clearly the motivations driving her self-segregations from her student peers. This first element is concerned with unsuccessful interactions whereby Helen had attempted to draw her student and non-student social groups together: Helen: I  have introduced them to some friends from home and it is strange when you combine the two because they’re talking about two very different worlds and there was almost a bit of a divide because they kept talking about university and I  had to keep encouraging them to talk about other things because of my friends who didn’t go to university.

Helen then goes on to explain the more spatial implications of drawing students into her non-student life: Helen: You do feel a bit vulnerable [taking student friends to a local place] because this is somewhere that you feel is quite personal. It’s like ‘this is a really huge part of my life, I hope you like it, even though you’re not saying that you like it’.

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Helen’s comments of ‘talking about two worlds’, having ‘a bit of a divide’ and ‘feel[ing] a bit vulnerable’ all indicate the incongruities involved in being a living at home student whose student and non-student lives are more proximate that they perhaps wish (see Holdsworth 2009a). Yet, as she suggests, while these lives may overlap it does not necessarily mean they will entwine or merge together. Vanessa May (2017) examines the role of temporality in producing fleeting or embedded senses of belonging, arguing that notions of ‘belonging out of time’ preclude more enduring and ancestral attachments to places, people and experiences. Yet, Helen’s multiple and competingly scaled senses of belonging to her student and non-student worlds add a new dimension to this, one that may be captured in-between the enduring and fleeting features of her non-student life. Helen’s attachment to Portsmouth as a place imbued with deep personal memories is at odds with her emerging student identity and her desire to forge belonging among her peers. Her comments imply that this creates a sense of vulnerability over how these worlds might merge, placing her in a precarious position in which she belongs to both worlds and neither, simultaneously. While this may appear fatalistic, with living at home students condemned to only partially existing in their student and non-student worlds, it is important to understand that many of the living at home participants across the studies did not apologise for not belonging, and instead developed strategies that involved embodying separations away from their peers. Alongside Helen, Tori, a final year student living with her boyfriend – a non-student – in Portsmouth spoke of her resistance to the first-year student night-time socialising: Tori: Part way through the first year the repetition [nights out] got a bit much. We [boyfriend] were like ‘this is boring, we hate it and we hear it every night when we go out’, so I  guess we started getting a bit less enthusiastic about the whole Tiger, Liquid, Highlight [mainstream nightclubs] and limited how much we went there . . . . Some of my friends in halls started complaining that I never socialised with them. They’d be like ‘do you want to come out with us?’ and I’d be like ‘no, I’m going out with [boyfriend]’ and they’d be like ‘oh, okay, we won’t take that personally’. But then you stop getting asked after a while. I didn’t feel left out but it just went on like that really. Helen: I think it’s easier when you live at home because if you don’t want to do certain things then people don’t expect you to. I think they view me not quite as a ‘student’ student but as a, kind of ‘ah, no, I’m at home, I  don’t really want to go out late’, things like that. If I  had moved out I would definitely be feeling a lot more pressured to do what everyone

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else was doing, whereas I’ve got the excuse that I’ve got the rest of my life to be doing as well.

These quotes, while indicating slightly different experiences of not belonging, share similarities with regard to how this was articulated. Tori’s comments suggest a rather blunt rejection of the ‘boring’ first year social sphere, while Helen’s remark alludes to her peer group having few expectations of her involving herself in student-centric activities because of her living at home status. While neither student refuted this – indeed, their comments suggest that they actively sought to resist certain social activities – it is the ways in which they performed these separations that is interesting. As May (2017) argues in her account on not belonging, the relational self has a need to belong, in other words, we have an innate need to connect to people and we derive pleasure from the intimate bonds we have with others. May (2017) articulates not belonging as a sense of exclusion, of being peripheral or somewhat invisible and of non-conformity. This is something that is done to a person but can also be a mechanism through which to defend against the effects of not belonging (i.e. justifying not belonging as being the fault of the other). Yet, both Tori and Helen approach this differently. In line with Butler’s (1991) notions of performativity – repeated behaviours that are based on social norms or habits – their sense of not belonging is an embodied performance – a physical enactment of separation from their peers that is based upon the expectation that living at home students’ identities are performed in a particular way (in these instances, not in student-centric spaces, not late at night, not during the week and not with students). While this may appear to align with May’s (2017) suggestion of not belonging being ‘done’ to a person, Helen in particular actually embodied this identity in such a way as to provide herself both the space to not belong and the methods through which to activate this. Her assumed position of immobility discussed above in terms of ‘not [being viewed] quite as a “student” student but as a, kind of “ah, no, I’m at home, I don’t really want to go out late” [student]’ suggests that she incorporated her living at home identity into her sense of self, embodying her social position in social situations and actively managing her separations her away from her peers.

Summary In this chapter we have examined the ways in which the everyday routinised behaviours of living at home students might contribute towards a more nuanced

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and individualised understanding of term-time spaces and the mechanisms of university life. In unpacking the intersections between the everyday, mobility and belonging we have revealed the complexities of performing living at home identities, particularly when such identities are so often couched in terms of the disadvantaged and problematic living at home student experience. We therefore propose three contributions from our findings. First by exploring living at home students’ activity spaces we have revealed the contrasting forms of mobility and belonging that can occur and how living at home students’ experiences of university life may ‘rub up’ against their more traditional counterparts living in student accommodation. While this is not new, our analysis identifies how the important dynamic characteristics of the ‘commuter student’ identity may be performed in such ways as to resist the ‘normalcy’ of more typical student behaviours (e.g. operating in circles that differ social and spatially to students living in student accommodation). This recasts the living at home student identity, not as immobile or stuck but as intensely active and reactive, following an alternative pathway that responds to undesirable aspects of the student-centric environment and that thus produces a more nuanced sense of self. Alongside this, we have examined how the relationship between memory, place and distance can produce the conditions for more effective ways of being reflexive about term-time spaces – particularly for those who may already have experiences and connections with them. Here we explored the methods adopted by our living at home participants that enabled them to move between social groupings, environments and situations – fitting in with some while opting out of others, and the ways in which this enabled a stronger sense of control over how their multiple and competing identities were managed and articulated. Second, we examined processes of everyday meaning-making and the ways in which term-time spaces and practices influenced negotiations with everyday life. In focusing upon spaces of refuge, and the emotional belonging that was produced through associations with these spaces, we argue that living at home students may identify spaces that constitute an ‘in-between-ness’ that provide opportunities to perhaps disengage with the multiple strands of daily life (home, university, work, family, etc.). Linked to this were notions of how imagined and virtual spaces may provide produce particular ‘senses’ of mobile belonging-ness for living at home students – specifically among those who commute – in which time to reflect or ‘tune out’ may be carved out while travelling between home and university. Crucially though, while these opportunities to switch off may afford respite, in the case of Faheema, this melding between technology and her

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imagined sense of being a student provided a mechanism for escape from being caught in a space that she struggled to identify with. Here we see lingering not as an indulgence but as something fearful that must be avoided. Our third and final point pushes the dynamism of living at home students even further by examining notions of not belonging and how this contrast with previous studies that identify living at home students’ experiences as disadvantaged. Here we advance Chatterton’s (1999) conceptualisation of ‘exclusive geographies’ to argue that living at home students exhibit may of the same characteristics of self-segregation and exclusivity as their more traditional peers as methods for protecting the knowledge, memories and routines they have with their location by enacting separations that ‘de-link’ their student and non-student lives. Crucially, through the experiences of Helen and Tori we have revealed the performative qualities attached to these separations whereby living at home students may adopt the ‘disadvantaged student’ as an embodied act – a part to play – that provides opportunities to ‘not belong’ and to manage time spent with and away from their student peers.

8

Rhythm-Making and Everyday Belonging: Understanding the Daily Commute as a Performance of (Not) Belonging

Introduction This chapter focuses explicitly on the everyday temporalities of living at home students’ experiences of university and the ways in which they feel (un)able to cultivate a sense of belonging. Here, we again combine qualitative data from the Lancaster and Portsmouth studies to put our framework of everyday mobile belonging to work. By focusing on everyday rhythm-making (rather than linear transitions) we open up a space for a more nuanced reading of what it means to feel a sense of comfort, connection and inclusivity at university for living at home students of different ages and backgrounds. Thus, whereas the previous chapter compared and contrasted the activity spaces of residentially mobile and living at home students, here we take commuting performances as the central focus. Looking exclusively at the experiences and practices of living at home students – in particular the rhythms and routines that they negotiate and choreograph as part of their everyday participation – we extend our framework even further to demonstrate the significance of movements and rhythm-making for the ways students (especially those on the margins) are able to feel a sense of belonging in higher education and, likewise, manage feelings of otherness and not belonging. In the following discussion we pick up on the ideas discussed in Chapter 3 around rhythm, temporality and choreography. As we argued in that chapter, these concepts are not new in educational research (see Gordon, Holland and Lahelma 2000) or indeed geographical studies of mobility and performance (see Cresswell 2006b; Nash 2000). Belonging is, however, more often than not, understood as a linear, accumulative and bounded process in higher education research (if indeed it is seen as a process at all), and through our framework we

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seek to take the field into new and more fruitful theoretical directions. As shall become clear in this chapter, because belonging is rarely seen as a process with and in tension, we are left with somewhat clean and neat visualisations of what fitting in (or standing out) might look and feel like, especially for those who are able to belong and who move like fish in water. Chapter 3 outlines the value of notions of dance and choreography for making visible the ways in which belonging is embodied, performed and negotiated. However, as Cresswell (2006) notes, when we think of the ideal dancing body, we see one that experiences pleasure but also one that has experienced exclusion and othering, on account of having had to learn to produce and perform the correct movements, in the correct sequence, and take up the right amount of space. We take these ideas forward here to show how living at home students engage in different forms of rhythm-making – to a certain extent choreographing their daily commuting performances  – to achieve different affective and embodied experiences which contribute to (and mitigate) feelings of (not) belonging. The chapter is organised into three discussion sections in which, drawing on our rich empirical data sets, we outline three modes of rhythm-making, which typify the practices and performances that enable living at home students to manage and make sense of their feelings of belonging at university. These are:  rhythms of respite and (self)care, rhythms of resistance and rhythms of reorientation.

Rhythms of respite and (self-)care This first section examines the ways in which the everyday practices of commuting were understood by living at home students, as mechanisms through which to generate rhythms of care; both for the self and for others, such as children, siblings and friends. As we demonstrate, the daily commute – whether that be a bus journey, a car-share, a walk through the city or a bike ride  – was not unilaterally experienced as a barrier to full participation, but an important spatio-temporal process of rhythm-making that afforded time for relaxation, respite and studying on the move, while also allowing students to connect different aspects of their lives in (often) well-rehearsed sequenced performances which, either enhanced their feelings of belonging at university, or highlighted the challenges they needed to negotiate. For a number of participants, then, finding mobility sequences that enabled them to integrate these moments of care into their everyday lives was central to any feelings of belonging they hoped to achieve whilst at university. There were,

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perhaps unsurprisingly, gendered dimensions to this mode of everyday rhythmmaking and how, related to this, the ways in which belonging were conceived and understood. Indeed, we are mindful that, in using metaphors of dance and performance, we run the risk of reinforcing associations between dance and femininity (Foster 1998, cited in Nash 2000:  657). This notwithstanding, as already stated, we are not referring to dance as an erotic, unstable or unknowable performance, but rather and more often, as a taught, scripted and highly formalised and rehearsed set of practices and routines, even when these are produced to push back against established ways of being. We begin with Jane from the Portsmouth study, a mature student in her forties who lived with her husband 18 km away from the University of Portsmouth main campus. In the excerpt below it is possible to get a sense of her everyday mobilities (both off and on campus) were underpinned by attempts to manage and align her multiple identities and responsibilities, as these shifted over time and in competing contexts. Indeed, for Jane the commute to university was only part of a very complex and often conflicting constellation of daily routines that she needed to perform with a rhythmic precision, in order to achieve a sense of mobile belongingness and engage in practices of self-care. It is worth noting that Jane was studying for a degree in Criminology and during this time she also held down two part-time jobs and led a busy social life: Jane: I  work in there [points to building about a quarter of a mile from the university] and I  also work up the road in the [leisure centre]. So, on a Wednesday I’ve got two sets of swimming kit. And because they’ve got such a good gym facility there, every morning I go and do a work out there, so I’ve always got quite a lot of kit. So, they provided me with everything I need, changing rooms, lockers – because when I first came to university that was one of the things I thought I might be able to get, a locker. I could store books and kit in there overnight. But they said ‘no, no, we don’t do that’, which is fair enough. But all of a sudden I was at a bit of a loss, because I was coming over from [home town] with kit for the day and I’ve got about four different bags and I’ve got to drag them between the classrooms and work so it was a godsend really because I can just dump everything in there [office at work]. And another thing is, when you notice what it is like round here for parking, I can park my car in there for nothing. Normally my husband has the car but on days like today that’s just a godsend. To be able to just dump your car there and not have to worry about it and getting back to a parking ticket like a lot of the students do.

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We have deliberately kept this quote long and in its raw form because it illuminates the messiness and agency required to create sequences and rhythms that open up liminiod spaces and different temporalities in which different kinds of care may take place. Jane’s richly detailed account conveys the struggles faced by living at home students in drawing the multiple threads of their daily lives together into coherent performances. In the previous chapter we outlined the shifting activity spaces of live at home students who may be juggling work, study, leisure and family life, revealing that these can be complex and may change according to the selectivity of their social networks (Axhausen 2007). What we wish to draw attention to here, however, is the interconnectivity between each of Jane’s activities; the coordination between each of her dance steps, the sense of active and knowledgeable rhythm-making and the constraints that are negotiated in and through such performances. These negotiations contrast greatly with other work discussed earlier in this book that situates living at home students’ experiences as rigid, inert and immobile. Our analysis of Jane’s – and others’ – accounts forms what we term here as ‘plastic mobilities’, a process whereby everyday movements are filled with vibrancy and spontaneity, and crucially that emerge from assemblages of carefully choreographed steps. Like so many participants across the two studies, Jane’s daily commute was not a linear ‘home-to-work-to-home again’ routine and, moreover, the rhythms engendered by the commute did not merely serve to connect two separate spaces. In fact, what Jane describes is a sequence of carefully coordinated, rehearsed and refined dance steps that required some form of synchronicity between each locale to facilitate a smoother transition through her day (e.g. the lockers at the gym housed swimming kits, the office at work contained books for university, etc.) and that created in-between spaces (‘dumping’ the car in the car park, for example) that were no less significant for her feelings of belonging and practices of self-care. This offers quite a persuasive argument for considering how such coordinated mobilities constitute ‘short-cuts’ (Bissell 2013)  to ostensibly accomplish a goal in the most straightforward way, and also to remind us that as well as constraint, living at home students can be highly agentic and creative in managing both mobility and belonging. Hence, everyday rhythms of (self)care necessitate a complex process of mobility and mooring  – placing items for use at different times and for different activities. This points to the mobility improvisations discussed by Peters, Kloppenburg and Wyatt (2010) in which contingencies may be built into mobility decisions that best suit the flexibility of the individual, allow them to be responsive to their relational obligations (Jensen, Sheller and Wind

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2015), and generate new and highly personalised rhythms of (not) belonging. Here, the precarity of simultaneously balancing the emotional/affective and material characteristics of Jane’s commute (it is unclear how Jane copes when her husband has the car) demonstrates how living at home students’ mobilities may be approached tactically through a coordinated approach to planning and choreographing different spatio-temporal flows of movement. In extending previous literature, this relational dimension of mobility – co-mobility – is in itself part of the practices of care and mutuality that allow live at home students to manage feelings of exclusion and otherness. Moreover, successful commuting experiences are likely to be repeated (e.g. through leaving books and gym kit in an office at work or using the car to capitalise on free parking) and, as Jane attests, developed into a much larger network of everyday mobilities that coordinate her multifaceted identities. We identified many similar stories across the Lancaster sample as the majority of participants were women, several of whom had children or had caring responsibilities for kin. As a mature student, and a parent, Fleur (twenty-seven years old) provides a useful example of this. Feeling a sense of belonging was contingent upon her ability to manage the multiple rhythms of her university timetable, the school run, her husband’s shift pattern at work, and her own bodily energies as she combined the obligations of parenting with study, part-time work and a commute of 180 km (round trip). Fleur travelled by a combination of train, car, bus and on foot, depending upon the particular rhythms of her day, her commitments to family, the seasons and weather conditions, and whether she was able to car-share with a friend who was also a mature student and parent. Like so many participants, Fleur’s interview was full of intricate details about how the multiple spaces of higher education, home, family and work were sewn together in both practical and enriching ways; through her rhythmic performance. There were tensions and frustrations, of course; however, the train journey was articulated as a time to catch up on reading and planning, maintain links with course mates on the smartphone messaging app, WhatsApp; the bus ride to and from campus, although loud and chaotic, provided a brief period of solitude and escapism; and the days when she was able to car-share offered particularly rare moments of intimacy that were fundamental to her sense of ontological security and belonging. Fleur: On campus, I  have my little favourite areas. It’s not always easy to get them though, if I’m later, like, if I’ve had to come on the train. When I  come by car, I  get to the library super early and nobody’s around so

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I get one of the booths. I love the booths. They’ve got like a mini sofa; I like to commandeer those if I can. I spend my time on campus studying. I  never [come to campus] for just for scheduled teaching, I  like to be in and around the campus and get stuff done. I like to feel the buzz of student life. . . . I get a lift with my best friend; she’s at college, doing an access course like the one I did. I get a lift to college with her and then the bus onward to Lancaster. Sometimes she drops me off and picks me up. It depends on what time she finishes and what time I finish. It’s a mutual thing because I pay towards the petrol and she says it’s better for her to travel with someone else in the car. She can’t use the travel time as study time, and if she had to do that drive on her own every day, well she’d be bored. So, we are both so busy it means we have two hours three times a week where we talk about all sorts, I love it [laughs]. It’s a rare thing these days, time alone. She has children too so making similar decisions [about higher education].

As with Jane’s comments, Fleur’s narrative of everyday mobility and placemaking on campus is rich, detailed, busy and highly contingent on the other demands on her time and ability to produce particular spatio-temporalities that connect home and university life. Although all students have their own routines, living at home students, particularly those with children or those who travel significant distances to participate in higher education, often operate within more constrained circumstances that require tighter or well-choreographed rhythms (Moreau and Kerner 2012). As Fleur reflects, living at home students’ movements and flows are often rehearsed and perfected, drawing on accumulated spatial knowledge  – being early enough to commandeer the booths  – and these small accomplishments were often the source of pleasure and, hence, feelings of belonging. Fleur reflected on feeling out of place; she worried that as a mature student and parent she stood out against more traditional (looking) students. It was through her own place-making and rhythm-making, however, that she was able to stake a claim on the spaces of higher education, indulge in the comfort of the sofas, and, thus, feel more authentic in her performance of studenthood. Additionally, this example is indicative of the flexibility of living at home students’ engagements with mobility and campus, which is interesting given they are often presented as highly constrained and rooted. We are not suggesting that students like Fleur and Jane are not limited in their mobility performances and both accounts demonstrate the complex choreography of formal and improvised steps which make care for the self and others possible. Nevertheless, our focus adds to

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existing interpretations of choreography by making visible the good and the joyful, such as carving out new (and rare) routines – time alone – which became an important therapeutic practices and resources for a more student-oriented identity. A common theme across the sample was how feelings of belonging were produced or made inaccessible in response to the rhythms of the student lifecycle (and the rhythms of others) who may be engaged in different performances of rhythm-making of their own. Holly (twenty years old) is a first-generation entrant and was in her final year of a law degree at the time of her interview. After two years of living in shared student accommodation in Lancaster, Holly returned home to live with her parents, travelling around 65 km each day to attend university. Below she reflects on how her feelings of belonging at university were maintained through a change of location and, necessarily, of rhythm, further revealing the creativity and agency that students engage in to accomplish new degrees of ‘fit’ as their circumstances change and the conditions of self-care shifts. Holly: First year was fine, like obviously sometimes you get homesick, like you know when you’re ill and you’re like, you know I need my mum, but it was virtually only in second year when there was like a lot of arguing in the [shared] house, I was like, I don’t need to do this. I did enjoy being in [the city] you could do more stuff like if you were to go out in town, you don’t need to go home in a taxi. . . . I don’t think I’m missing out now, though. I feel like I’ve done two years. The third year is different, I don’t know many people who still go out in the third year, we’re all studying.

Holly describes belonging as emerging through different centring processes, constituted by different combinations of mobility and immobility (Arp Fallov, Jørgensen and Knudsen 2013:  468). This was a common theme; the ways in which students centred upon and around different spaces changed over the course of their studies, and in accordance with their changing social and intimate networks, their sense of place and orientations towards the future. Maya, a third year Social Policy student living with her family in the centre of Portsmouth, reflected on her desire to leave the area on completion of her degree, again challenging the idea that early decisions about where to study necessarily fix students in place and reveal how choreographies of care and belonging emerge over longer conceptions of the whole life-course and not in the discreet spatiotemporal dimensions of the university life-cycle. This is a point we explore

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further in Chapter 9; however, it relates to our theme of self-care and how this is managed over time by living at home students. Maya: I  guess I  wouldn’t change going to university here because I’ve had such a good time but at the same time there’s not much else here except for my friends which I can come and visit after university. I don’t really know what I’d do with my life when I’m not a student, I mean I’m thinking about doing a Masters but not down here, I wouldn’t want to do it down here.

Both Holly and Maya describe how mobility performances are rarely permanent or fixed for living at home students; indeed, change was both welcomed and expected in some cases, albeit in less traditional sequences than those we have come to know in popular and academic discussions of what it might mean to be an ‘authentic’ student. There were in fact many examples of students switching from home to university, and back again, as part of the necessary, and everyday negotiations of emotional, financial and educational concerns. These examples reveal a dynamism that undermines the binary conceptualisations of local/ non-local students and that suggests students feel able to choreograph their own transitions according to their changing circumstances, creating new and meaningful rhythms at various stages in the student life-cycle. There was a strong sense of selectivity then, freestyling you might say, as living at home students chose which bits of university to orient the self to, at different times, subverting the official spatio-temporal rhythms (that is, to leave home for university, and engage in onward mobility thereafter, as discussed in Chapter 9) that are laid out for them and held up as symbolically valuable (Bathmaker et al. 2016). It was through these smaller and larger modifications that living at home students were able to manage the whole constellation of obligations to kin, manage their own shifting emotional and intimate connections and find a space for their multiple and overlapping identities to sit together in varying degrees of comfort and coordination.

Rhythms of resistance In many ways, living at home and the rhythms of care described above are also performances of resistance which emerge through particular (and affective) movements through and ways of connecting different spaces during everyday commuting. Notwithstanding the close relationship between care and resistance,

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here we want to illuminate the ways in which mobility performances were choreographed in ways that enabled them to explicitly push back against some of the constraints they felt on their identities and upon what it meant to be a fully paid up member of the student community. Thus, in this section, we drill deeper into the idea of everyday student mobilities organised as constituting a direct challenge to conceptions of the traditional student, and which allowed these living at home students to retain a sense of authentic selfhood while participating as commuters rather than residentially mobile sojourners. We have discussed the ways in which everyday rhythms were adjusted and managed to respond to the rhythms of others, the working day, the cycle of the academic calendar and the degree programme more broadly. However, we want now to think about the significance of internal, bodily rhythms, for shaping the different choreographies of belonging of students who choose to live at home. These were especially important for Hazel, a mature, part-time undergraduate student at Lancaster University in her fifties, with complex health needs related to ME (myalgic encephalopathy, or chronic fatigue). During her go-along interview, which took place in a taxi cab that Hazel used frequently and alongside a driver with whom she had developed an ostensibly ‘close’ relationship, Hazel reflected on the ways in which her weekly journeys away from home – experienced as the site of her illness and recuperation and debilitation – had become important steps in the routinised, practiced sequence of her condition (and her resistance to it). She reflected on the ways the journeys away from home and her time on campus allowed her to (re)connect with, and remind herself of, a former life and a past identity in which she was a successful business manager and mentor to colleagues. In many ways, the decision to study a degree and engage in these mobility practices were part of a routine of self-care; however, inevitably, Hazel’s long journeys and busy days depleted her energy and, hence, were part of a process of resisting her condition and the constraints that she felt her disability put upon her sense of self. As the excerpt below reveals, Hazel had to find a rhythm in order to manage her on and off-campus movements to account for much needed rest and recuperation: Hazel: Because I’m inside the house so much and I haven’t got any energy to do anything when I’m at home I’m generally in or on my bed. So, it can get claustrophobic. So, this, university, is about getting away from home and about the brain cells rubbing together and still being able to apply yourself in an intellectual way, even though your body feels like its falling apart . . . its difficult in one way because I’m 51 and the people I’m

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interacting with are 19. . . . But I love growing people, and helping people to see what they’re good at. It’s nice to be able to contribute and help again. . . . Some days I practically crawl in [the taxi] and [driver] just lets me sleep the day off. Other days we put the world to rights and chat all the way. It depends on how I’m feeling.

Hazel’s experiences of disability and (im)mobility exemplify Nigel Thrift’s (2008) argument about the analytical value of metaphors of dance. By thinking of living at home students – and indeed students with disabilities – as developing their own personalised practices of place-making and rhythm-making  – choreographing their own ‘spatial stories’  – a more inclusive and ambivalent notion of belonging can emerge, that is not fixed to the territory of the university, or indeed to standardised notions of transition. Instead, this process involves multiple temporalities, movement and stasis and a sense of selectivity rather than universality. The examples discussed in this section reveal how students’ own rhythms are tied to their sense of place and place-making. Here, belonging emerges out of embodied expressions and affects, whereby the different interpretations and meanings attached to movements may be selected and modified to create a sense of comfort, inclusion and, in some cases, dis-location. Different students obviously have quite different ‘dance-spaces’  – that is, room for manoeuvre  – and some rhythms are subject to much tighter choreographies and policing whereas others are open to adaptation (Haldrup 2010). Nevertheless, like so many other living at home students in this study, particularly those with caring responsibilities or health issues, Hazel’s interview reveals that even her highly constrained everyday rhythms can provide a way to ‘transgress, play, dissimulate’ (Thrift 2000: 141) and this is integral to feeling a sense of belonging. We offer a word of caution here, about the extent to which all/some bodies are able to resist and transgress in this way. Hazel and others with health conditions described the significance of quiet spaces, away from the hustle and bustle of the more explicit student spaces. Lancaster University offers ‘offcampus accommodation’ comprising of seats, tables, lockers and kettles1 so that students who live at a distance from campus have access to the vital spaces of mooring which facilitate their daily (im)mobilities. Even so, this reminds us that the campus can itself be somewhat disabling and othering, producing a politics that living at home students are acutely aware of. Some students in the 1

At the time of the study there were limited facilities for off-campus students at the University of Portsmouth and these were provisioned unevenly between faculties and departments.

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Lancaster study complained about the expense incurred with having to moor in the many cafes and eateries on campus; they understood how this put them at a disadvantage to students who could slink back to their halls of residence for rest, study, or for food and drink. More than this however, as Fleur alluded to with her reflection on arriving early enough to ‘commandeer the booths’, some spaces simply became unavailable or unwelcoming because of the particular rhythms living at home students had access to. Aiden from the Lancaster study provides a useful example of this. He is a mature (twenty-four years old) undergraduate student from the South East of England; he relocated to a town approximately 20 km away from the campus and lived alone in private-rented accommodation. Thus, Aiden is not a traditional living a home student; nevertheless, he was explicit in his desire to eschew the traditional model of residential relocation, shared student living and everything that comes with that particular experience. In his interview he reflected upon the ways he tried to manage the spatio-temporal flow of his day, to account for the physical toll that his daily cycle ride to campus, and his early morning rowing club training, took on his energy levels. Additionally, he also describes the way the daily rhythm of his (im)mobilities were organised to create a sense of place and a soundscape that allowed him to directly resist and stand apart from stereotypical notions of the ‘student’ and, in doing so, feel a greater sense of belonging in a space where he openly describes himself as an outsider: Aiden: The library’s too loud and there’s too many people around. I mean it’s not loud but people are talking and you can hear them and they’re right next to you and I don’t like what they’re talking about so I don’t like that. I go to the Learning Zone now instead; they have these computers on really high tables, so I have to stand to work. I love this because I’m always so tired from rowing all the time, so I find if I sit down in front of the computer I just nod off (laughs). So, what I do is stand up so I can’t fall asleep and I do my work like that.

This excerpt again reveals the flexibility that living at home students engaged in with regards to their daily mobilities; experimenting and reworking their steps, changing the tempo of their engagement to feel a greater sense of affinity with higher education. Moreover, Aiden’s experiences are another example of the centrality of the body for feelings of belonging and how living at home students both respond to and create different campus rhythms, synthesising internal and external cadences and resisting cultures with which they feel so little affinity.

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As with the examples in Chapter 7, Aiden’s experiences indicate how some bodies can be disruptive in higher education spaces, sparking judgements, feelings of otherness and, in some instances, feelings of shame (Loveday 2016). Our living at home participants, particularly parents, mature and minority ethic students, were very aware of standing out on campus and concerned at how this might undermine their sense of connection. Faheema (nineteen years old) worried that as a young Muslim woman she stood out on campus, something that was heightened by her lack of affinity with the college spaces, particularly the bars and the drinking culture that characterised them. Managing her everyday mobilities to avoid this was central to her feelings of belonging, and forms of digital communication  – predominantly with her parents but also school friends – provided a mechanism for creating a sense of familiarity and maintaining imagined connections and a sense of home when transitioning between lectures and ‘killing time’. Retreating into online spaces became a strategy for belonging in this case, revealing how students are often embedded in multiple and overlapping spaces even when they are physically present on campus. This idea that everyday mobilities provided ways for living at home students to disappear or escape was a strong theme across the sample. However, this should not be understood as evidence of ‘not-belonging’ but as strategies for belonging that incorporate non-physical spaces and practices which allow for a leakage of one place into another. Indeed, outside of the official rhythms and routines of university, it was through informal, embodied activities in limonoid, mobile spaces that living at home students found ways to manage the ambivalence and conflicting emotions. Eve from the Portsmouth study, for example, shared similar reflections to Aiden, in terms of not quite feeling like she fit in. She is a mature student with a four-year-old son and lived approximately 13 km from the University of Portsmouth. Eve talked about how living a distance from university meant that, like Aiden and Faheema, there was a real separation between her student and non-student lives and she often felt like an outsider: Eve: I  wouldn’t say they [other students] were hugely welcoming, I  think they tried. I found it difficult personally to integrate into a new group. It’s something I find difficult to do anyway so it was hard to join in. Plus, having a child at home, other than this one girl who also had a child at home, nobody else had kids so it was really hard to grasp that I had to go home and that I had these outside commitments that weren’t uni [sic] based.

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For Eve, being a student did not involve her being part of a social community and this separation was reflected in her commute to and from campus – treating each space as fairly discrete entities. Nevertheless, this did have its benefits, particularly for her working practices and allowed her resist some of the demands on her at home: Eve: In many ways it’s easier at uni [sic] to study . . . I mean, at home I can shut the door but sometimes life does spill over into it [study time]. My little boy wants Mummy all of a sudden. It’s like ‘Mummy look, Daddy’s done this great drawing with me’ and he’ll want to show me and I’ll get interrupted in the flow.

In this way, Eve’s everyday rhythms were strategies for resisting the role of parent and carer, to find a space for study so although the spaces of university could feel alienating and unwelcoming, they were also sites of resistance and belonging at the same time. Resisting the practices and rhythms of the traditional campus was not always easy or possible, though. Rachel (twenty-one years old) reflected on the ways in which established institutional rhythms of exam periods and assignment submission were challenging for living at home students’ own temporal and spatial resources. Crucially, though, as the excerpt reveals, the mobilities of living at home students and their small acts of resistance can, in some cases, lead to change in institutional policies: Rachel: I  mean, we can access lecture notes online and do all this other stuff, but I’m supposed to travel in during the revision period to hand one essay in. It’s stupid and shows no consideration of what is going on for us [living at home students]. A few of us have complained. Who knows if it’s just lip service but there seems to be some desire to change things.

The pervasiveness of digital media and mobilities certainly has potential for supporting diversity and belonging through more diversified access to learning, teaching and assessment and for informal networks and peer support, helping foster a culture of belonging within the university amongst more diverse students (Timmis, Yee and Bent 2016). Students in both our studies talked of connecting with one another via messaging apps, and the value of Facebook groups for courses or working groups for maintaining a sense of community away from campus. However, with the prevalence of group work and assessments in higher education pedagogy, personalised choreographies were often interrupted by, and dependent upon, the rhythms and flows of other students with whom

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participants worked. Notwithstanding the role and significance of digital mobilities, working in groups is often dependent upon face-to-face corporeal interactions and several participants reflected that, when working alongside students who worked to different rhythms, this aspect of learning and teaching had the potential to disrupt and destabilise their sense of belonging: Rachel: A lot of people who are on campus, especially international students in my groups, don’t like getting up in the morning. They’re not used to the buzz, they work through the night sort of thing, they do all-nighters, they get up at like two in the afternoon and they’ll work [un]til two in the morning. But for me it’s not convenient in the sense that when I finish at 6 o’clock on a Tuesday I don’t get home until half seven and then if I’ve got work to do, I have like washing to do, general things that you have to do when you’re at home than what you do here, it’s just hard to arrange time to do things with people on campus.

When learning and teaching is contingent upon the synchronicity of rhythms of a diverse cohort of students, feelings of belonging can be challenged. Thus, group work might be planned as a way to help students make friends and gain a sense of belonging; however, these interactions, in the ways they disrupt personalised rhythms, can often make dance spaces difficult to negotiate and thus have the opposite effect.

Rhythms of reorientation In this final section, we show how living at home students managed their mobilities to reorient themselves to particular modes of selfhood, identity and place. The previous sections have revealed the tensions of managing multiple mobilities, caring for others and the self and resisting the pressures and stereotypes that come with the processes of being a student and being a person in the world. For some participants, however, mobility and particular choreographed movements were regarded and mobilised to reorient the self and make the transitions to and from particular ways of being. Finding a particular rhythm of mobility that enabled students to move between selves and different locations was a common theme for students across both studies and there were observable classed and gendered dimensions in terms of how these choreographies of everyday commuting were described and understood. Darius, from the Lancaster study, is a white twenty-eight-year-old

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PhD student, living in Manchester with his partner who also works away during the week. Commuting to (and, equally, away from) Lancaster engendered a set of well-practices steps and routines that made it possible for Darius to reconcile different dimensions of his identity as a PhD student and as a cosmopolitan urbanite, with particular values and orientations to the world. There were moments during his interview when he described his mobility sequencing as a means of mobilising his inclination to be a team player and group leader in Lancaster: Darius: Lancaster is great. It’s brilliant. I  think I’m lucky because the department always has something going on. We have reading groups, which I organise, we have like weekly things that we do together, we play [sports game] I  normally have dinner at my supervisor’s house once a week. Then there’s the supervisions [meetings] too . . . fortnightly. It’s quite an intense vibe. But I like that. I grew up playing football since I was eight so I like group stuff, I don’t like being cut off. I like being active in that, in the mix if you will. I was shitting it. Sorry. I was really panicked about it [the distance]. It’s a long way to come to spend the day on your own, and then travel back. But it’s never been like that.

Here, Darius describes a set of mobility performances that embed him in university life, even coordinating the rhythms of his wider study community; and yet his process of departure/return to Manchester was a way to reclaim his worldliness and a sense of being diverse and cultured in a way that Lancaster was not: Darius: there’s not enough going on [in Lancaster]. For both [him and girlfriend]. It’s too white a city, for me. I like Manchester. I have a lot of black and mixed-race friends. Last night I went to a Korean restaurant. Those are things I like to do and I couldn’t give them up for the sake of being a bit handier, day to day, getting to uni [sic] I mean. Those things about city living are very important for me. It just doesn’t feel right [in Lancaster] as nice a place as it is, and it is nice. For like half a day. But you can’t live somewhere like Lancaster. Not when you have travelled and stuff.

Darius situated his sense of cosmopolitanism within a background of travel and international mobility, referencing a much broader life-course choreography in which intercultural dances were key. In doing so he invoked a very disembedded sense of self and, through his everyday mobilities, is able to resist and stand apart from what he perceives to be the parochial rural spaces of Lancaster:

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Darius: I don’t like feel the liberty of coming up north into the countryside. I prefer getting back to the city. The size of the city. Feeling minuscule. It’s a really good thing for me. I like that feeling when the train rolls in to the city; it just feels gritty and anonymous. More me I guess.

Darius was, therefore, able to link together the aspects of his team player, sporty youthful self with this more anonymous identity through a carefully choreographed routine of reorientation in which the practice of travelling was fundamental. However, it is important to question the extent to which this playful, pastiche approach to identity is embedded within notions of disembedded masculinity and how a similar process might be experienced by others, particularly those like Rachel and Eve, discussed earlier, who have caring responsibilities and/or do not live in large cities. This process of reorientation was indeed more common in the narratives of male participants; however, large distances were not always required to engage in this kind of disembedded, ostensibly masculinist thinking. John (thirty years old), is a mature part-time postgraduate student in the Lancaster study who cycled into the university, where he was also employed in student services. For John, feelings of belonging were dependent upon the university recognising the multiplicity of his commitments and roles, his environmental values and facilitating his transitions from home to work, work to study and cyclist to student-worker: John: On my particular journey to university, if I  was to commute via car it would be like really stressful and congested, or I would have to leave probably about quarter past seven every day to actually make it through the traffic in kind of a general free-flowing experience. Cos otherwise you’re just stuck in traffic, wasting money, and I  actually, from a personal perspective, kind of from a work life balance and a productivity angle at work, I  know that riding to work helps my productivity. So, I commute to work and stay on for my classes, I do a bit of work, either at my desk or in the library depending how I feel, then go home on my bike. So I try and visualise it a bit like that, and the journey, it gives me that time to think about what my day’s got, what lies ahead, whether I’ve got deadlines or essays, whether I’ve got meetings to attend, so it kind of processes that stuff for me. Then also after the end of the day it helps me unwind, not de-stress because I’m generally not a stressed person, but it helps me, by the time I get home, I’m out of the work zone.

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Indeed, the idea that the official spaces of the university are the only sites of belonging is misleading. John’s comments echoed many others in which the liminoid spaces that connect home and university (the train, the walk, the car journey, etc.) were actually integral to how and to what extent they felt a sense of connection and belonging. These spaces became significant components of the choreographies of belonging, allowing our participants to reorient, resist and relax, as John articulates so clearly.

Summary In this chapter we have examined the ways in which the everyday commuting practices and movements around and in-between home and campus create particular rhythms of belonging for living at home students. We have therefore built upon our arguments presented in Chapter  7, which presented a more nuanced and individualised understanding of the ways term-time spaces are made meaningful, by bringing into view the liminoid, mobile, digital and niche spaces of experience that were so integral for our participants’ performances of belonging as rooted in practices of care, resistance and reorientation. While the analysis presented in this chapter rests the three dimensions of our framework – the everyday, mobility and belonging – by focusing on the particular negotiations of time and space for living at home students who engage in their own form of rhythm-making, we offer a further counter narrative to the idea of the commute as a barrier to full participation and feelings of belonging. To summarise our arguments in this chapter, we demonstrate that feelings of belonging emerge in and through the specific choreographies of daily mobilities, that allow students to create time and space for care of the self and others; to perform identities and activities that resist and push back against some of the established practices that might make them feel excluded at university; and to reorient the self to different aspects of selfhood and place. These are distinct findings and ways of belonging in an everyday sense; however, they share in common the need to find a rhythm through commuting, which facilitates a tight sequencing of different aspects of students’ complex lives (family, work, student, etc.). In doing so, we are able to further recast notions of the living at home student in ways that challenge representations of commuters as immobile or stuck. Instead, we present a picture of agency and creativity albeit within the constraints of imposed rhythms and identities associated with higher education students.

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In this chapter, we have shifted the gaze away from the traditional spaces of belonging to include cars, trains, public spaces away from the university and digital spaces that layer over and provide respite from physical spaces. Thus, it is by thinking of belonging as accomplished through rhythm-making, embodied practices and negotiating official, informal, physical and online spaces that a more inclusive framework can be formulated, aiding understanding of what differently located students need from institutions in order to feel connected to increasingly diverse spatio-temporal experiences of studenthood. Moreover, our focus on the temporalities of commuting also provides more insight into the ways time and feelings of belonging are closely linked (May 2016a, 2017). The temporalities of the terms, the seasons, the weather, the mobilities of key others and the student life-cycle are all important for how living at home students perform, adjust and perfect their everyday rhythmic interactions with the physical and digital spaces of the university. This point about time is crucial for leading us into the next chapter, which examines in detail the issue of post-student mobilities and how graduate transitions are understood through the lens of mobilities theory. While we develop and illuminate our everyday mobile belonging framework through the in-depth analysis of data generated by a small, locally specific sample, the theoretical arguments advanced here have much wider currency and import, having value for theorising online participation, international student mobility and modes of participation that do not rely on or privilege semi-permanent mobility and home-leaving.

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Ongoing Mobilities: The Complexities of (Not) Belonging to the Graduate Class

Introduction In this final empirically focused chapter, we turn to the issue of post-student mobilities, or what happens after students exit higher education as new graduates and move out into what we are calling, the ‘graduate class’. Much of the language about what happens following completion of university is predicated on the assumption that university-leavers are focused on graduate jobs, higherlevel earnings and careers. Indeed, in the UK graduate outcomes are measured through the Destination of Leavers in Higher Education (DLHE) Survey, which records what university-leavers are doing six months after qualifying from their course.1 As we outlined in Part One of this volume, these metrics are linked to evaluations of teaching quality within the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF), and, therefore, have a significant impact upon university league tables. Consequently, post-university pathways are part of a matrix of information that current and prospective students must navigate when they think about value for money, the kinds of institutions they wish to attend – and therefore exit as graduates – and for the ways they imagine their post-university trajectories into some kind of collective class of graduates. As we reveal in this chapter, however, there are strong geographical, spatial and temporal dimensions underpinning graduates’ experiences of the labour market that shape post-student (im)mobilities and, yet are not captured in the ‘six month metric’ of the DLHE survey or debates about graduate success. Bathmaker and colleagues (2016) reflect on this point in their own qualitative longitudinal study of student transitions. They argue that idealised notions of 1

The Destination of Leavers in Higher Education Survey ran from 2003 to 2017 and was sent to all graduates six months after completing their degrees. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/29-06-2017/ sfr245-destinations-of-leavers.

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social mobility and swift transitions into graduate level jobs sit (uncomfortably) alongside a burgeoning debate about a generation of young people being lost, jilted even (Howker and Malik 2013), and lacking a sense of a clear and certain future. They maintain that while there have always been competing demands on final-year students as they look towards the future, ‘there are features of the current situation that increase the pressures on these young adults, above and beyond the debts they are carrying with them’ (Bathmaker et  al. 2016:  100). These include the increasing costs associated with independent living, such as spiralling rents in the private sector and limited state support for young people’s housing; the competitive nature of the (increasingly globalised) graduate labour market; and the fact that a degree is often just one dimension of the package of attributes that employers are looking for, meaning that graduates today must amass evidence of a range of curriculum vitae (CV)-enhancing activities from contributions to sports teams, societies and unpaid internships (Bathmaker et al. 2016: 101). Thus, the graduate class is now a complex and diverse cohort, whose experiences are stratified along ethnic, class and gender lines as well as in accordance with home region (Wilton and Purcell 2010; Rafferty 2012; Woodfield 2012; Burke 2015). In this chapter, we extend debates that underscore the heterogeneity of the graduate class by applying our everyday mobile belonging framework to reveal how the ongoing (im)mobilities of university-leavers are not rational, step-bystep, linear life projects, but  – instead  – patchwork, rhythmic, disrupted and ‘frayed’ (Sabelis and Schilling 2013). We argue that notions of post-student mobilities  – particularly those which are idealised in policy discourse  – ‘[do] not take into account the flexibly changing demands of contemporary life-worlds and hence [have become] increasingly problematic’ (Sabelis and Schilling 2013:  128) when making sense of both men and women’s postuniversity experiences. As with Chapter 8, we focus here on the rhythmicity of experiences of imagining and planning future mobility decisions; however, we extend our theoretical gaze to incorporate longer temporalities of the student life-cycle and the life-course, which go beyond, but are informed by, notions of the everyday. As Cuzzocrea (2018) argues, there are two contrasting demands upon the experiences of young adults, students and graduates; one operates at the level of everyday life – a sense of social acceleration, busyness and the need to accumulate experiences and qualifications that will enhance employability – the other is a ‘permission to decelerate’ (3), a period of ‘waithood’ that allows university leavers to experiment with possible selves and that unfolds in biographical time.

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To explore these different temporalities and the rhythms that they inform, we again synthesise our different data sets to understand, first, how students look forward and imagine their future (im)mobilities as part of a practice of belonging (to a generalised notion of the graduate class and within their own personal social worlds) and, importantly, as coping strategies for their immediate situations. Secondly, drawing on data from the qualitative longitudinal study with women graduates (see Chapter  5), we are able to offer insights into the ways post-student mobilities were made sense of retrospectively and the identity work undertaken as part of this process of meaning-making. We acknowledge that this sample is small and includes only women as well as graduates who had left home for university. Yet, as with Chapter  6 we argue that including these participants’ experiences provides excellent context for our everyday mobile belonging framework, particularly as their comments illustrate how the home may continue to represent a space of (im)mobility for all students well beyond graduation. Moreover, these participants reveal how orientations towards (im)mobility and the labour market are understood, relationally, and as part of broader conceptions of the life-course and the increasingly ‘frayed’ nature of career trajectories under neoliberalism. We begin with a short statement about how and why graduates have become synonymous with discourses of the neoliberal, agile, mobile subject, considering some of the complexities of this way of knowing university leavers and the post-student experience. We then move into our analysis of how post-student mobilities were articulated from the vantage points of looking forward and looking back.

Graduates as mobile subjects When we think about the mobilities of university-leavers, the social and geographical are deeply intertwined. Often, in such debates, issues relating to earnings and job satisfaction are framed within the context of whether graduates spent time abroad as students. In their Gone International reports Universities UK make clear claims about the value of study abroad programmes for employment outcomes; something that is evident in the titles of their annual publications, The Value of Mobility (2016), Mobility Works (2017) and Expanding Opportunities (2018). Indeed, in their 2018 report it is argued that mobile graduates from the 2015/16 academic year were more likely to be in graduate employment or further study; and were more likely to have a higher starting salary and a lower

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unemployment rate than their non-mobile peers (5) and of overseas employment of graduates for ‘contributing to global connectivity’ of the UK (2017: 4). Like the TEF, this research draws on data from the DLHE survey and, in doing so, the temporal reference point of six months post-graduation becomes embedded as a key moment in the rhythms of post-student life. Moreover, like so many readings of ‘mobility’ the Gone International reports discount internal and regional migrations, focusing solely on the apparent value of international study and work, neglecting to consider the important contributions graduates make within their home regions and, crucially, the reasons why they might be drawn back – or choose to stay – there. In Chapter 2 we discussed Ball’s (2015) research for the HECSU, which offers an interesting picture of the pattern of movement within the UK as students’ transition out of higher education. Ball’s findings are useful for framing the coming discussion because they speak, in part, to the regions from which our data are drawn. Thus, for students and graduates in the North West, there are complexities and economic penalties attached to the decision to remain in the region after completing university. Conversely, for those in the South East there is more to be gained by remaining loyal to the region. However, Ball’s work also relies on the DHLE data and, hence, the ‘six month rule’ is further embedded as a key objective temporal dimension of graduate identity, success and belonging. As Cuzzocrea (2018) argues, however, the impact of this is a sense of increased personal responsibility, bolstered by social acceleration, ‘as it becomes necessary to collect qualifications, “marketable experience, and more generally, titles  – what Holdsworth (2015) has called ‘the cult of experience” ’ (7). Thus, while there are long-held assumptions about the ways moving out of home for university can provide the necessary first step on the road to adulthood and independence (Patiniotis and Holdsworth 2005) as part of a lifecourse of linear geographical mobility that takes young adults away from home, increasing numbers of university leavers are moving (or remaining) within their family home while they collect the kinds of attributes and experiences to which Cuzzocrea and others refer. We provide a more detailed overview of the ‘boomeranging’ and ‘yo-yo’ transitions literature in Chapter 2; nevertheless, for the purpose of context, it is important to mention studies which have shown a less linear trajectory for university-leavers (Mitchell 2006; Stone, Berrington and Falkingham 2014; Sage, Evandrou and Falkingham 2013). This work, while illuminating important shifts in post-university mobility patterns, necessarily reinforces the notion that university-related mobility ought to signal the end

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of ties with home (and when it does not, this is problematic). Indeed, the discourse that links home-leaving with particular (and symbolically valuable) characteristics of a responsible/sustainable/ethical graduate self (Ahier, Beck and Moore 2005) is persistent, and international mobility is often regarded as the exemplary experience for becoming a well-resourced graduate (Van Mol 2014). Notwithstanding, these ways of thinking about (im)mobility and belonging for university-leavers fail to capture the everyday experiences of most students and graduates, who remain deeply entwined with family, region and home during and beyond university. We examine the implications of this in the coming sections. Having outlined some of the patterns of post-student (im)mobility we now turn to our data sets from Studies One and Two (the Portsmouth and Lancaster studies) to consider the ways in which, in the first instance, students imagined their ongoing graduate (im)mobilities and the tensions and temporal complexities such imaginings triggered when they considered their routes of entry and belonging to an idealised graduate class. Following this, and drawing on Study Three (the QLR project), we examine retrospective narratives of poststudent mobility to consider the ways in which mobility is tied up in notions of success and wellbeing for graduates in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Looking forward: Imagining post-student (im)mobility In this section we investigate the process of imagining post-university mobilities and how these become part of particular strategies of belonging and identity work for students approaching the end of their degrees. We focus on the ways in which a sense of belonging – to the notion of a successful graduate class – was integral to the ways students were (un)able to imagine their futures and the ways social, geographical and spatial mobility would shape these. Our first example comes from the Portsmouth study. Tori was a final year student who previously lived in student accommodation but, after a fall out with her housemates spent a lot of time living back home with her mother about 60 km from Portsmouth. In her final year she rented a room with her boyfriend who was not a student and in the following excerpt she spoke of how although living back in Portsmouth was helping tie everything up she planned to return home after completing her studies, this time with her boyfriend:

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Tori: I think that this year I have actually stayed in the city a lot more. Before it would be really easy to be like ‘oh, I’ve only got an hour’s lecture, I’ll read about it on [university repository] from home in my own space’. But now it’s only five minutes down the road you go to it and it’s that much easier and it fits in, and because you’re happier here you don’t feel the need to have to keep going back to your parents because you’ve got a nice space of your own. Interviewer: This feeling of having your own space is quite important then? Tori: Yeah, it’ll be quite difficult to go back after uni [sic] because we’ve got so much into a routine. Interviewer: Where does your boyfriend come from? Tori: He’s from East London but he’s got a job near me to go to after uni [sic], so he’s going to end up living with me at my parents. But also, when I went home, he went home with me so he’s kind of like been involved with the family for years so it’s all like quite close. Interviewer: So, it won’t be too complicated to move then? Tori: No, we did it during summer holidays and stuff and we’d be at mine all the time, so we’re quite used to it really.

In this exchange we can see how post-student mobilities are imagined in the context of rhythms and routines that are already established; that is, the past, present and imagined future sit alongside one another. Moving home is clearly part of strategy of becoming employable and, though perhaps not a first or even preferred option, Tori’s family home is valuable in providing a liminal space in which she and her partner can accumulate work experience, become more financially secure, and experiment with cohabitation at this early life course stage. Thus, we can see the interplay of everyday and biographical temporalities here, and while there are points of tension (losing a space for herself), these can be reconciled through the familiarity that Tori and her partner have built up with her family through regular spatial mobilities and interactions. It is important to acknowledge here that as Tori imagines a return, this is not formed by a binary home/away typology, because she has moved from different residential statuses as part of her ongoing and changeable mobilities as a student. Movements are rarely definitive, and Tori subscribed to neither the ‘mobile’ nor ‘local’ student categories exclusively. Crucially, this appears to have influenced how she is able to imagine her post-student mobilities away from Portsmouth as something entirely different than ‘boomeranging’. This first example illuminates that students and graduates ‘often employ adaptive strategies and might interchangeably opt for one direction or another in a relatively short period of

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time’ (Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016: 554) making it difficult to produce binary typologies of the mobile or immobile graduate. It is crucial, then, to focus on the relational, reflexive and highly temporal orientations towards movement and fixity that students negotiate across space and time. Holly from the Lancaster study was approaching her final exams when she was interviewed. She also had a mixed mobility trajectory, living in Lancaster for years one and two and moving home in her final year to focus on study. When asked about her plans for work, she explained that she had undertaken work experience in a law firm in Southport, which was a straightforward commute from her family home in Preston. As she imagined her post-student mobilities, she expressed a strong desire to remain at home to ‘get herself sorted’, revealing the ways in which the period after graduation can become a form of ‘procedural waithood’ as university leavers ‘realise they are missing some pieces of the picture and that without them cannot proceed any further’ (Cuzzocrea 2018: 12). In Holly’s case, this was valuable work experience in a reputable law firm: Holly: So, I’d actually be looking for a job to apply [in Southport]. I’m not too fussy. Ideally I feel like Manchester, while I’m living at home, is too far only because your commute is horrific, like it can take you two hours in the morning to get there with all the traffic. If I  was to get a job in Manchester I’d have to move closer to Manchester, but I  don’t know. I think I would move out of Preston but probably not like too far. I want to stay [with family] for the time being until I  get myself sorted, but I don’t think I could find the right job in Preston. I mean, there are law firms, of course, there are but I want to go to a really good firm. I don’t think I’ll get to one of the like, the main really big firms. There is one of the big ones PWC; they do have a firm in Preston so I was looking at that, but I really liked the one I worked at in Southport and it came in the top one hundred best places to work in the UK, so. And I know the woman who’s HR for them which is why I got the work experience in the first place so she shared it on Facebook. Interviewer: How do you know her? Helen: Through my mum. She’s my mum’s old friend. Interviewer: Do you think you could get back into there once you’ve graduated? Helen: I don’t think I could get to it through her but by myself hopefully, cos [sic] it was, I would think as well cos [sic] I’ve been there for work experience they might sort of I already know the environment.

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Holly’s interview indicates the significance of social and emotional capital for the ways students imagined their graduate (im)mobilities, as well as the ‘spatial reflexivity’ (Cairns 2014) which allows her to reconcile her career aspirations with notions of work-life balance and well-being. She wanted to capitalise on her warm contacts and, at the same time, work for a reputable company and balance her commute with relational ties at home. Although finding work in a larger city like Manchester might provide access to higher salaries for some kinds of knowledge work (though, research by Resolution Foundation reveals regional decline in terms of salaries and opportunities (2017)), decisions about internal migration for employment often emerge as a way to enhance job satisfaction and are motivated by non-monetary aspects of work life, such as the quality of the fit between employee and organisation, working conditions and security (Perales 2017). For Holly, the reputation of the firm and the ability to minimise the stress of the commute were both important factors. In this way she was able to imagine herself as belonging to the graduate class, working for ‘one of the best places to work in the UK’, while also being able to remain connected to her rhythms and routines of home life that sustained her. While Holly articulates an ostensibly busy and productive post-university waithood; there were others for whom the process of imagining a future was much more fraught with anxiety and distress and, thus, here waithood was articulated as a sense of entrapment and feeling stuck, without options for movement. Much has been written about the locational choices of graduates, especially those in rural areas (Bjerke and Mellander 2017). Many of the living at home students who participated in the Lancaster study travelled from fairly remote, rural parts of the Lake District; an area of natural beauty but with few opportunities for highly skilled work and fewer higher education institutions offering postgraduate courses than large cities such as Manchester, London and Birmingham. Consequently, when Timothy – a final year Natural Sciences undergraduate – was interviewed about his own experiences of living at home and planning for the future, his narrative was full of distress and disappointment at not being able to imagine his next move, having not being accepted on to the Masters programme at Lancaster University. Timothy liked living at home. He came from a very middle-class family with high stocks of academic and cultural capital (both parents and his older siblings possessed PhDs). However, although this brought many of the advantages available to more traditional students in terms of his sense of belonging in the spaces of higher education, his rootedness in the rural town where he lived with

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his parents, sister and dogs, meant that his options for further study – indeed at a high-status university – were very limited: Timothy: I try not to think about much when I’m travelling. Particularly at the moment because my mind can drift, like, to what’s next. What I’m doing after [graduation]. Interviewer: Is it stressful for you? Timothy: Yes, it is really. Like, since I  realised I’m not doing the Masters degree now. My grades aren’t up to it. I  just don’t know what is next for me, hmmm (visibly anxious). I have tried to find a Masters degree elsewhere, but I don’t want to move away really. I just can’t think about it (becomes distressed). I  dread it. It’s mostly having like familiarity, especially the people, my family, the dogs. I’m not sure if I want to do a doctorate yet. A  Masters would help me to decide. If I  come out of Lancaster with a 2:2 – which looks about right by now, I didn’t do well in my exams last year – but if I could get a distinction in a Masters then I could get ahead again.

Timothy’s interview was framed by a sense of being stuck, unable to move or even imagine onward mobility, but nevertheless being fixated on the Masters and the notion of forward academic progress. It did not seem to occur to him that he had time to make decisions about his future once university was over and his grades were confirmed. This is perhaps because of the ways ‘dead times’ (Leccardi 2009: 31) are read as problematic and perverse (cf. Cuzzocrea 2018). Indeed, the stress of his indecision and the pressure to make a choice was palpable, revealing the ‘cruel optimism’ of continuing to invest in a hopeful orientation to the future whilst simultaneously taking full responsibility for (not) fulfilling his own potential (Mendick et al. 2018). This again reiterates arguments about the ways in which graduate success is framed by notions of social acceleration and how new graduates can feel trapped and constrained by temporal discourses which leave little room for reflection. More than this, however, Timothy’s case is interesting because of the challenge it poses to discourses around ruralism, brain drain and the exodus of highly skilled graduates to the urban centres of the South East. Reminiscent of Donnelly and Evans’s (2016) research with young people in the Welsh Valleys, Timothy articulates both an aspirational vision of his future (albeit with limits) and a strong sense of connection to his roots in the rural north. It is perhaps Timothy’s emotional connection to academic and social mobility via postgraduate education that hinders his ability to imagine an alternative future, more than his geographical fixity. It is important to restate,

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then, just how post-graduate study can operate as an instrument of cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) whereby one’s attachment to an idea of a future brings the promise of belonging on the one hand, but feelings of impossibility and loss on the other (Franceschelli and Keating 2018). We mentioned Maya’s experiences in Chapter 8. Maya is from the Portsmouth study and, in contrast to Timothy, felt that after living at home to study, her post-university trajectory would involve mobility away from home. Although Portsmouth had provided the kinds of rhythms that suited Maya as a student, she confessed to ‘not knowing what to do’ in Portsmouth without the security of her student identity. Interestingly, Maya saw postgraduate study as a chance to move away. It is possible that this new willingness for mobility has been cultivated within the context of higher education, which itself promotes the image of the entrepreneurial agent, ‘who is opposed to that which is locally embedded (or immobile)’ (Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016:  554). Having learned the ‘rules of the game’ during her time at university, Maya latterly began to articulate a much stronger orientation towards geographical mobility and, indeed, this became part of the ways in which she was able to feel a sense of belonging to the graduate class. As Maya felt a growing lack of certainty about how she would do everyday life as a graduate in Portsmouth, mobility intervened to allow her to disconnect and escape, providing a sense of agency at a time of uncertainty (Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016). As we have explained, Timothy came from a family of highly qualified scientists, for whom post-doctoral study  – at elite institutions  – was part of the expected trajectory. Thus, he was quite possibly operating within different rules or, at least, a different sense of the game. This made it very difficult for him to imagine an alternative pathway and is, thus, revealing of the significance of family and class-based rhythms for informing personalised choreographies and how difficult it can be to shake these off, even when feelings of belonging are under threat. Thus, post-student belongingness echoes our findings from Chapters 7 and 8, being informed by the interconnections of everyday practices (and comforts) of family-life, the emotional geographies of mobility and immobility, and notions of what it means to be a successful graduate. This point is crucial in understanding post-student mobilities because, notwithstanding how resilient and creative living at home students might become as part of their everyday mobility performances as students, this comes to nothing if they cannot convert this into a career that they feel is valuable and successful. As we shall demonstrate with the example of Rachel however, these interconnections play out rather differently when there is a different orientation towards the game

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of higher education. Thus, Timothy and Rachel provide useful examples for contrast when considering post-student mobilities and graduate identities. While it was very common for living at home students to express a desire to find study or work that allowed them to remain in the region, there were a number of cases where students imagined rather different trajectories and were more embracing of the idea of moving regions once university was over. These students tended to be highly pragmatic in the ways they framed their decision to live at home during university, highlighting issues around cost and minimising the financial impact of higher education as motivating factors. Equally, then, they were similarly pragmatic about their post-student mobilities, recognising the limited labour market in their home region and the opportunities that moving to a large urban area might bring. Rachel, a first-year student in the Lancaster study, explained that a move to London, where she had extended family, was the best option for her beyond her time at Lancaster. It is worth noting that Rachel took two years out before attending university to save money and buy a car; hence, she had a very pragmatic approach to her engagement with university, had experienced a form of waithood already and, crucially, was embedded within an older friendship group whose own rhythms and routines were important for the ways she imagined her next steps: Rachel: I do feel at home here but I don’t see it as a permanent residence, it’s kind of, I feel like I’m passing through if that makes sense. I spend my time [at home] and it’s fine, but then in a few years time I know that we’ll move. I know that my mum wants to move to the Lake District as soon as my sister’s finished high school, so that’s probably something they’ll do. Interviewer: You won’t go with them? Rachel: I don’t think so, I’ll be like 26 so I’ll probably want to be out of the home then, I want to have my own place to live and to be honest, the opportunities for a career are very limited. Unless I went into hospitality management and I don’t want to do that. Like I want to go into or carry on within business. I’ll probably just try and apply for some sort of internship scheme or something like that. I have family I can stay with in London, well just outside. That will be better for me. I won’t want to do a post-grad or anything like that. I don’t think that’s for me. Interviewer: Really, you seem very studious? Rachel: I am quite studious, I’ve always liked studying; I like education and I’ve always thought ‘oh it’s important to do it’ but I don’t know. I think it’s my age; I think it’s because I’ve got to a point, I’ll be 24 I think by the time I graduate, and I want to be working or being able to pay for my own

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house or bills and family, I don’t know, things like that, whereas if I’m still studying, I just feel like I’m kind of hindering myself. All my friends have finished their undergrads [sic] and most of them aren’t going further with their education. They’ve got into good schemes and they’re securing like deposits for a house, things like that. I kind of want to be doing the same as them if that makes sense.

Rachel’s experience of looking forward is deeply embedded in her relational connections to friends and family, and the rhythms that she observes of key others around her, as well as the notions of what it means to be a successful twenty-something graduate. She does not feel a sense of connection to further study, despite her fondness for and investment in education, and this is largely due to what she sees as appropriate life-course rhythms for a young woman, making her way in the world. We wish to dwell on this example to draw out the ways in which ‘belonging’ is often conceptualised as following a well-worn path, doing things that both reflect and reinforce powerful notions of the ‘generalised other’ (Holdsworth and Morgan 2005). If we take this approach then Rachel, in eschewing the typical route of others, appears disengaged and disadvantaged; however, we see Rachel as highly dynamic in making specific choices about her trajectories and sticking to them, and this informs her sense of self and belonging.

Looking back: Retrospective accounts of (not) belonging to the graduate class In moving to the findings from Study Three, of the ten women interviewed as graduates (from the original sample of twenty-four participants), eight said that they had returned to their hometown  – Millthorne  – following completion of their undergraduate studies. This group of women exhibited similar characteristics of everyday mobile belonging while living at home as graduates as our other participants who lived at home as students. This pattern of post-student mobility was evident for those women who studied relatively locally (i.e. within the North, broadly defined) and for those who had migrated several hundred kilometres away. Emily is an example of the latter. She studied a degree in Music and Management in the South East of England and although she expressed ambivalence towards her home town both prior to and during her time at university, she returned to live with her parents soon after graduation. She reflects on this decision in the excerpt below:

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Emily: You know, my parents have always been very much like, ‘there’s always a home for you here’ and even though that’s not what I necessarily want, it does mean I can focus on developing my career and saving for a house . . . I think my dad just wanted to help in any way he could but he wasn’t going to give me money.

By moving home and benefitting from free lodgings and the use of the family car, Emily was able to take up a six month, unpaid internship with a digital promotions company within the music industry in a nearby city. The position was part-time and she received a subsistence allowance to compensate for her commute; however, over time she became increasingly disillusioned with the precarity of the internship, the time spent travelling away from Millthorne each day, and the elusive sense of belonging as a new graduate. She described how she wanted to feel a sense of progression; of working up the ranks and, like Rachel from the Lancaster study, belonging was situated within the broader rhythms of the life-course, growing up and living independently. Thus, she decided to take a career change which, although not using her degree directly, allowed her to earn, accumulate savings and live, independently, with her partner. As others have noted, stages of working life (or lives) ‘are interlinked and biographic: marking, as it were, recurrent hurdles and beautiful events on a meandering path’ with the rhythmicity of careers mapping onto the ‘transition periods in working lives attached to the rhythms of life’ (Sabelis and Schilling 2013:  131). It was clear from this data set that when post-student decisions were narrated and made sense of, notions of biography and the choreographed nature of the life-course, was central for these women. Emily alludes to the fact that a move home was not necessarily her preferred choice, but a compromise that materialised as she reconciled the pragmatic with the emotional. Indeed, these women graduated in the midst of a recession in the UK and at a time when graduate unemployment was very high. Harriett, who also lived away from home during university, reiterates this ‘needs must’ attitude towards moving home as a new graduate, as she described her departure from Bristol back to Millthorne and her decision not to pursue postgraduate study directly after completing her first degree: Harriett: At first, when I moved back, I sort of said right, I will give myself six months and then I can move on somewhere else. And [postgraduate study] wasn’t something I wanted to do straight away, you know, because obviously I’d done four years [at university] and I  just thought maybe I’ll just have a year off, and at that time and especially in my last year,

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I was thinking about going travelling, doing some volunteering abroad sort of thing. I definitely didn’t want to come home. But I was also toying with trying to get into the prison service and doing their sort of, you know, they’ve got a very set way of doing things which includes a Masters degree, and various bits of sort of trainings. But I dunno, I just felt like it wasn’t the right time to be, well, putting my eggs in that one basket, you know. I felt really confused and in the end I just sort of, well I came home because I was skint and running out of money. Now, it’s been what, 18 months? And I’m happy and settled and who knows, I can always go back to that plan for Masters later.

Harriett’s articulation of time is very interesting and we can see how she is not operating from a notion of a linear, forward moving progress, but listening to the rhythms of her own physical, mental and emotional state. There is a sense of her being exhausted with study, even though she is still considering a Masters degree in the future. Of course, it may be that this narrative of ‘maybe in the future’ was for the benefit of the interview; even so, there is an interesting orientation to the idea of waithood here, that challenges some of the dominant thinking about social acceleration and accumulation of experiences and qualifications. Moreover, it alerts us to the problematic nature of measuring graduate outcomes as early as six months after completion of the degree, when university-leavers might actually wish to take much longer to regroup, consider their options and replenish their depleted financial and emotional resources. Belonging in the phase following graduation is much more complex than the linear trajectory we are increasingly encouraged to work with, but involves stops, pauses, moments of retreat as well as forward movements. These periods of moratorium or waithood that are linked to personal experimentation are of course, more available to graduates without caring responsibilities or considerable financial commitments. Additionally, the women in the sample referred to broader ideas about what it meant to feel a sense of belonging as a graduate, making their way in the world. There were several references to wider peer and friendship networks; and, in a symmetry with Rachel’s comments in the previous section, there were several instances where participants measured their own post-university successes against what others were doing. For some this provided much needed comfort and anchorage, which were integral to feelings of belonging. If friends had returned to Millthorne then this allowed them to read their own return mobility in ways that were meaningful. Equally, where friends were living in rental

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accommodation in London, and often not putting down firm roots, then this meant they could rationalise their own feelings of liminality and precariousness. For Catherine, however, measuring the movements and accumulations of others was part of a competitive culture that she tried to distance herself from. Catherine moved back to Millthorne from the south west coast. She experienced a relatively tricky post-university transition into work and was underemployed for the local council: Catherine: I  don’t know. It’s really strange. It’s almost like a competition now. Who can have the best car, who can get a Masters degree, who can get a fancy job, who can start a family. You know it’s just on all levels that you would think there could be a competition. And I just thought, I don’t want anything to do with it, because I’m not . . . I didn’t feel at that time I was in a position to compete. But actually, I have got a job. I’ve got my car. I’m in a relationship. I’m happy. But I have distanced myself from [school friends] because it was just getting silly. We’d meet at the pub or whatever and it would just be a bragging contest and I didn’t feel like I had much to brag about. It made me feel quite low. Especially as I’d made quite a big fuss about moving away [before she started university].

There is much to dwell upon in Catherine’s account of negotiating her longstanding friend relationships after returning to Millthorne as a graduate. First, it is clear that a sense of everyday belonging for university leavers is shaped by a broader set of concerns than salary and contract type (Finn 2017) and that relational comparisons with similarly positioned others have the effect of undermining a sense of connection to notions of success. Thus, return mobility after graduating might help young adults with the practicalities of housing costs, but as a process it can lead to uncomfortable emotional geographies which involve confronting past selves and values, that can destabilise a sense of emerging identity, as Catherine notes. This leads to a second point about selfexclusion and limiting one’s mobility. Catherine gradually stopped attending the quiz nights at the pub as she felt othered and excluded from the competitive process she describes. She learned to choreograph her movements in such a way that meant she could avoid these interactions which threatened her status. Finally, Catherine’s comments reveal the ways in which comparisons are part of everyday meaning-making for young adults and graduates (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007), and even though she is able to rationalise and hold up her successes, the process of (not) belonging is always relational and far from stable.

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The myth of mobility as belonging In this final empirical section we trouble the idea that the mobile graduate is ultimately the happy and successful graduate; after all, mobility works doesn’t it? Even participants who had experienced significant geographical and social mobility as students, found their post-student mobilities challenging and did not always feel a sense of belonging in their new status as, largely, urban-dwelling creatives and knowledge workers in cities such as Manchester, Leeds and London. Sophie was a graduate from a Russell Group university in the midlands. She came from a middle-class family with experience of mobility and higher education and after gaining a first class honours degree, she returned home to Millthorne briefly, before moving to London to train as a theatre actress. In the following excerpt Sophie reflects on how she struggled moving back home and focused on the move to London as a key dimension of establishing a sense of belonging as a graduate, only to feel the opposite once she got there: Sophie: I think naively I went down thinking I’ll be fine once I’m in London but it was pretty awful actually. I  was terrified because I  didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. . . . up until that point I’d known exactly what I was going to do and I knew exactly how to achieve it. And I think it was the first time that it really, really hit home, like how uncertain it was and for the first time I really doubted whether I was going to be successful as an actress. And it was certainly horrible, you know, this was supposed to be it, the real thing, I just couldn’t see how to fix it all.

Sophie’s trajectory into, through and out of university had been a series of ostensibly linear moves. She went away, rarely came home and spent summers abroad with friends. London had always been the ‘end game’ and represented her true vocation, having done her degree to appease her parents who wanted her to have a back-up plan, should the acting career fall through. Arriving and living in London then, was the first time Sophie was, in many ways, ‘still’; that is, not driving towards a future goal or a particular set of mobility decisions. This stillness engendered a deep sense of anxiety and loss that many of the women felt after completing their studies, regardless of where they moved on or back to. Waithood can thus, be both productive and fairly destructive of belonging at this juncture. Mobility practices can have the impact of making us feel productive and active in the pursuit of goals and happiness. Stillness – or arrival – can open up spaces of dwelling (upon) our social and emotional situation, which can

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undermine as well as contribute to feelings of belonging, as we argue elsewhere (Holton and Finn 2018b). Also in London, Stacey, a graduate of an elite institution in Scotland, was working in publishing on a low salary but happy to be with her partner and among many of her university friends who also moved directly to London after completing their degrees: Stacey: We started dating at the beginning of fourth year, very beginning of fourth year. And then we both got jobs in London in the same week, so we ended up living together because it was convenient because we’re both, we work five minutes away from each other, so we both live in the same place. But a lot of his friends from [university] were different from my friends, and when we all ended up in London, we kind of all ended up friends. There’s a lot of [university] people in London. We still see most of our . . . I’d say 97 per cent of our friends in London are [university] people, still. It’s very nice, of course, but sometimes I  feel quite, I  don’t know. I feel out of it I guess. Like at university it wasn’t an issue because we were living away from home and all doing the university thing, but now. Like, a lot of my friends studied abroad. A lot of my friends studied international subjects. So one works for the American government in Dubai, one’s a doctor in India running a clinic there. A lot of my friends are doing graduate courses. Lots of girls are earning silly amounts of money are doing painful jobs like, accountancy where they have to stay until two in the morning if supplies have got a problem and then they have to start at six the following day, or international security where they have to jet off to Africa for a conference, which is what one of my friend does. And it’s just a bit painful so I’m quite glad I don’t do that but then I feel, like there’s a distance in terms of, like what we do.

Here we see the relational comparisons (Holdsworth and Morgan 2007) again and, even though Stacey has followed a similar geographical trajectory to her friends from university, she is aware that in terms of social mobility, there is a distance that has emerged and which positions her on the periphery of this group of new graduates in London. Thus, onwards mobility to large urban centres might open up opportunities for work and for maintaining friendship, however, it does not necessarily follow that the everyday practices of graduate employment will be similar across a friendship group or within the graduate class. This can have an impact on belonging, particularly when the experience of being a student is no longer the thing that binds a group together and differences

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begin to surface not only in experiences but material outcomes of various investments and mobilities. For some participants, a clear break with previous notions of student life was a way of avoiding the kinds of challenges that Stacey described. Ashley, for example, had lived away in Birmingham to attend university. Her experiences of making friends were a little rocky; however, in the end she found a group who supported her and understood her connections back in Millthorne; her family and long-term partner. When she was interviewed two years into her post-student trajectory Ashley was living back in Millthorne in a house she had recently bought with her partner and with financial and other support from their families: Ashley: You know, I’ve done that, that living away thing and it was fun and good and I did like it. But I’ve had that experience and, well, I know now that I’d rather have a nice home here, see family and travel out to work than do it the other way around. . . . Also, I kind of feel that, to an extent but it’s not a big deal that [her partner] has, you know, been here and I’ve been away and I have to, like, recognise that.

This excerpt is a helpful reminder that student (im)mobilities are not as finite as the literature suggests; indeed, they are connected to and have implications for the ways everyday mobile belonging is conceptualised and acted upon throughout life – informing decisions throughout life, for better and for worse.

Summary This chapter has examined the ways in which post-student mobility decisions are articulated prior to and after exiting higher education. Drawing on three data sets, and taking the vantage point of looking forward and reflecting back, we have shown that the ways students and graduates engage in post-student mobility is deeply embedded within and informed by their movements as students. That is not to say, however, that students who live at home during study remain at home as graduates; we actually found a diversity of experiences in this regard. It is more that what happens once university ends is related to broader concepts of relational (im)mobility and understandings of the life-course and careers as far less linear than the literature would perhaps have us believe. Our main takeaway message of this chapter is that students and graduates operate from within and work across multiple and overlapping temporal

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registers, and yet the DLHE survey, with its fixed six-month rule, is embedding an accelerated notion of success into our imaginaries of what it means to be a paid-up member of the graduate class. Following other studies, we found that participants reflected on moments of waithood, stillness and longer-term ideas about career and life-course trajectory that brought with them difficult and more positive emotions. We argue here that it is absolutely essential to appreciate and understand the various temporal regimes, registers and rhythms that students and graduates are negotiating in their pursuit of belonging and not become fixated on that defined by policymakers and metrics.

Conclusions

To begin this final chapter of the book we return to the initial premise set out in the introduction. In that chapter we argued that now was the right time to think critically about the multi-scalar mobilities experienced by higher education students in the twenty-first century. In recognising student mobilities research as a seemingly crowded field we posited that a more analytical and nuanced exploration of the mobilities of living at home students could offer interesting and important understandings of a ‘life lived differently’ and, hence, different modes of belonging. We also advocated a more networked approach to appreciating the myriad of environments (campuses, homes, social spaces, etc.) and people (students, families, colleagues, etc.) that constitute living at home students’ lives, as well as the various mobilities through which these are connected through walking, commuting, pausing and so on. In working through this the rest of this chapter is divided as follows: next we outline the contributions made by implementing the everyday mobile belonging framework and what a mobile-inflected sense of belonging might bring to discussions of living at home students’ experiences. Following this we focus on the changing hierarchies of the UK higher education system in light of mutable policy directives over the last seventy years. Through legacies of privilege we argue that there are distinct differences in how students are recognised (and perceive themselves) and that these need to be challenged if we are to ensure students are understood as a diverse and heterogeneous cohort. Next, we critique the role of the ‘typical student identity’ and the ‘authentic’ experiences that emerge from adopting such definitions to examine some of the ways in which living at home students implement tactics for opting in and/or out of student life. Following this we seek to challenge structured senses of belonging to examine more agential expressions associated with not belonging. Here we recognise the important embodied, choreographed performances of belonging and how these are disrupted by the structural process of the university. From this we investigate

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how graduates fit in with our everyday mobile belonging framework. In doing so we assess the disjuncture between the anticipation and realities of post-student life and the effects this can have upon mobile belonging. Finally, we provide an insight into how our everyday mobile belonging framework can be employed as a toolkit for understanding more critically the shifting associations with place and the agency involved in experiencing the wider world.

Everyday mobile belonging The fundamental contribution of this text is through the development of our framework for everyday mobile belonging. Through this networked approach to considering the intersections between theories of mobility (Jensen 2009; Bissell and Fuller 2011), everyday life (Lefebvre 1991a; de Certeau 1984) and belonging (Probyn 1996; May and Muir 2015) we have demonstrated how the seemingly mundane and routine experiences of daily life can, in fact, be infused with vibrancy and dynamism. In Chapter 3 we argued that our everyday mobile belonging framework recognised the important socio-temporal characteristics that mobility inflections can bring to a sense of belonging (Arp Fallov, Jørgensen and Knudsen 2013), and how this challenges some of the more situated and sedentarist conceptualisations that define belonging as linear and fixed. In the context of living at home students we demonstrated this in three ways. First, in the variety of intersecting behavioural movements that comprise living at home students’ daily lives (e.g. through the interactions with campus spaces, commuter routes and non-student family spaces that might simultaneously merge or rub up against one another). Second, through the knowledge that living at home students’ lives are not silos but are complexly imbricated at multiple scales and through various technologies (e.g. social media, connections to digital university interfaces and the imagined ‘sense’ of being among friends and family at a distance). Third, in that these processes are part of a continually evolving assemblage of experiences, interactions, performances and knowledges that are be negotiated and reconciled at various stages of the degree pathway. A crucial outcome of this then is that our everyday mobile belonging framework advocates identity performances as essential components of everyday life that connect different (and perhaps disparate) realms of experience. Through notions of creativity, subversion and resistance we witnessed these performances in the contexts of Ruth’s and Sarah’s spaces of refuge (Chapter  7) and Jane’s, Fleur’s and Hazel’s rhythms of respite (Chapter 8). Intense experiences of affect

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and emotion infused these students’ everyday mobilities, resulting in pauses, or changes in rhythm and tempo as mechanisms for managing the pressures of everyday life, while also retaining a sense of belonging-ness to both the home and the university spheres. While these students’ comments of disengaging or hiding away could, on the surface, be interpreted as ‘not coping’, the everyday mobile belonging framework demonstrates that their sense of mobile belonging provided them opportunities to forge attachments to place (be it the home, the university or a cherished space) while simultaneously having the freedom to move between and interact (both mentally and physically) with these spaces. Parallels can easily be drawn here between our students’ experiences and Gustafson’s (2001) links between place attachment and mobility. Gustafson suggests that those experiencing periods of mobility (albeit social mobilities in the context of our participants) are more likely to replicate similar types of connections that they had with previous locations (for example, neighbourliness, citizenship, community ties, etc.) when they move into a new area. Across the datasets, our living at home participants often spoke of their changing dynamics of their relationships with term-time locations as they became students (visiting familiar spaces as a student, recognising the campus as no longer off-limits, negotiating new commuting routes and strategies, drawing student and nonstudent friends together, etc.). While similar to Gustafson in that the practices are complimentary, our findings also present a very different way of establishing belonging with term-time spaces, predicated on the complex re-negotiation and re-working of both new and existing connections in conjunction with one another. Here, rather than the larger-scale geographical movements posited by Gustafson (2001), the social mobilities associated with becoming students, alongside changing everyday practices, brought about a re-sensing of place whereby previous attachments were re-evaluated as the living at home students learned how to reconcile their new student identities alongside their existing familial ones. Moreover, while this interpretation of everyday mobile belonging disrupts the situatedness of belonging it provides a more multidimensional set of characteristics through which to understand experiences of everyday life. Our final point in this section links to understandings of the power dynamics involved in belonging and how these contribute towards hierarchical scalings that advantage some and disadvantage others. We call this a politics of belonging (cf. Yuval-Davis 2006; Crowley 1999) in higher education. Through our framework we argue against the questionable boundaries that are erected around the student identity that privilege the experiences, behaviours, practices

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and performances of residentially mobile students as the accepted/acceptable student identity. This identity, predicated upon an abstracted sense of imagined community (see Anderson 1983) contributes towards what Crowley (1999: 30) defines as the ‘dirty business of boundary maintenance’. We take this to mean that students are categorised physically (through the structure and placement of the institution), mentally (through attitudes towards how to be the ‘right’ student) and metaphorically (through the language used to articulate such belonging). Hence a troubling outcome of this is the recognition of a relational line of ‘them’ and ‘us’, of leaving home or living at home, whereby some students have the capability to choose which side they wish to be situated on, while others – specifically living at home students – may not have that choice available to them. In ‘muddying’ these political waters, we drew, in Chapter  3, upon Savage’s (2010) and Watt’s (2009) respective notions of elective and selective belonging to help understand how the flexibility of mobility could work appropriately alongside the rigidity of belonging. In doing so we have argued through our analysis that mobility and immobility are both crucial dimensions in making this work  – in recognising the importance of pausing as well as moving; of extricating oneself from a situation in order to belong to another; of operationalising the correct time/space to fulfil a task. The realities of this though hint at notions of resilience and having to be a resilient student that can manage shocks throughout the university pathway. This is, of course, a rather idealistic notion, and when considering that students reasons for deciding to live at home are often predicated upon managing against the risks involved in going away to university, this option in turn usually marks out living at home students as different and their experience as ‘inauthentic’ (Ploner 2017; Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008). This was revealed in Chapter 9 through the experiences of our participants that had graduated and moved away from their respective institutions. Here, living at home in a different context, as a graduate, presented new anxieties. This was particularly evident for Stacey, whose experiences of belonging and everyday life as a student were re-framed as the circumstances associated with her friendship group (the locations, the routines, the experiences) changed once in the world of work. Hence, recognising the boundaries – real or imagined – that exist in higher education and the influences and impacts these might have upon (un)successful experiences emphasises the crucial importance of recognising time, position, context and power in everyday mobile belonging (Benson 2016).

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Heterogenising the living at home student experience – a legacy of policy in practice One of the fundamental contributions of this book has been to tease out the heterogeneity of the student experience. We argue that many conceptualisations of student mobilities tend to oversimplify the student experience in order to generate neat, ordered classifications. As we have discussed above though, the heterogeneity and agency involved in carving out nuanced pathways that support learners’ individual identities are crucially important in understanding the student experience. Yet, this has not appeared from nowhere. Much of this heterogeneity can be derived from the radical, and sometimes swingeing, policy directives that have shaped and re-shaped (and re-shaped) the topographies of UK higher education over the last seventy years (see Chapter 1). The work of successive governments in drawing together and cleaving apart the student body in multiple ways, from the massification projects of the 1960s and the establishment of the polytechnic institutions in the 1960s and 1970s (and their subsequent abolition in 1992), to the widening participation initiatives of the 1990s and 2000s, and the more recent trends for global marketisation and competition, have all left enduring legacies that greatly affect the experiences of successive generations. We argue, therefore that this is partly why such blurred lines exist between student cohorts in the UK higher education system. Legacies of history, culture, and above all, class, present a durable, and yet somewhat opaque sense of hierarchical privilege (and conversely disadvantage) among institutions, academic staff and students. We choose the wording of this carefully – these legacies are durable in that they are often predicated on generations of familial or institutional histories yet opaque in that they are visible to some but not all students. Those without knowledge of the rules of the game (Bourdieu 1977) are unlikely to understand how belonging may be sought and what it might constitute in relation to social mobilities (networks, contacts, experiences, etc.). So, in relation to our own work, this book provides notable contributions to destabilising these dusty modes of classification. We have questioned notions of the relational student experience (traditional vs. non-traditional, mobile vs. immobile, non-local vs. local) that are persistent in living at home students’ experiences as relative to their peers who have left home (Thomas 2002; Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell and McCune 2008; Leese 2010; National Union of Students (NUS) 2015) and as such may incorrectly infer relational experiences as disadvantaged

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or inferior. Our framework for everyday mobile belonging therefore provides opportunities to move beyond these relational binaries that privilege certain forms of movement over others (i.e. the large-scale meta-mobilities associated with leaving home for university over the iterative movements of the commuter student). By exploring such everyday mobilities through a lens of belonging we have revealed a sense of vibrancy to the ‘local’ student experience that is often lost in policy recommendations that cast such trajectories as perfunctory and pragmatic (Artess, McCulloch and Mok 2014; NUS 2015). This agency must not be confused with pragmatism though, of making do through adversity. Across the datasets, many of our living at home students’ experiences shirked the ‘typical’ pathways associated with university trajectories (leaving home, drawing upon (others’) past experiences, ‘fitting in’, etc.), instead exhibiting some interesting signs of resistance and innovation in how they chose to approach higher education. Here, we might infer then that these students, rather than being paralysed or necessarily disadvantaged by risk and inexperience, were perhaps more emboldened by the lack of expectation to perform higher education in a more predictable way. Yet, while we focus specifically upon the UK perspective, we acknowledge other international experiences of higher education to foster similar issues concerning risk and disadvantage (e.g. EUROSTUDENT VI 2018; Norton, Cherastidtham and Mackey 2018) that form part of this knotty, complex and contrasting context of living at home students’ mobility experiences. We argue then that in a climate whereby university take up is becoming increasingly ‘localised’ (Donnelly and Gamsu 2018a), providing freedom from the shackles of ‘traditional’ pathways and mobilities may be highly beneficial for living at home students in allowing them greater opportunities to forge their own senses of belonging that focus on moving forward rather than being fixated upon historical (and perhaps outdated) notions of student life.

The (re)active student identity These notions of unconventional pathways also links into discussions of term-time spaces and the modes of operation involved in ‘fitting in’ (or not) among the student cohort. As with the trajectories into higher education outlined earlier, the ‘typical student’ identity (hedonistic, 24-hour, unencumbered, mobile, etc.) is very often privileged as providing the right conditions for the ‘authentic’ student experience to emerge, be these positively or negatively produced and received (Chatterton 1999; Hubbard 2013; Selwyn 2008; Holdsworth 2009a). The mobilities attached to these

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experiences – of having the freedom to experiment with identities away from the parental gaze – very often ‘rubs up’ against the experiences of living at home students whose identities may mean they cannot, or avoid, involvement in these practices (e.g. through familial responsibilities, commuting, age, culture, etc.). While this discussion rehearses the findings of Holdsworth (2006), Christie (2007) and Crozier, Reay, Clayton, Colliander and Grinstead (2008), our analysis goes further by countering claims that living at home students are necessarily caught in their perceived immobilities. We suggest that they instead demonstrate characteristics that act (and react) in ways that carve out alternative social pathways that combine elements of their multiple identities. Using the everyday mobile belonging framework we have revealed how the relationship between memory, place and distance can be uniquely (re)configured to support these students adapting university experiences. In almost all encounters with our participants we discovered methods and tactics that were employed to enable the smooth(er) movement between both student and nonstudent social groupings, environments and situations (e.g. Ruth’s botanical garden refuge, Cleo’s alternative night-spots, Timothy’s music on the way home from lectures and Faheema’s hotline to her parents). These experiences crucially align with the fluidity and flexibility of the everyday mobile belonging framework in that it encourages agency in recognising when and how to opt in or out of situations. Notwithstanding this though, it would be wrong to assume that these tactics are employed only as mechanisms to fit in. As the experiences of Helen and Tori, two of the younger living at home students from Chapter 7, revealed, in some ways memory, place and distance were operationalised so as to opt out of the university sphere. In discussing the experiences of these two students from the Portsmouth study we saw how agency was deployed as an apparatus through which to self-segregate away from other students. This reveals ‘exclusive geographies’ not to be the privilege of traditional students (Chatterton 1999) but to be an emergent part of living at home students’ identities that de-couples the student and non-student spheres when necessary but in subtle ways that do not risk damaging potential links in the future. This works to insulate the durability of the non-student world away from the pressure or perceived damage of the temporary and liminal student life.

Carving out spaces of (not) belonging Building upon these notions of de-linking student and non-student spaces, we sought in Chapter 8 to advance work that links belonging with more structural

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senses of proximity, connection and place (Mee and Wright 2009; Nagel 2011) through more agential expressions of not belonging. We advanced May’s (2017) notions of ‘belonging out of time’ to reveal the precarity involved in the living at home context, whereby students may exist, for the duration of their degrees, simultaneously in both student/non-student worlds and neither. Our everyday mobile belonging framework reveals distinct temporalities to be involved in this. For example, the re-imagining of cherished or unfamiliar spaces; the changing practices and behaviours involved in everyday routines; the re-working of identities in relation to the perceived fixity of home were all discussed by our participants and many spoke of needing opportunities to step away, to pause and reflect or to close down particular pathways. In contrast to the imagined segregations discussed in the previous section, we recognise these processes as embodied acts – performances of resistance that are built into the choreographed routines of our participants’ daily lives. This was clearly evident in Chapter 8 through the experiences of Hazel whose sense of being a mature living at home student with ME was constructed around a very specific set of needs based upon her condition and an understanding that her body might not allow her to fulfil the mobilities she desires all of the time. Likewise, Aiden’s and Jane’s experiences of commuting between the multiple dimensions of their student and non-student lives revealed instances that necessitated not belonging to the immersive world of student life as they navigated the business of their everyday lives. Yet importantly, these embodied performances are vital lessons for institutions themselves. ‘The University’ as a structural entity is set up for students who are residentially mobile and therefore necessarily on campus in ways that disadvantage living at home students’ experiences (e.g. through the office hours of the timetable that often contain significant gaps between lectures and the inconsistency of semesters and academic years; the location of the campus library and the physical borrowing and returning of books; the small pieces of group/lab work or assessments that require students to regularly be on campus for short periods of time; the university clubs or societies that necessitate consistent physical attendance, the close proximity between campus and student accommodation that facilitates short iterative commutes and negates storing possessions on campus, etc.) (see Thomas and Jones 2017; Artess, McCulloch and Mok 2014; NUS 2015). We argue therefore, that universities prescribe a certain type of choreography, that is, they want students to move in a certain way (see Fincher and Shaw 2009) that fosters a sense of not belonging among those that resist or deviate from these set routines. Faheema’s and Eve’s examples of not belonging in Chapter 8 resonate with Loveday’s (2016) discussions of shame,

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whereby the affective and embodied characteristics of a person (such as body image, accent, culture, etc.) mark them out as Other or deviant. Shame is quite clearly something that is done to a person, perhaps at the expense of others – for Eve this was partly to do with having dropped out of university first time around to have a baby while for Faheema this manifested through her mental health issues and her fear of standing out in the crowd. Shame is therefore felt and has implications for everyday mobile belonging in that while it is embodied, it is also performed. Hence, Eve’s avoidance of student-centric events and Faheema’s abandonment of campus as soon as lectures were finished demonstrate ways of developing tactical mobilities that emerge from instances of not belonging and that become enduring for the individual.

Post-student mobile belonging – anticipating . . . reflecting Our final contribution concerns the trajectories of students and how everyday mobile belonging is mapped out in relation to the completion of the degree. Student experiences are not liner processes – sets of stepping stones associated with leaving home for a period of time, gaining a degree and a set of lifeskills and then moving on to a post-student identity (Kenyon 1999). Nor are they necessarily cyclical, in ‘boomeranging’ (Molgat 2002) students back to, or remaining in, the familial home post-graduation. As our analysis has demonstrated, there are differences in the lives our participants might have anticipated beyond graduation and accepting the realities of being a poststudent. Through our analysis we first explored how students might look forward to imagine how feelings of belonging – both to the graduate class and within their own social and personal worlds – might be managed upon completion of their degree. Second, and through the benefit of hindsight, we offered insights into how post-student mobilities were made sense of retrospectively and the identity work undertaken as part of this process of meaning-making. Our analysis revealed that the ongoing (im)mobilities of university-leavers are not rational, step-by-step, linear life projects, but are, instead, a patchwork of rhythmic, disrupted and ‘frayed’ performances that contribute towards adult life (Sabelis and Schilling 2013). We therefore critique notions of post-student mobilities as idealised in policy discourse, arguing that such trajectories are precarious and perhaps iterative – featuring ‘yo-yo’-like periods living with and without families (Biggart and Walther 2006; Sage, Evandrou and Falkingham 2013). We argue that this has repercussions for belonging, both through the

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different forms of mobility involved in managing a career and the everyday practices and performances that may be disturbed or disrupted in the process. In response to these disruptions, broader policy inferences can also be drawn out of this. While Chapter 9 reveals a certain rhythmicity of these post-student mobilities (leaving university; working through (a set of) jobs; negotiating relationships and intimacy alongside careers, etc.). This all takes time and in the five-year interval between our participants leaving university and being re-interviewed, many of them still considered themselves on the pathway to finding the ‘right’ career. Some felt they were emerging into careers, others had adjourned or surrendered plans in favour of different pathways, while some were situated at points of the life-course that did not necessarily align with what they had originally anticipated. In almost all of these instances, home featured as a prominent marker of how their everyday mobile belonging was framed and considered. Our analysis therefore highlights how the experience of living at home can extend greatly into post-student life – partly as a compromise for saving for the future but also as a mechanism of recalibration, of reconciling university life into a workable set of future plans. Emily and Harriett from Chapter 9 both outline the importance of having time to reflect on their experiences and how these might relate to their future independent adult lives. Cairns, Growiec and Smyth’s (2012) term ‘spatial reflexivity’ is relevant here. While Cairns (2014: 28) defines this as recognising ‘the importance of geographical movement and acting upon this realisation’, we consider an alternative dimension that acknowledges the benefits of pausing as providing space(s) of reflection and comprehension. As was stated in Chapter  9, there are then, clear implications for the metrics set up by governments, policymakers and universities for gathering data about careers and employability during a period whereby graduates are adjusting to post-student life.1 Such metrics that measure graduate employability six to fifteen months after university invariably fail to consider the time needed to piece together a clear career pathway. We draw then on Sabelis and Schilling’s (2013: 128) caution that policies therefore, do ‘not take into account the flexibly changing demands of contemporary life-worlds and hence [have become] increasingly problematic’. Careers and employability, while vitally important, are just one component in preparing graduates for their future post-student lives. 1

At the time of writing this volume the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey has been discontinued and a new Graduate Outcomes survey will be conducted in December 2018 that will capture graduate employment data over an eighteen-month period.

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Everyday mobile belonging – moving forward In this final section we return to our framework for everyday mobile belonging to advocate its use a toolkit for researchers seeking to understand everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness in their own contexts. When designing research with students and young participants we suggest allowing for the following themes: ●

●

●

●

●

Consider the importance of place in research design but also make appropriate attempts at (em)placing the research encounter in research practice and recognise how and why power and position might affect the research process and outcomes. Incorporate the banality of everyday life into research while, ultimately ensuring that students’ lived experiences are accounted for and that the ‘messiness’ of students’ everyday lives are able to emerge during the research process but also become part of the analysis as well. Talk to student about their mobility practices at appropriate points of their ‘mobility journeys’ to encourage reflexivity of how mobilities have affected (or may yet affect) the ‘student experience’. In doing so, researchers could also draw more effectively upon mobile methods when designing research with students to think more critically about the influence of journeys upon how everyday lives are portrayed. Consider the role of identity and place in interpreting and conveying notions of (not) belonging and to think critically about representation and visuality in higher education research. Recognise the implications for time and liminality in the student experience and consider ways of drawing approaches that consider temporality into research design.

This is, of course, not a blueprint for student-centred research design but we believe that attending to some of these points can help tease out the heterogeneity of the student cohort and allow for more nuanced experiences of mobility, place, belonging and identity to emerge. To close then, through our book Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities we emphasise the importance of thinking critically and empathetically about student and graduate experiences, and the choices they make about their multiply-scaled mobilities. This is vitally important as global higher education networks continue to shift, converge, part and overlap and we must be intensely aware of the roles of

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governments, policymakers, universities, academic staff, students, families and social networks in shaping and embedding unique senses of everyday mobile belonging within individual experiences of term-time spaces and within the wider world. In doing so, we argue then that university life can be recognised as part of the cyclical and processual dynamics of families and relationships, the life-course and shifting associations with place and space.

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Index active student identity 200–1 activity spaces 11, 71, 139, 147–50 differentiated 140–5 emotional belonging 146–7 of live at home students, shifting 160 living at home student identity 141–4 reconciling place(s), memory and distance 144–5 Adey, P. 66, 70, 75 adulthood, definition of 46–7 affect 52, 127, 196–7 age 22 -based higher education participation 30–1 -based transitions 78 and everyday mobilities 68 agency 46, 76, 78, 80, 100, 124–5, 128, 149, 151, 173, 184, 199, 200 Ahmad, A. 54 Allen, K. 54, 103 Anderson, J. 69, 90, 110 Andersson, J. 61 Archer, L. 44, 47, 53 Arp Fallov, M. 74 assemblages power 75–6 of rhythms 79 at-risk students 55–6 austerity 6, 16, 25, 29, 36, 55 Australia 2, 27, 41, 42, 55, 89 auto-ethnography 96, 97 Axhausen, K.W. 144 Baas, M. 72 Back, L. 9, 65, 94 Bagguley, P. 58 Ball, C. 37, 178 Barth, F. 60 Bathmaker, A. 21, 22, 23, 29, 175–6 Baxter, A. 136 Beck, Ulrich 53, 137 Beech, S. 34

belonging 7, 23, 28, 41, 67, 68, 72–4, 75, 79, 98, 107, 111, 112, 113, 115, 128, 131, 132, 135, 137, 138 based on Bourdieu’s theories 50 and identity (see identities) and intersectional identities 77 mobile forms of 64–6 multiple forms of 60 politics of 197 and research methodology 97–101 reshaping, through experience and precarity 134–7 resilience of 75 sense of 29, 38, 43, 50, 56, 147, 161, 182, 188, 196 temporal shifts in 74 and transition (see transitions) belonging out of time 153 Bennett, J. 79 Benson, M. 74 Benway, G. 46 Berlant, L. 54 biographical planning 31 Bissell, D. 97, 143 Black Gay Male Undergraduates (BGMUs) 89 Blair, Tony 24 boomeranging/boomerang effect 38, 46, 48, 66, 178 bounded places 42, 57–61 Bourdieu’s theories 33, 48, 50, 52 Britton, C. 136 Brooks, R. 95 Brown, G. 25–7, 102 Brown, P. 19 Browne, Lord of Madingley 25–6 Browne Review 16, 115 Butler, J. 154 Cairns, D. 72, 204 Callender, C. 24 campuses 7, 61, 87, 114, 197, 203

234 cultures 90 geography 89 spaces 34 Cantillon, S. 56 capital cultural capital 49, 50, 60, 182 economic capital 15 emotional capital 182 mobility capital 15 and places 87 social capital 58–9, 182 careers 103, 184, 192, 193, 204 see also employment/employability care, rhythms of 158–64 cartographic storytelling 100 case histories 118 Chatterton, P. 60, 76, 151, 152, 156 choreographies 78–9, 80–1, 160, 161, 163, 173, 189, 202 see also rhythms Chow, K. 46, 98 Christie, H. 62, 129, 130, 201 Ciambrone, D. 46 citizenship 93, 197 class 44, 45, 116, 118 -based mobility practices 22, 48–9 and gender 103 graduate class 175, 182, 184, 191, 193 middle class (see middle classes) mobility, emotional complexities of 51 working-class students 92 classifications 42 Clayton, J. 50, 125, 127, 201 Coffey, A. 67, 93 cognitive mapping 100 Colliander, L. 201 Collins, F. L. 92 communities 57, 59, 169 and belonging 74 commuting 97 of practice framework 129 commuter identity 5, 140, 141–4, 155 commuting 11, 56, 62, 112, 132, 134, 202 reorientation rhythms 170–3 research on 96–7 resistance rhythms 164–70 respire and care rhythms 158–64 co-mobility 161 competition/competitiveness 23, 199 Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition government 25, 26 Conservative Party 26, 30

Index consumerism 28 coping 56–7 corporate spaces 28–33 cost-sharing funding model 31 credit transfer schemes 47 Cresswell, T. 68, 70, 71, 96, 158 Crosland, A. 20 cross-sectional analysis 117 Crowley, J. 198 Crozier, G. 50, 125, 127, 201 cruel optimism 54, 183 cultural capital 49, 50, 60, 182 Curtis, M. L. 88–9 Cuzzocrea, V. 176, 178 Davies, P. 125 day students 5, 129 Dearing, Sir Ron 23, 24 de Certeau, M. 67, 93 degree 18, 129, 134 degree apprenticeships 30 de-linking student and non-student spaces 151–4, 156, 201–2 de-location 17–32 national de-location 33 normalisation of 17–21 Dent, S. 47 Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey 36, 175, 178, 193 digital and imagined senses of mobile belonging-ness 71–2, 95, 147–50 digital media 169 digital mobilities 71–2, 170 disabilities 56, 165–6 disadvantaged living at home students 24, 57–61, 77, 130, 137, 138, 141, 155, 156, 200 diversity 23, 43, 61, 63–82, 77–8, 169, 192 doctoral students 3, 117, 184 Donnelly, M. 3, 24, 36, 132 double boomerang 48 see also boomeranging/boomerang effect dual sector institutions 23 Edensor, T. 96–7 Education Reform Act (1988) 21 elective belonging 73 elite universities/institutions 22, 33, 38 Elwood, S. A. 86, 111 emotional anxieties 51

Index emotional belonging 52, 73, 147, 155, 197 emotional capital 182 emotional vulnerability 55 emotions 66, 88 employment/employability 54, 176, 204 see also careers commuting for 96 and education 30 graduate employment 117, 191 and higher education 103 and income 27 internal migration for 182 England government funding and loans 25–6, 33 higher education institutions in 21–2, 35 policy changes on universities 36 transitions in 37–8 tuition fees in 26, 29, 54 ERASMUS (European community action scheme for the mobility of university students) 1 Erskine, K. 69 Ertl, H. 31 escapism, technology-aided 147–50, 155–6, 168 Esson, J. 31 ethnicity 22, 36, 56, 59, 62, 110, 126 ethnography 91, 92, 101, 104 European Union (EU) 109 EUROSTUDENT VI study 31, 123 Evandrou, M. 47–8 Evans, C. 183 everyday life 66–9, 82 and centre/periphery 67 definition of 66–7 and identity performances 67–8 and place 68–9 and research methodology 91–4 everyday meaning-making 145–50, 155, 189 everyday mobile belonging framework 196–8, 205 everyday mobilities 145, 161–2, 165, 200 performances 184 everyday relationships and expectation 115–18 everyday space 94, 111–12 Everyday Student Mobilities Project 113 exclusionary behaviours 60 exclusive geographies 60, 76, 151, 156, 201

235

face-to-face interviews 98 Falkingham, J. 47–8 family-based support systems 31 feathered nest see boomeranging/ boomerang effect feel for the game, of mature-aged learners 42, 48–52, 61 fee system 27–9, 54, 136 Fincham, M. 95 Fincher, R. 89 Findlay, A. M. 34 Finney, N. 59 first-generation students 4, 5, 123, 163 academic background of 31 formalised belonging 73 Forsberg, S. 54 Franceschelli, M. 54 Frank, S. 70 Freundschuh, S. 100 friendships 46, 47, 53, 57, 67, 131, 152, 185, 191, 198 Fuller, G. 143 full-time students 18, 19, 26, 32, 51 further education 23–4, 32, 58 FutureTrack study 103 Gabriel, M. 47 Gamsu, S. 3, 24, 32, 36, 132 gender 22, 58–9, 92 and class 103 and everyday rhythm-making 159 geographical mobility 44, 137, 184 geographical proximity 58 geographies 58, 80, 86–7 campus 89 emotional geographies 147 exclusive geographies 60, 76, 151, 156, 201 of graduate transitions 38 of higher education 16 of participation and student (im)mobilities 24–5 psychogeographic approach 90 space, and virtual space 72, 155–6 of university recruitment strategies 34 Giddens, Anthony 53 Giroux, H. 29, 35 global higher education 205–6 see also internationalisation; international students

236 go-along interview 114, 165 see also walking interviews Gone International reports 37, 177–8 González-Arnal, S. 58 Gordon, T. 47 government funding 24–5 graduate class 175, 182, 184, 191, 193 see also class graduate employability see employability graduate employment see employment graduate identities 116, 178, 185 graduate mobilities 179 graduate premium 27, 36 graduates 36 see also postgraduates highly skilled 183 as mobile subjects 177–9 Griffin, C. 60 Grinstead, J. 201 group work 169–70 Growiec, K. 204 Gustafson, P. 197 Gyimah, Sam 30 habitus 48–52 Hägerstrand, Torsten 71, 140 halls of residences 19, 98, 99, 109, 110, 113, 143, 167 Hall, T. 34, 67, 93 Halsall, A. 47 Hanley, K. 57 Harrison, N. 36 Harvey, L. 54 Healey, M. 46, 98 hegemony 44–5, 47, 60, 76 Henderson, S. 103 heterogeneity 144, 176 higher education 1, 15, 115, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 134, 136, 137, 138 choice of 33 contexts 2–3 embedding within the local 19 and employment 103 ‘finishing school’ model of 19 funding premium for institutions 24 in further education 24, 32 integration with wider society 23 for living at home, access to 58 marketisation of 16, 23, 27–34, 38, 199 non-participation in 53

Index participation 30–1 participation in 29 participation localisation 30 as a private good 28 as a public good 27 reform 16 reform, new horizons of 21–5 social order within 36 stability of youth participation 31 student experience (see student experiences) widening participation 8, 23, 35, 43, 44, 62, 199 Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU) 37, 178 higher education institutions 32 see also universities changing culture of 28 higher education participation wider social value of 29 Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) 3, 29, 32, 113 Hillman, N. 35 Hinton, D. 101, 131 Holdsworth, C. 3, 47, 49, 60, 76, 130, 178, 201 Holland, R. 101 Hollingworth, S. 47 Holloway, S. L. 141 Holt, M. 60 Holton, M. 60, 98 home and university, linkages between 45 home student identity 141–4, 155 homogeneity 61, 77, 99 Hopkins, P. E. 77, 89, 101, 124 Hughes, A. 125 Huisman, J. 27, 33 Hussain, Y. 58 identities 50, 51, 52, 58, 75, 76, 93, 99, 102, 127, 129, 172 accepted/acceptable 198 active student identity 200–1 and belonging 51, 97–101 commuter identity 141–4, 155 and everyday life 67–8, 91 graduate identities 185 home student identity 155 intersectional 60, 61, 76, 77

Index learner identities 44, 45, 48, 51 living at home student identity 76, 141–4, 155 and mobilities 70 multiple and overlapping 164 new student identities 197 non-academic youth identities 47 and place 87, 88 place-based identities 55 post-student identities 46 pragmatic learner identities 45 relational 76, 142–3 student identities 20, 60, 153 student-oriented identity 163 and temporality 118 typical student identities 76, 142, 195, 200 working-class identities 52–3 identity performances 67–8, 140, 146, 196 imagined community 198 imagined geographies 149–50 imagined mobilities 71–2, 95 imagined segregations 200–1 imagined spaces 155–6 immobilities 5, 69, 70, 76, 153–4 see also mobilities and belonging 74 perceived immobilities 58, 151 in-between spaces 7, 45, 101, 107, 114, 147, 155, 160, 173 inclusion 20, 28, 62 Incomers 37 independence 46, 47, 204 inequalities in accessibility for living at home students 58 in higher education transitions 44 Ingram, N. 49, 51, 93 in-migration 23 institutional effect, in university choice 127 institutional habitus 50, 51–2 see also habitus interactive mapping 89 intergenerationality 47–8 internationalisation 8, 16, 33–4 international marketisation 34 international mobility 33, 171, 179 international students 56, 59, 89

237

mobility of 95 recruitment 34 sense of belonging 34 intersectional identities 60, 61, 76, 77, 103 intra-national mobilities 1, 2 Jackson, J. 24 Johnson, Jo 30 Jones, K. 88, 90 Jones, R. 141 n.1 Jørgensen, A. 74 Keane, E. 53 Keating, A. 54 Kember, D. 98 Kilkey, M. 58 Kitchen, R. 100 Kloppenburg, S. 160 Knudsen, L. B. 74 Kraftl, P. 102 Labour government 25 Lahelma, E. 47 Lancaster University 134, 166–7, 170–2 everyday student mobility examination in 112–15 Lashua, B. 67, 93 Law, J. 93–4 Lawrence of Arabia myth 136 league tables 28, 35, 50, 108, 175 learn and go students 5 learner identities 44, 45, 48 see also identities Leathwood, C. 44 leaving home pathways 1, 4, 6, 42, 45, 129, 138, 198, 200, 203 Lee, K. 98 Leese, M. 125 Lefebvre, H. 65, 66, 78, 79, 80, 137 Lehmann, W. 50–1 LGBTQ students 56, 89, 90 Liberal Democrats 25 life courses 45, 48, 59, 65, 66, 70, 78, 102, 180, 192, 204 choreography 171 of linear geographical mobility 178 rhythms 186 trajectory 193 transitions 47

238

Index

life cycle, bottlenecks and blockages within 35–8 lifelong learning 30, 78 Li, N. 98 linguistic habitus 52 living at home experiences 155 disadvantage 142 hydrogenisation 199–200 risk 52–7 living at home student experiences mobility and proximity 128–34 living at home student identities 76, 155 the commuter 141–4 everyday meaning-making 145–50 living at home students 2, 19, 29, 31–2, 36, 44, 54, 61, 80, 93, 112–13, 116–17, 121–8, 195, 196 activity spaces 140–5, 155 agency of 76 and belonging 74, 75, 77 belonging reshaping through experience and precarity and 134–7 commuting 97 definition of 3–7 inequalities in accessibility for 58 and mobilities 69, 70, 72, 77, 95 mobility and proximity everyday experiences of 128–34 and place 69, 97 response to social and environmental pressures 148–9 living with parents/children 3, 5, 6, 110, 112, 114, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131 see also living at home students loan system 25–7 localised decision-making 58 localised study 31, 33, 54 localism 2–3, 8, 24, 32, 107 local/non-local students 46 rhythms of 158–64 local region 3–4 local students 4, 5, 16, 19, 69, 108, 180, 200 see also local/non-local students disadvantaged through immobilities 23 local university 3 participation 6 London vortex 38 Longden, B. 22 Loveday, V. 51–2, 92, 202

lower socio-economic groups 23–4 Loyals 37 Lucey, H. 103 Lynch, K. 28, 56 Lyons, M. 56 MacFarlane, R. 100 Magolda, P. M. 99 Malet-Calvo, D. 92 Mangan, J. 125 maps 100 marketisation 16, 23, 27–34, 35, 38, 199 Martin, D. G. 86, 111 Massey, D. 75 mass higher education systems 24, 27 massification 17–21, 27, 33, 38 Mass Observation Project 98 material mobilities 95 Mather, H. 47 mature students 23, 30, 32, 36, 45, 48, 77, 78, 136, 168 May, V. 67, 73, 98, 153, 154, 202 McCaig, C. 35 McCollum, D. 34 McCormack, D. P. 80, 87–8 McGuinness, M. 95 McLeod, J. 102 meaning-making 145–50, 155, 177 digital and imagined senses of mobile belonging-ness 147–50 spaces of refuge 146–7 Mee, K. 73 Meier, L. 70 Melody, J. 103 memories 100, 153, 156 Mendick, H. 54 mental well-being 56, 115, 203 Merriman, P. 71 methodology 85–6 belonging 97–101 comparative approach 95 everyday life 91–4 mobilities 94–7 multi-method approach 92 places 86–91 semi-longitudinal approach 95–6 sensuous scholarship 94 temporality 101–4

Index middle classes 8, 20, 22, 33, 39, 41, 43, 49–50, 182, 190 migration 6 ethnic differences of 59 in- and out-migration 23 internal migration for employment 182 minority-ethnic students see ethnicity minority groups 89 mobile belongingness 7, 74 mobile communication 34 mobile/immobile student 44, 46 mobile students 5, 42, 46, 56, 60, 142, 198 mobile technologies 149–50 mobilities 1, 2, 29, 46, 49, 69–72, 82, 91, 142, 195 and belonging 74, 99 as belonging, myth of 190–2 binaries of 18, 20, 21, 22–3, 43, 63, 71 during course of a degree programme 47 digital/imagined 71–2, 95, 147–50 geographical mobility 44, 137, 184 international mobility 33, 171, 179 local mobility 1 material 95 national mobility 1, 33 politics of 6, 71 and proximity 128–34 regional mobility 1, 58, 178 and research methodology 94–7 residential mobilities 19, 45, 134 social mobilities 4, 20, 197, 199 socio-spatial mobilities 4, 5, 52, 100 spatial reflexivity 72 mobility performances 164, 171 choreography of 164–70 moorings 70 Morosanu, L. 57 Morrison, A. 35 Moss, D. 99 Munro, M. 62, 129 Murray, L. 95 Nagel, C. 73 narrative-style interviews 92 National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (NCIHE) 23 negotiated belonging 73

239

neoliberalism 25, 26, 27–34, 35, 53, 177 New Labour 24 new localism 24 New Managerialism 35 New Public Management systems 28 new student identities 4, 43, 76, 197 New University 21–5 Nielsen, H. B. 103 Nightingale, J. 47 non-academic youth identities 47 non-local student 46 non-students 201 networks 34 spaces 121, 131, 135, 136, 137 non-traditional students 4, 49–50, 124, 125 experiences of 49 theorising as at-risk 56 normative belonging 73 Northern Ireland 26 nn.5–6 not-belonging 75, 150–4, 168 O’Donnell, V. L. 129 O’Donovan, B. 57 off-campus accommodation 166 Office for Fair Access (OFFA) 25–6 O’Kane, P. 45 Open University 19–20 Osborne, George 35 out-migration 23 over-recruitment 35 Owens, M. 45 Oxbridge ‘boarding school’ model 18–19 Packwood, H. 34 Pain, R. 77 Palmer, M. 45 parents 111, 123, 125–6, 127, 134 Parry, G. 32 participant observation 92, 97, 101 participatory diagramming 101 part-time distance learning 98 part-time students 20, 24, 27, 32, 36 part-time work 32 pausing 78, 111, 149, 195, 197, 198, 202, 204 peer relationships 57 perceived risks 54, 55 performances 159, 198, 202

240 of belonging 173 of rhythm-making 163 performativity 81, 154 perseverance 52 Peters, P. 160 photo elicitation 88–9 placelessness 7, 79 place-making 57–61, 60, 68, 69, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87, 96, 99, 100, 140, 162–3 place(s) 65, 66, 205 attachments to 197 -based identities 55 -based interviews 98 and belonging 73, 98, 99 and everyday 68–9 networks of connections 7 and relationality 76 researching 86–91 and rhythm 79 sense of 7, 56, 59 plasticine modelling 93 plastic mobilities 160 plate glass universities 19 Ploner, J. 56 polytechnic colleges 20–2 positionality 86, 89 post-1992 university 21–5 postgraduates 182, 183–4, 187–8 see also graduates post-student identities 46, 47–8 post-student mobile belonging 203–4 post-student mobilities 23, 37, 66, 175, 176, 192–3 graduates as mobile subjects 177–9 imagining of 179–86 myth of mobility as belonging 190 retrospective accounts of belonging to graduate class 186–9 transitions 189 (see also transition) and waithood 70 post-university trajectories 184 power 76, 89, 90 assemblages 75–6 and mobility 70 pragmatic learner identities, 45 Prazeres, L. 59–60, 95 privatisation of funding 33 of social investments 27

Index privilege 19, 51, 53, 57–61, 76, 151, 195, 197–8, 199, 200 everyday meaning-making 145–50 propinquity, importance of 128–9 psychogeography 90 public funding 27, 33 qualitative longitudinal research 102, 103, 104, 115–18 Read, B. 44 Reay, D. 50, 58, 125, 127, 201 reconciliation 51, 144–5 recruitment 22, 24 regional bias 3–4 relational identities 142–3 relationality of mobility 28, 70, 75, 128 relational positionings 75–8 diversity of unconventional student lives 77–8 power assemblages 75–6 relationships 93, 131, 135 between the academic and vocational streams 21 between graduates and the labour market 23 between memory, place and distance 155, 201 repercussions for 47 with spaces 100 rented accommodation 19 reorientation, rhythms of 170–3 representation and belonging 97–101 of place 8 Rérat, P. 61 residential mobilities 19, 45, 134 resilience 29, 52, 56, 198 resistance, rhythms of 164–70 Returners 37 return mobility after graduating 189 rhythm analysis 9, 65, 79, 80, 115 rhythm-making 157, 173 rhythms 63, 65, 71, 73, 182, 185–6, 188, 204 of the life-course 187 of post-student life 178 of reorientation 170–3 of resistance 164–70

Index of respite and (self)care 158–64 temporal 78, 79–81 Richter, I. 99 risks 42, 200 to belonging 46 of failure to working-class identities 53 as linked to de-traditionalization 53 for living at home students 136 of not belonging 52–7 Robbins, Lord 17–18, 19 Robbins Report 18 Rose, G. 100 routines 3, 67–8, 70, 79–80, 81, 91, 95, 102, 114, 137–8, 149, 156, 159, 168, 182, 185–6, 202 Rowling, L. 55 Rudberg, M. 103 ruralism, 183 Russell Group 22, 36, 190 Rutherford, J. 136 Sadgrove, J. 61 Sage, J. 47–8, 61 Sassler, S. 46 Savage, M. 38, 73, 198 Scanlon, L. 55 Scase, R. 19 Schalansky, Judith 100 Scotland 26 nn.5–6, 116, 191 Scott, P. 20 Seamon, D. 80 selective belonging 74, 198 selective engagement 151 self-care, rhythms of 158–64 self-made self 29, 39, 55 self-protection 53 self-segregation 60, 76, 151–3, 156 semi-structured interviews 88, 90, 97, 101 separations 143, 152, 153–4, 156, 168–9 sexuality 88 shame 51–2, 202–3 Shams, F. 27, 33 shared living 6, 8, 16, 41 Shaw, K. 89 short-cycle two-year courses 30 short distance commuters 3 Sinha, S. 94 six-month rule 36–7, 172, 178, 187, 188, 193

241

Skelton, T. 68, 75 Slack, K. 125 Smart, C. 94 Smith, D. 23 Smith, D. P. 61 Smyth, J. 204 social capital 58–9, 182 social class see class social justice 35 social media 22, 34, 72, 115, 169, 196 social mobilities 4, 20, 197, 199 social network concepts 34, 45, 57, 59, 75, 144, 160, 206 Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) 10, 112 sociology 3, 4, 8, 42, 85 socio-spatial mobilities 4, 5, 52, 100 socio-temporal characteristics 196 Solnit, Rebecca 100 Southern European model 6 space(s) of belonging 201–3 connections with 112 corporate spaces 28–33 of higher education 28–33 of not-belonging 150–4 of refuge 146–7, 155 studentification 152 Spanish youths 47 spatial reflexivity 72, 182, 204 Stayers 37 Stevenson, A. 96 stillness 71, 143 see also immobilities; mobilities Stoller, P. 94 Strayhorn, T. L. 89, 90 Strike, T. 47 student accommodation 5, 6, 110, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127–8, 129, 132, 151, 155 see also term-time locations Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) 26 n.5 student experiences 4, 23, 61, 87, 124, 200, 203, 205 of disability 56, 165–6 diversity in 63–82 homogenous 99 and massification 17–21

242 monolithic 51 normalisation of 44 Student Finance NI 26 n.5 student geographies 16, 29, 35 see also geographies student identities see identities studentification 16, 23, 152 student mobilities see mobility/mobilities student-oriented identity 163 student retention and withdrawal 3, 8, 9, 44, 56, 74 Student’s Union (SU) 5, 61 student welfare/well-being 28–9 Sullivan, R. E. 90 sustainability 10, 112 Sykes, G. 92 Taylor, C. 35 Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) 37, 175 technical colleges 20 technology 72, 155–6 Temple, P. 87 temporalities 59, 63, 65, 78–81, 115, 116, 117, 118, 142, 153, 157, 181, 202 and belonging 73, 74, 75, 78, 79 of commuting 174 and research methodology 101–4 waithood and stillness 71 term-time locations 1, 6–7, 46, 78, 108, 132, 151 see also student accommodation and belonging 73 changing dynamics of living at home student’s relationships with 197 Oxbridge boarding school model 18 residential circumstances and risk 32 student accommodation (see student accommodation) term-time spaces 23, 60, 140–5, 155, 200 territorialising 60, 76, 151 Tett, L. 136 therapeutic culture 56 Thomas, K. 19, 131 Thomas, K. C. 100 Thomas, L. 141 .1 Thomas, W. 22 Thomson, R. 102, 118 Thrift, Nigel 166

Index Tillman-Kelly, D. L. 89, 90 time taking see waithood Tobbell, J. 129 topophilia 69 traditional/non-traditional binary 44, 46 traditional students 45, 165, 182 transition 42, 43–8, 55, 66, 88, 101–4, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 135, 136, 137, 175–6, 178 age-based 78 and agency 46 as complex, emotional and fragile compliments 45 into higher education for living at home students 45 linear transition 19, 43, 157 out of higher education 37 structure of 44 ‘yo-yo’ transitions 47–8, 178 transportation 10, 65, 96, 100, 108, 114 Trow, M. 20 Tuan, Y. F. 69, 147 tuition fees 24–6, 54, 136 two-year degrees 30 typical student identities 76, 77, 142, 195, 200 undergraduate students 150 belonging of 98–9 United Kingdom 88, 89, 92, 95, 97, 101, 103 United Kingdom, higher education in 2, 199 in 2010 25–7 changing hierarchies of 195 contemporary policies 16 marketisation 27–34 policy changes 16–27 residential mobilities and leaving home for university 6 in twentieth-century 16–27 widening participation 17 United States 2, 8, 27, 29, 51, 90 universities 86, 89, 92, 112, 122, 124, 127, 129, 131, 135, 136, 202 see also higher education changing culture of 28 and diversity (see diversity) expressive order 50

Index and globalisation 23 intersectional identities in 76 places associated with 87 ‘post-1992’ 21–5 and privilege 17 spaces, expression of difference in 61 and transition 78 Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) 3 Universities UK 30, 177–8 university friendships 53 university life 17, 44, 45, 69, 76, 81, 89, 99–102, 108–9, 114, 122, 124–5, 130, 138, 140, 147, 155, 163, 204, 206 see also student experiences University of Bristol 21, 22 University of Portsmouth 10, 108, 122, 125, 129, 141–4 walking interviews 110–12 web-based survey 108–10 University of West England 21, 22 Urry, J. 72, 148–9 Valentine, G. 61, 88 virtual spaces 72, 155–6 vocational programmes 20, 21, 22, 36 Wager, F. 62, 129 Waite, P. 90, 99 waithood 70–1

243

Wakeling, P. 38 Wales 88 government funding and loans 25–6, 33 higher education institutions in 21–2, 35 tuition fees 26, 29, 54 Walkerdine, V. 103 walking interviews 96, 110–12, 114, 146 see also go-along interview Waller, R. 36, 77 Waters, J. 95 Watt, P. 73–4, 198 web-based survey 108–10 Webber, D. J. 131 Weber, Z. 55 well-being 10, 28–9, 55, 56, 112–13, 182 widening participation, in higher education 8, 23, 35, 43, 44, 62, 199 Wilkins, S. 27, 33 Williams, D. 3 Wood, B. E. 92–3 working-class identities 52 women’s transitions 58 working-class students 50 relationships and friendships 53 in UK elite institutions 51 workshop techniques 101 Wright, S. 73 Wyatt, S. 160 Young Students 26 n.5