Non-University Higher Education: Geographies of Place, Possibility and Inequality 9781350145313, 9781350145344, 9781350145320

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: Understanding the Local Student: Concerns of Place, Mobilities and Space
Chapter 2: Placed Possible Selves: Theorizing Spatial and Temporal Educational Subjectivities
Chapter 3: What Does ‘Local’ Mean?: Non-University Provision as ‘Local’ Higher Education
Chapter 4: Being Local: Place, ‘Local’ Higher Education and Educational Subjectivities
Chapter 5: Staying Local: The Multiple Mobilities of ‘Local’ Educational Subjects
Chapter 6: Living Local: The Part and the Whole of ‘Local’ Higher Education Spaces
Chapter 7: Placed Possible Selves: Spatial Stories of Im/Possibility
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Non-University Higher Education

Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education 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. Advisory Board: David Boud, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Claire Callender, Birbeck, University of London, UK Isak Froumin, Higher School of Economics, Russia Carlos González Ugalde, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Kimberly A. Griffin, University of Maryland, USA Sylvia Hurtado, UCLA, USA Sylvia Hurtado, UCLA, USA David James, University of Cardiff, UK Shi Jinghuan, Tsinghua University, China Simon Marginson, UCL Institute of Education, UK Sioux McKenna, Rhodes University, South Africa Monica McLean, University of Nottingham, UK Bjørn Stensaker, University of Oslo, Norway Satoshi Watanabe, Hiroshima University, Japan Hong Zhu, Peking University, China Paul Ashwin, Lancaster University, UK Manja Klemencic, Harvard University, USA

Non-University Higher Education Geographies of Place, Possibility and Inequality Holly Henderson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This edition published 2022 Copyright © Holly Henderson, 2021 Holly Henderson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte James 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Names: Henderson, Holly, 1982- author. Title: Non-university higher education: geographies of place, possibility and inequality / Holly Henderson. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Understanding student experiences of higher education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020030972 (print) | LCCN 2020030973 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350145313 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350212190 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350145320 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350145337 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Postsecondary education–Great Britain–Regional disparities. | Junior colleges–Great Britain. | Junior college students–Great Britain. | College student mobility–Great Britain. | Educational equalization–Great Britain. Classification: LCC LC1039.8.G7 H46 2020 (print) | LCC LC1039.8.G7 (ebook) | DDC 378.941–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030972 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030973 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4531-3 PB: 978-1-3502-1219-0 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4532-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-4533-7 Series: Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Sebastian, who will always have walked with me through these pages. For Shirley, my grandmother, who would have liked to read this. And for Emily, always.

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Contents Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Foreword

viii x

Introduction 1 1 Understanding the Local Student: Concerns of Place, Mobilities and Space 19 2 Placed Possible Selves: Theorizing Spatial and Temporal Educational Subjectivities 43 3 What Does ‘Local’ Mean?: Non-University Provision as ‘Local’ Higher Education 59 4 Being Local: Place, ‘Local’ Higher Education and Educational Subjectivities 87 5 Staying Local: The Multiple Mobilities of ‘Local’ Educational Subjects 107 6 Living Local: The Part and the Whole of ‘Local’ Higher Education Spaces 127 7 Placed Possible Selves: Spatial Stories of Im/Possibility 149 Conclusion 177 Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements My first thanks go to the students and staff who participated in the project on which this book is based and who gave of their time and insights; I am so grateful for their generosity. My doctoral supervisors Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Deborah Youdell guided me through the process of this project with the kind of expertise and wisdom I could hardly have imagined possible. In her attention to detail and her ambition on my behalf, Ann-Marie showed me a level of respect rarely afforded to doctoral students. She pushed me, encouraged me and taught me, and I will always be proud to say I have worked with her. Since the completion of my doctoral studies, Ann-Marie has remained a mentor, adviser and colleague, and it is a privilege to continue working with her. As a teacher looking for ways to understand my experiences, I came across Deborah’s work and realized I wanted to research education. Throughout the different phases of this study, she asked key questions at exactly the right moments and helped me through the most difficult dilemmas of writing and representation. I cannot thank either of them enough. I also owe a debt of thanks to Claudia Lapping, whose supervision of my master’s research prepared me so well for my future academic work. Throughout this and so many other phases of my adult life, Alison Binney has been a remarkable and faithful friend. I am grateful for her belief in me and her reminders to take care of myself, and for sharing her poetry which has brightened some of the longest months of writing. From across the Atlantic, Z Nicolazzo has kept close contact despite the changes in his own life, always understanding when I have felt quiet or overwhelmed and always responding when I have needed reassurance. I am grateful for Z’s kinship. Thank you to Katja Ogrin, for the feeling of coming home on TV evenings that have rescued even the most failed of writing days. I thank Kate and Rhiannon Nichols for QF nights of warmth and seriousness and laughter, and the kind of friendship I am lucky to have found. Thank you for always asking how I am and always waiting for an answer. My nephews, Sebastian and Toby, have given me the pseudonyms for the towns in this book, and a great deal else besides. Thank you for the privilege of knowing you during your earliest years. To Lizzie, my twin sister, thank you for

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continuing our lifelong conversation through the darkest hours of your life, and for the visits to your home and family that will always be intertwined with the years of this project in my mind. To my parents, Vicky, Nick and Neil, thank you for the countless advantages that have brought me here. It is because of my mum, Vicky, that I grew up without ever having questioned whether women can have careers that they are passionate about and successful in. I am still learning just how exceptional her example to us has been. My parents-in-law, Karen and John Henderson, have read every word of this at least once, and have engaged with its ideas and its vocabulary willingly at every stage. To Karen, I am particularly grateful for the afternoon spent discussing my concept maps, which laid the groundwork for my data analysis chapters. To John, thank you for knowing that Passing Time was the perfect novel to get me through the last months of writing. My final thanks go to Emily Henderson. Inevitably, you saw this coming long before I had begun to imagine it. You have held the threads of this project steady when I have dropped them, reminded me why they matter when I have forgotten that they could, and told me what they are when I have lost sight of them. Throughout it all, you have encouraged me to fully inhabit this and all the other areas of my life, never needing it, or me, to be smaller or more manageable than we are. Most of all, from our very first conversation you have asked me what I think as though that is the most important and exciting question you could pose, and you have never accepted less than the fullest answer I can find. Every time you ask, you change my life all over again. Thank you.

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 offer a rich understanding of the different global and local meanings of being a student in higher education in the twenty-first century. Non-University Higher Education makes an exciting and novel contribution to the series by its focus on local students who are studying in non-university higher education. It continues the focus of the series on social justice and students’ experiences of higher education. It also builds on the focus on student mobilities in Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton’s contribution to the series, Everyday Mobile Belonging. Non-University Higher Education draws on the notion of ‘placed possible selves’ as a way of considering time, space and place within student experiences of higher education. It interrogates the complexities of the meaning of ‘local’ within narratives of ‘local higher education’. For example, the ways in which ‘local’ can be a pejorative term for describing less prestigious higher education institutions but is also a term of pride within English further education. In asking whether it is possible to discuss higher education without reference to the university, the book productively challenges our understanding and ways of thinking about higher education and encourages us to confront who and what is excluded by current dominant ways of understanding higher education. By exploring the rich and complex narratives of local students, this book shows the ways in which many students are invested in, and committed to, their local communities and also recognizes the ways in which the local can be limiting for some students. As a whole, this book encourages more careful thinking about local students and local institutions so that their important

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contribution can be recognized and the particular challenges they face can be better understood. Such thinking is essential if we are to develop more inclusive and socially just ways of understanding the educational potential of higher education. Paul Ashwin and Manja Klemenčič Series Editors

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Introduction

‘I Get Travel Sick’: The multiple geographies of higher education Holly: Why did you decide to do your degree here? Meera: I get travel sick.

(Excerpt from interview data) I have returned to this moment in a research interview many times over the course of the project on which this book is based. Seemingly simple, the moment nevertheless encapsulates the layered and unequal geographies that work in locally specific ways in any experience of higher education, in any international context. To highlight just a few of these geographies: despite living in England, where there is a deeply ingrained expectation that students move away from the family home to start degree education, Meera did not consider leaving home in order to study; Meera’s location in the geographical distribution of higher education institutions in England, in a large post-industrial town without a university, meant that there were two options for her when she was considering her undergraduate education. One option, the nearest university to her home town, would have required daily travel either by car or by public transport, and she discounted this option for the reason stated earlier, that she got travel sick and was therefore unable to take on repeated travel. The other option, which she took up, was to study at the local further education college. This chain of geographical circumstances is, as will be highlighted throughout the book, interwoven with intersecting inequalities such as those of social class, race, ethnicity, caring responsibilities and age. Underlying these geographies is another spatial consideration – that of the geographical structures of institutional reputation. Universities in England compete for the marker of ‘global’, and this marker signifies a range of highly sought-after status symbols such as research funding and collaboration, faculty

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members and students. By contrast, the college at which Meera and the other students in this project studied carries the marker of ‘local’, where this signifies its student intake as well as its long-established relationships with employers in the area. Meera was a local student and studied at a local institution. The unequal higher education geographies embedded in this description are the central topic of this book. This book sets out my exploration of higher education geographies through a research project looking at student experiences of higher education in the English further education system (this context will be explained further later). Beyond the project itself, however, the book argues that higher education in any national or local context is inherently spatial in five interconnected ways. First, any nation has a geographically unequal distribution of higher education institutions, so that there are places from which a student might have to travel some distance in order to arrive at a place of degree-level study. There are other places within which it is almost impossible to avoid passing higher education buildings. There are many places in between. Secondly, each of these places has a history that is related to but not wholly captured by its history of higher education provision; the absence of higher education from an area or place might signal an economic legacy of deprivation or post-industrialization, or a remoteness from degree-level education in addition to other metropolitan or urban advantages. Thirdly, there are national and sometimes regional traditions of undergraduate mobility that determine the extent to which studying for a degree is synonymous with leaving the familial home. Fourthly, alongside these models of undergraduate mobility are smaller-grained inequalities. There are some places from which (some) people are less likely to move, even if mobility is necessary or expected for undergraduate study. In England, these places are also the places with fewer higher education institutions, so that undergraduate mobility is both more necessary and less likely for students in these places. Finally, any individual student is positioned within and amongst these and other layered local familial geographies and negotiates them in order to attend a course of higher education.

The geographies of English higher education The relationship between undergraduate education and mobility varies hugely across and even within nationalities. As Alexander (2015; 2016) and Corbett (2007a) point out from their research contexts of the Scottish islands and

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remote coastal Canada respectively, there are additional complexities to higher education geographies when living in a remote, rural or island location in any country; in these locations, Corbett argues, part of the role of school education is to teach potential students of higher education to leave in order to continue their studies; this lesson is not as necessary in the metropolitan areas of the same country. However, as Brooks (2018) highlights, there are also narratives of undergraduate mobility that operate at a national policy level, and that go some way to explaining the distinct differences between, for example, different European nations in their numbers of students who leave home in order to take up higher education. Historically, the spatial language of ‘going to’ university in England has signified a geographical journey from the familial home to university accommodation Here, England has strong similarities to countries such as the United States, where the place of the university campus as the location of all aspects of undergraduate social experience holds a comparable sway in public imagination. The geographical journey and its association with degree-level study combine to create a narrative of ‘going to’ university as a rite of passage, a progression from the spaces of childhood and adolescence to those of early adulthood and independence. This understanding of what it means to study in higher education remains a powerful shared societal narrative, with the figure of the ‘student’ often representing a homogenized category of people with privilege, youth and social and economic freedom. The coinage of and subsequent research into the concept of ‘studentification’ (see, for example, Prada, 2019) in university towns and cities shows how geographical areas in these places have become dominated by this student figure; housing and social spaces are shaped around a generic student lifestyle. There is an irony to the fact that national narratives of student experience are both characterized by spatial and social mobility and reproductive of homogenized spatial experiences that limit encounters with different localities. The massification of higher education in England, combined with two decades of widening participation (WP) policies aimed at increasing access to higher education from under-represented groups, has led to an increase in the numbers of students who do not follow the traditional pattern of undergraduate mobility. Often characterized by this mobility decision as ‘commuter’ or ‘local’ students, these students are seen as non-traditional in wider discourses of English higher education, despite making up considerable student populations in some higher education institutions. While the traditional move away from the family home is still associated with gaining of independence and the broadening

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of horizons, there is a danger that ‘local’ students are seen as not gaining these skills and experiences. Although this view is challenged by those who argue that local students often manage far more complex home, employment and educational commitments than their traditionally mobile peers (see, for example, Holdsworth, 2009b; Holton, 2015), the dominant narrative of student mobility remains pervasive. It is pervasive even and especially for ‘local’ students themselves, as this book will demonstrate. As argued by Donnelly and Gamsu (2018), patterns of student mobility in England have to be understood in nuanced ways in order to account for the inequalities both in distribution of educational provision across the country and in student relationships to place, education and mobility. In 2015, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE, now part of the Office for Students and Research England) published a set of maps relating to the distribution of higher education provision in England (HEFCE, 2015). One of these maps uses the metaphor of temperature to highlight areas of the country which have high levels of higher education provision as ‘hot spots’. These areas are coloured in red and orange on the national map. The areas of the country in which there are fewer universities or other higher education providers are coloured blue and described as ‘cold spots’. In 2017, a further set of maps was published, this time showing student mobility both for and following undergraduate study (HEFCE, 2017). The maps are interactive, so that it is possible to click on one county and read statistical evidence of the proportion of students that travel from this county to each of the other counties in the country. What is clear from both sets of geographical data is that there are stark inequalities in the geographies of higher education in England. Though published separately, these two geographical inquiries, of higher education provider distribution and of student mobility, are closely intertwined. Areas of the country with a higher proportion of higher education provision are also areas from which more students travel for degree study. Correspondingly, a cold spot, already an area without much or any higher education provision, is also an area from which people are less likely to travel in order to study. If student mobility is understood as a marker of privilege or capital (Corbett, 2007b), then this kind of privilege is also reinforcing and reinforced by the privilege of local investment in higher education. While these maps demonstrate ways to understand geographies according to higher education provision and undergraduate mobility, they cannot capture the multiple and very specific narratives of place that constitute each particular ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ spot. These narratives are connected with the ways that higher education is positioned in each locality and are difficult to capture and

Introduction

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uncomfortable to address. For example, in large towns without higher education provision, there is also often a legacy of industrial loss and economic deprivation. Where university buildings are absent from the town’s architecture, employment opportunities are also often absent from recent history. These places are easy to imagine without visiting, so that the term ‘cold spot’ can be used almost euphemistically to describe not only a place without higher education provision but also a place whose economic and social ‘climate’ might be best avoided. In this kind of local context, the decision to both remain in place and study for a degree is a complex one, which requires a negotiation of placed discourses of education, employment and opportunity, as well as national narratives of what it means to be an undergraduate student. The focus on place in this book allows for the layered geographies of national narratives of mobility, national distribution of higher education and local relationships between place and higher education to be understood together. In particular, the book draws attention to inequalities in higher education experience, by applying this geographical lens to higher education that takes place outside of the university, in the English further education sector.

The Geographies of Non-university Higher Education1 As discussed in the example of Meera at the beginning of this chapter, the students whose experiences are explored in this book are themselves seen as ‘local’ not only because they have not left home in order to study but also because they attend ‘local’ institutions, or institutions which cater largely for students from the immediate local area, and which do not compete at a global level for research funding, international faculty and elite reputation. The local institutions focused on in this book are colleges of further education, which provide a range of qualifications at all levels, for students from the age of fourteen upwards. In providing dual-sector higher education, further education colleges have clear similarities to dual-sector institutions in many international contexts, while having in common with these institutions a system that is specific to current and historical national, regional and local idiosyncrasies (Gallacher and Reeve, 2018). The terms ‘non-university higher education’ and ‘dual-sector higher education’ are used throughout this book with full awareness that they are contested and arguably outdated ways of understanding this kind of provision. The choice to use these terms is based on their legibility across international contexts, in contrast to the term ‘college-based higher education’, which is most commonly used in England but which risks misunderstandings based on the multiple international definitions of the word ‘college’.

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This section sets out the specificities of English college-based higher education, drawing out the particular constellation in this national context of common concerns in dual-sector higher education such as those of locality, widening access and skills development. On the one hand, what emerges is a kind of provision that is impossible to ‘pin down’, or to characterize neatly and with certainty. On the other hand, this educational provision is not pinned but weighed down by euphemistic definitions that pull it in multiple directions – it is there to fill local skills gaps, to allow England to compete globally in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, to increase access to higher education, to compensate for localized educational failings. It occupies the impossible position of doing all and none of these at any one time and in any one place. Qualifications offered by further education colleges include higher education at degree and sub-degree level, and at degree level are usually awarded through a partnership with a university. These institutions can be seen as ‘local’ in a variety of ways. They cater for comparatively smaller numbers of higher education students than typically attend a university, and these students tend to be recruited from places geographically close to the college. In both literature and policy, colleges are seen to provide vital opportunities for educational progression and skill acquisition in ‘underserved areas’ (Avis and Orr, 2016; Bathmaker, 2016), so that they are discursively linked to a particular type of locality. There is also a historical connection between the college and its local area, which is a point of pride in narratives of further education (see, for example, Hodgson, Bailey and Lucas, 2015). However, the ‘local’ higher education institution is positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy of higher education in which the ‘global’ is most highly prized (Marginson, 2006), and connections between institutions and surrounding localities are often fraught. Additionally, largely because of their position as responsive to the specificities of their local area, there are huge disparities between further education colleges with regard to the subjects and types of higher education study offered (Saraswat, Hudson and Thompson, 2014). While some colleges offer a small number of higher education qualifications, often in technical subjects not typically provided by nearby universities, others offer a large range of subjects including those more commonly associated with academic university study such as humanities and social sciences. The courses provided correspond to local demand, achieving financial viability only if there is sufficient take-up for the subjects offered, and if that take-up is not absorbed by surrounding university providers. It is important therefore to see higher education provision in colleges in relation to the unequal geographical distribution

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Where non-university higher education offers the only undergraduate education opportunity provision in a ‘cold spot’ locality, the confused roles already assigned to this provision are further exaggerated. On the one hand, the college fulfils a WP mission by offering access to higher education to those who might not be able to travel further to the nearest university and are ‘underserved’ by the geographies of higher education, as well as by increasing participation in higher education in ‘low participation neighbourhoods’. On the other hand, it is in precisely these areas that the loss of industry during the twentieth century prompts policy discussions of the need for new forms of technical education which meet the changing demands of local and global industries (BIS and DfE, 2016). As a result of this confusion in the purpose of dual-sector higher education in these areas, despite the stated emphasis in policy upon short-cycle and technically oriented qualifications as a priority for further education colleges (Dearing, 1997), colleges continue to offer a wide range of subjects and levels of higher education. In cold spot areas, this provision can be particularly varied given the relative lack of competition with universities in the local marketplace. Therefore, despite both the traditional and the currently increasing focus on further education as technical education and on further education colleges as redressing a national skills shortage, some colleges offer humanities and social science degree courses alongside more technically oriented degree and subdegree options. As these discourses demonstrate, higher education provision in colleges in England is understood at a national level through competing claims. Each of these claims offers its own definition of the meaning and purpose of local higher education opportunities in areas with both low participation in undergraduate education and low levels of skills and employment. These claims represent historically enduring concerns in both further and higher education sectors, as well as being specific to the contemporary moment in terms of massification processes in higher education and current policies of rationalization and efficiency in further education (Smith, 2017). In addition to this temporal consideration, discussions of what non-university higher education is for, and the specific role it plays in particular geographical areas, invariably make an association between higher education and the future. Discourses of opportunity, future workforces, social and geographical future mobility and improved future life chances are common to higher education representations more broadly but are especially pertinent in places where the futures associated with higher learning have been lacking. Alongside the spatial focus on the spatial and the local in this book, then, runs an acknowledgement of these and other temporal

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conditions of education. The project on which the book is based is explained in more detail in the following section, followed by a summary of the conceptual framework uniting the spatial and the temporal.

Researching local students at local colleges For many of the reasons outlined earlier, higher education in further education colleges is a particularly difficult educational phenomenon to attempt to capture or represent. It looks markedly different from college to college and location to location even within a single region or nation; while it has many equivalents in terms of dual-sector or technical higher education provision worldwide, these are rarely either directly comparable across country contexts or identical within their own national sectors. Working within this variety, this book is based on research that sought to explore an instance of the multiple conditions in which higher education takes place, and to develop an analytical framework for the exploration of student subjectivities in diverse higher education environments, institutions, sectors and localities. The project began with elite interviews involving actors at senior levels in further education and with expertise in the sector’s higher education provision, in order to position the project within current policy discourses. Five such interviews were conducted. The bulk of the research was then carried out at two further education colleges in England over the course of an academic year. The colleges were similar in the size and variety of their higher education provision and were both located in ‘cold spot’ areas of the country. Both were in large post-industrial towns without universities, and offered a range of degree courses in humanities and social science subjects, as well as technical degrees and short-cycle higher education qualifications. To gain a sense of how higher education provision and students were seen across the institution, interviews with Directors of Higher Education were carried out in both colleges. Alongside these interviews, a discourse analysis of college marketing materials for their higher education courses also explored the ways in which students, potential students and the institutions themselves were represented. Two degree courses at each case institution were chosen as examples of the higher education provision – one academic and one technical subject. These were chosen in order to take into account the contrasting roles of the provision as both widening local access to traditional undergraduate education (the academic subject) and redressing local skills and employment gaps (the technical subject). Interviews with tutors involved in teaching each course were

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crucial to gaining an understanding of the histories of degree provision in the colleges, as well as further informing a sense of the characteristics of the student population. Six tutors were involved in these interviews. Because the research also had a temporal lens, seeking to explore the role of future temporalities in degree study, the focus was on final year students on BA degree courses, with the rationale that these students would be closest to imagining their future beyond graduation. Given the locations of the colleges, and their histories without higher education provision, the project particularly sought to understand how these anticipated graduate futures might intersect with local narratives of higher education. Student participants in the study were interviewed at the beginning and end of their final year of study, capturing shifts in the ways that futures were discussed as the end of the course became more imminent. At the beginning of their final year of undergraduate study, twenty-one students in total took part in the first interviews for the project. Of these twentyone, three did not complete that final year and did not take part in a second interview for the project. Two of these students were pregnant at the time of my first interview and had elected to take their final term of courses the following academic year. The third student left his studies between my first and second visit for reasons unknown to the college and did not respond to my attempts to contact him. His narrative, as represented to me in my first and only interview with him, is explored in detail in Chapter 7. Student interviews form the primary source of data from the project and are drawn upon for the majority of the later chapters in this book (Chapters 4–7). These chapters also refer to my observations which were recorded in fieldnotes throughout the time of the project and which give an insight into the experience of being a researcher visiting the colleges and the towns in which they are located. The observations bridge the gap between the reader as a stranger to the towns and colleges, and the students and staff of the college who were deeply embedded in the places and institutions, and are a way of encountering the localities as much as is possible through text. What emerges from the project is a nuanced picture of the ways that higher education is framed and structured through often unseen geographical and temporal inequalities, as these inequalities are felt and lived in the experiences of the students who took part in the research. This granularity is in itself a core argument of the book; there are considerable insights to be gained from approaching a place and an institution or a student within that place in all their singularity and specificity. Such an approach ensures that, while numbers of students accessing higher education across the world continue to increase, this increase is not accompanied by a homogenization or universalizing perception

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of what it means to undertake degree study in any particular place and time. The project also demonstrates the rewards of focusing attention on aspects of educational provision or practice that could be described as ‘marginal’ as nonuniversity provision is seen in higher education discourses in England. This attention has the function of making the familiar strange, in that it highlights what might be accepted, unseen or unnoticed in a more normative higher education environment. The opportunity to see university-based higher education from a strange liminal position both within and on the borders of the higher education sector allowed for a view that could not be gained from the centre of the sector. As a consequence, many of the findings outlined in the later chapters of this book speak to and critique the norms and traditions of university practice, and can only do so from the project’s position on the boundaries of that practice. Finally, the book demonstrates that student futures and possibilities are imagined and lived at this local level and that higher education in local areas offers important opportunities. The book therefore suggests that as policy seeks to even out local difference and economize on local services in the name of efficiency, smaller subjective scales of locality should not be disregarded.

Conceptualizing student subjectivities It is important to the inquiry of this book to see students as subjects, in a Foulcauldian sense, as both subject to and recognized by the terms of discursive power structures. But is there an experience of subjectivity that is specific to educational experience? Do students have particular subjectivities that can be described as educational? I argue that there are discursive norms and positions that are specific to or exaggerated by education systems, and that therefore the term ‘educational subjectivity’ is useful in drawing attention to these particular qualities. However, this is not to suggest that a distinct model or mode of subjectivity operates within the times and places of educational institutions. Many of the defining features of education systems, such as linear progression through a demarcated system and assessment and ranking through externally defined standards, merely exaggerate the norms of subjectivity in a more general sense of the word. Discussions of subjectivity in educational contexts are likely to move between the boundaries of before, during and after, within and without, the subject’s occupation of those contexts. I therefore continue to refer to ‘educational subjectivity’ throughout this book, with an understanding that accounts of such subjectivity are neither easily divided

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from, nor simply aligned with, accounts of subjectivity that are not specific to education. The book develops and demonstrates a narrative conceptualization of educational subjectivity that takes into account the spatial and temporal conditions of higher education experience and does so by drawing together a range of theoretical tools. The first of these is de Certeau’s ‘spatial story’ (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 116–31). At its simplest, the spatial story highlights the ways that places are defined, showing the myriad narrative processes involved in describing what a place ‘is’ or ‘is not’, what is possible or not within a place, and what the possibilities of movement within or away from a place are. De Certeau’s theorization sees such stories as fundamental to narratives of subjectivity; when a subject tells a story of themselves, he argues, they tell a story of a subject that is located in a particular place. Often without noticing, a story that defines a subject also defines the place in which that subject is located. In this book specifically, the educational subject’s narrative of their educational trajectory and experiences is also a narrative of their location in a place, and of the multiple ways that educational possibilities, limitations and opportunities are understood in that place. Chapters 1 and 2 elaborate further on the spatial story, showing how geographies underpin educational subjectivities. It is common for scholarship in educational geographies to focus on one of three interrelated geographical concerns – education and place, educational mobilities, or built educational spaces (Brooks, Byford and Sela, 2016). In contrast, this book explores the significance of each of the three concerns in detail, and then asks how they might intersect. To return to the example of Meera at the beginning of this chapter, Meera’s decisions about her higher education were structured through both a relationship to place that meant she had not considered leaving for degree study and a relationship to mobility that meant she felt unable to commute to the nearest university. As will be shown in later chapters, these factors of place and mobility were also inflected with further relationships to the built environment of the town and the college. This individual-level tripartite spatial story is layered with the educational history of the town she lived in, which had never had university provision. In theorizing spatial stories then, the book demonstrates how three ways in which place is defined – what the place ‘is’, what movements are possible within and from it, and how built spaces are experienced within it – are fundamental to narratives of educational subjectivity. In developing this definition of the spatial story in education, I used terms such as ‘possibility’ and ‘opportunity’. These are used carefully and deliberately in this book, and refer directly to the way that temporality is theorized. Some

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of the specificity of the educational subjectivity, as discussed earlier, is in its exaggerated linearity and logic of progression; put simply, an ideal educational subject has a clear plan for the future and works hard, in the present, towards that future. The book therefore uses the concept of possible selves (Henderson, Stevenson and Bathmaker, 2018; Markus and Nurius, 1986) as a way of theorizing future temporalities in the context of higher education. The possible selves concept, which originates in the research discipline of social psychology, suggests that present behaviour is influenced by how individuals imagine their futures, and particularly by personalized imagined versions of themselves enacting those futures. The concept is used in a critical way, so that because it can describe some of the temporal conditions of higher education, it also de-naturalizes these and shows the difficulties of creating and sustaining educational subjectivities according to these conditions. The possible selves concept is useful in this endeavour partly because it offers an opportunity to disrupt linear temporalities, showing how the imagined future is experienced in the present, rather than simply following on from it. Multiple future temporalities are also acknowledged in the possible selves concept, so that contrasting or conflicting imagined futures can be thought through in all their complexity. In this book, the concept of possible selves is used with the spatial story to create the concept of the placed possible self (see Chapter 7), so that questions of how a place is defined are also questions of what is seen to be possible in that place. Necessarily, these questions also ask what impossibilities are part of a place, and here the book is situated amongst scholarship on inequalities such as those of social class, age, race and ethnicity in higher education. Prioritizing the spatiotemporal allows new insights into these perennial concerns with widening access to higher education. In bringing together the temporal and the spatial in the theorization of the educational subject, the book explores the demands of the current neoliberal higher education context while allowing for the particularities of the ways that this context is lived at a local level. While focusing in on individual accounts of educational experience, the conceptual framework also seeks to situate these within the local and national geographical and ideological structures at work in a particular higher education system (in this case, the English higher education system). The study’s focus on higher education ‘on the margins’ (Scott, 2009) of this system allows for an analysis of the ways in which the boundary between degree study as possible and impossible is negotiated where this boundary is at its most fragile.

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The language of space and place If the language of higher education provision outside the university were not complicated enough, this book also uses the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’, thereby entering into another contested linguistic and conceptual terrain. As the book uses a conceptualization of de Certeau’s (1984) spatial story throughout, the spatial terminology is influenced by his scholarship as well as by the work of Massey (2005), which critiques and further develops de Certeau’s conceptualization. I outline these definitions here while acknowledging the multiple ways in which the terms can and have been used in geographical scholarship (Agnew, 2011). Both de Certeau and Massey see space and place as imbued with and produced through power relations; for de Certeau, these power relations create a complete division between place and space. Place is defined through the practice of mapmaking and -building, and the qualities and characteristics of a place are fixed by those in power. The spatial movements within and around the pre-existing structures are enacted by subjects who gain agency from these movements. Massey argues that seeing place in this way denies the interactional quality of relationships between subjects and place. Through these interactions, she argues, even the externally determined organization and representations of place are fluid and constantly shifting. De Certeau’s definition does not account for the many and varied meanings made from built places and the uses they are put to by those who did not build them, but who do interact with them. These interactions blur de Certeau’s definitional distinction; the spatial movements he describes are intertwined with, rather than separate from, the places in which these movements are made. In contrast to de Certeau’s view of place as fixed, Massey understands place as ‘open’, ‘woven together out of ongoing stories, as a moment within powergeometries, as a particular constellation within the wider topographies of space, and as in process, as unfinished business’ (p. 131). In her formulation, the difference between space and place is one of both temporality and scale. Place is a small, temporally specific ‘moment’ within a larger ongoing temporality that is spatial. The specificity of a place in Massey’s definition does not fix or complete its meaning. Instead, the stories through which the meaning of a place is made are never finished, and the meaning of a place is therefore perpetually re-made. Seen in this way, it is only possible to grasp a meaning of a place by fixing it temporally in a ‘moment’. This fixing, in turn, can only be done with the acknowledgement that in any other temporal moment, the woven stories of

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a place would say something different. Like de Certeau, Massey firmly positions discussions of space and place within the concerns of power and societal structure. However, rather than reinforcing de Certeau’s division between the powerful, who define place, and the powerless, who enact space, Massey argues that varied, messy and unequal relationships of power structure all spatial and placed experiences. Massey’s attention to power dynamics highlights how places are often defined through competing claims to ownership. It is in the context of these claims that she argues for a definition of place that refuses fixity, and therefore resists tendencies towards absolute belonging and control. I use ‘place’ to refer to a single location in a way that signals attention to the specific, rather than the generic, qualities of that location. In thinking about place, I keep in mind Massey’s attention to the temporal fixing of a ‘moment’ that is necessary in creating a coherent account of a place. I therefore see ‘place’ as specifying time as well as location. Working with this definition of place, ‘space’ is therefore understood as the wider context within which place is specified. Following Massey, I see this context as constructed through relationships of power. In order to de-naturalize the power dynamics that structure subjective experience, ‘space(s)’ also refers to built environments, whose role in shaping subjectivities might otherwise go unnoticed. In order to describe movement through places and spaces, with the material experiences that accompany this movement, I use the adjective ‘spatial’. This adjective takes into account de Certeau’s conceptualization of the spatial as the negotiated practice of place.

Book structure Chapter 1 continues the geographical discussion with which the book began. The chapter asks fundamental questions about the ways that place, belonging and education intersect; the ways that decisions are made to leave or remain in a place; and the role of the material in experiences of space. Structured according to Brooks, Byford and Sela’s (2016) categorization of growing areas of educational geographies scholarship – place and locality, mobilities and built environments – the chapter explores some of the geographical issues that underlie these questions, moving through place, mobilities and built spaces in turn. Each of these sections first considers the geographical construct more generally, and then moves to a focus on higher education specifically, drawing on literature from a range of international contexts. These shifts in focus highlight the difficulty of dividing educational contexts from broader issues of place, mobility and built

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environments, and show how educational geographies research is informed and enhanced by engagement with wider geographical issues. The literature in this chapter is chosen because it allows a discussion of the interaction between the spatial, the temporal and subjectivities, and because it demonstrates the ways that inequalities of class, race, gender and age structure these subjectivities. The chapter sustains the book’s attention to inequalities in higher education and closes with a section applying the chapter’s discussion to the particularity of non-university higher education in England. Arguing that the term ‘local’ can be applied to students in this provision in many ways, the chapter sets out the book’s exploration of locality in all of its complexity. Chapter 2 brings together the concerns of the spatial and the temporal that inform the remainder of the book, arguing that research into educational inequalities requires a theorization of educational subjectivities that can take into account the spatial and temporal conditions of educational contexts. Chapter 2 argues that research into educational inequalities requires a theorization of educational subjectivities that takes account of the spatial and temporal conditions of educational contexts. The theoretical framework is built in stages and drawn from a range of theorists, beginning with the concept of the ‘spatial story’ (de Certeau). This narrative understanding of the spatial and its relationship to subjectivity is explained, before a more developed theorization of the structures of narrative subjectivity is set out using the work of Ricoeur (1980; 1992) and Butler (1997). The final section of the chapter introduces the concept of ‘possible selves’ (Markus and Nurius, 1986), which is used in the book to understand and critique the temporal processes at work in contemporary higher education. The conclusion of the chapter summarizes the framework as a whole through the construct of the ‘placed possible self ’. While the chapter is conceptual in its focus, connections are drawn throughout between the more abstract theoretical thinking and the book’s focus on inequalities in higher education generally, as well as the context of non-university higher education more specifically. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the ways in which a higher education institution is constructed as ‘local’ within the global higher education marketplace. The chapter looks at the national context of English non-university higher education, making connections internationally with the geographies of community college and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) higher education provision (Dache-Gerbino and White, 2016), and locates the two empirical research sites within this national context. In order to do so, the chapter uses the concept of the spatial story to explore representations of the ‘local’.

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The analysis focuses on the ways in which non-university higher education is narratively represented as ‘local’ provision for ‘local’ students, and the ways in which its fragile position as local higher education provision between national higher education and further education policy contexts results in complex claims for its local purpose. The chapter then moves on to analyse data from documentary analysis and staff interviews at each of the case colleges in turn. These data show how the colleges’ higher education provision is positioned as responding to particular local histories in each place. Across the chapter as a whole, the data from interviews at national and case college level demonstrate a homogenized construction of the ‘local’ non-university higher education student which the subsequent chapters seek to question and complicate. In the first of the four chapters to focus on interviews with students, Chapter 4 looks at how students in each case college town narrate the place(s) in which they live and study. The chapter uses the concept of the spatial story to show how students’ narratives of educational subjectivity locate them within a definition of what their locality is and is not, and what is im/possible within it. The analysis explores these narratives in the context of the locality as a ‘cold spot’ in the national geographies of higher education. In these local contexts, while local higher education opportunities were seen as necessary in the staff data analysed in the previous chapter, students occupy complex subject positions as they imagine graduate futures that at times seem incongruous with placed histories. Using the possible selves concept along with the spatial story allows an analysis of these complexities, taking into account experience of race and social class that are particular to place. The analysis in this chapter draws out the multiple ways in which each place is defined, drawing out common definitional threads as well as disparities between the narratives. Chapter 5 shifts the focus of analysis to student mobilities, looking at how the narratives of place and locality drawn out in the previous chapter are implicated in students’ spatial stories of their lived and imagined educational mobility. In response to the representation, in Chapter 4, of the typical nonuniversity student as tied to or stuck in place, unable to move or to imagine moving for undergraduate study, this analysis explores students’ accounts of past or imagined future decisions to remain ‘local’ for their degree education and in their graduate futures. The analysis shows that students who are perceived as simply immobile are in fact mobile in multiple material and imagined ways. The chapter also looks at how the dominant societal narrative of the perceivedas-mobile undergraduate student pervades in the form of the once-possible future, even where students have not followed this pattern. Two binary common

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distinctions are therefore destabilized in this chapter. The first is the association of mobility with privilege and immobility with disadvantage. The second is the understanding of the traditional student as mobile and the local student as immobile. As the analysis in this chapter shows, local capital and the ‘everyday’ mobility of the local student are crucial to complicating these assumptions and to extending existing understandings of student mobility in this and other national contexts. Chapter 6 builds on the analysis of locality and mobility in the previous chapters, looking at the material experiences of non-university higher education spaces, seeing these as shaped by and shaping of possible educational subjectivities. Again, the chapter works as a response to the analysis in Chapter 4, in which the material needs of the non-university student were characterized in a homogenous and universalizing way. In particular, the chapter grapples with the difficulty involved in creating student spaces for students with contradictory spatial practices, who at times both rely on and deny the need for designated undergraduate spaces. The interview data in this chapter are analysed using de Certeau’s spatial conceptualization of synecdoche (1984, pp. 101–2) to develop the framework of the spatial story and applies this to material objects such as chairs, as well as social spaces such as coffee shops and canteens. Within this analysis, understandings of the spatial needs and practices of the ‘local’ student, as well as of the visibility of higher education spaces in remote or under-served geographical areas, are brought together with perceptions of the traditional university. The chapter highlights the complexities and contradictions of social spaces for local students in these local contexts, where visible higher education space is seen as necessary but often remains under-used. Bringing together the cumulative spatial analysis of local student experience of the previous three chapters, Chapter 7 uses four more detailed student narratives to demonstrate the salience of the ‘placed possible self ’ as a conceptual tool in higher education research. In focusing in depth and detail upon four specific narratives, the complex layers of spatial educational experience reveal the impossibility of characterizing the non-university student as a single homogenized figure. The chapter also highlights how local, non-university higher education occupies a complex position in each of the student narratives. At times, it can be seen to offer a chance to maintain an investment in local capital and realize an undergraduate imagined future, where this would not be possible without the provision. At other times, the dominance of traditional university-based higher education in societal narratives and in the stratified higher education system means that studying for a degree at a local college is

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experienced as a form of exclusion from university-based higher education. While these narratives argue for the importance of the conceptual framework of the spatial story, where this takes into account the multiple temporalities of educational possibility and impossibility, they also resist individualizing or deficit discourses, and instead show the structural inequalities through which educational subjectivities are constructed, made available and lived. The book’s conclusion reflects on what it means to see student experience as spatiotemporal, what can be revealed about inequalities in higher education through this approach, and how the work of the book might be taken forward. This chapter returns to the premise of the book, which was to explore the spatiotemporal conditions of higher education through the instance of nonuniversity higher education in post-industrial towns in England. The chapter offers four key challenges by way of concluding the work of the book. The first of these is the development and application of the placed possible self as a conceptual framework. The second raises the problem of the dominance of the university in the language of higher education. The third problematizes the binary opposition between mobility and immobility in understandings of  the higher education student. Finally, the fourth challenge uses the concept of ‘local capital’ to counter the language of deficit around the local student. These challenges complete the work of the book without ending the conversations to which it contributes and suggests ways that the project of locating the places, spaces and times of higher education can continue.

1

Understanding the Local Student Concerns of Place, Mobilities and Space

Introduction Take any student, of any age, in any education system. How is their educational trajectory affected by their relationship to the places in which they have grown up, and in which they are educated? Does the educational institution they attend reflect, reproduce or try to work against wider understandings of the local area and the educational priorities of the national context? How does this relationship to place affect their plans to continue their education, either away from home or remaining in place? What are the material experiences of moving through educational spaces in this place? What do classrooms, dining areas and libraries look and feel like? And how might asking these questions capture some of the inequalities that structure education systems? This chapter explores these questions, asking what is already known about the relationship between education and geography, and explaining how this knowledge informs the book’s focus on student experiences of higher education systems, and of higher education provision outside of the university more specifically. The chapter is organized according to three interlinked key geographical concerns. The first is the relationship between people and place; this section discusses how places are known and defined and what is involved in a relationship to a place, before considering the ways that higher education and place intersect. Building on this discussion, the second part of the chapter asks how these aspects of place also impact upon movement to, from and within a locality, and what goes into decisions to stay in or to leave a place to take up higher education. The chapter then looks at the ways that educational mobility is associated with English higher education, and the particular inequalities that structure and are shaped by this national system. The third section of the

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chapter explores different understandings of the ways that built environments are experienced by those living and working in them. The focus then turns to the material experiences of educational spaces, and how these experiences are inflected by the relationships to location and movement that characterize higher education. Through separating these concerns while also demonstrating the connections between them, the chapter sets out the structure of an educational spatial story which will be elaborated on in later chapters using data from the field. The chapter also highlights what the educational spatial story reveals about the structures and inequalities of the higher education system specifically, from the book’s vantage point of higher education provision on the margins, outside of the university. From this vantage point, the chapter uses the three spatial factors of place, mobility and material spaces to expand upon the descriptor of ‘local’ that is so often applied to both the students and institutions that provide non-university higher education. The final section of the chapter shows how the considerations of the spatial outlined thus far are related to the college-based higher education context. In light of issues of class, race, gender and age that are addressed in research literature on space and place, this section shows how these issues are particularly relevant to the spaced and placed inequalities specific to nonuniversity higher education provision.

Place and locality Understanding the relationship between people and place means bringing together a range of different and often contradictory factors. Time as well as space is involved in a definition or description of a place, because any definition might capture a place in a single moment but cannot capture its changes as time moves on. People relate to and belong to places as individuals, but also through collective stories, expectations and histories, so the relationship is both plural and singular. And while descriptions and definitions of place are usually discursive, given in verbal, visual or written language, connections to place are also material, formed through habitual movements around a location. What this multitude of factors means is that it is difficult to pin down exactly what a place is, and what a human relationship to it means. Added to this difficulty is the fact that the term ‘place’ can be used to mean a locality of any given size, ranging from a single dwelling (or room within that dwelling) to a nation. Within the complexity of place as a concept, and despite the elusiveness of human

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relationships to it, there are some common elements that are important to the project of this book. The first of these is that place is experienced, understood, defined and articulated narratively; as Massey puts it, place is ‘woven together of ongoing stories’ (Massey, 2005, p. 131). The second is that narratives of place are not the same for everyone. It is the case that any two people would narrate the same place in different ways, but this book argues that there are differences in experiences of place that are structured along lines of inequality that Massey calls ‘power-geometries’ (Massey, 2012). In the UK, social class is one such power-geometry. Social class also demonstrates how place is experienced and narrated both individually and collectively. The loss of industry in, for example, the former mining communities of north-east England (Taylor, 2012) and Wales (Jimenez and Walkerdine, 2011) is felt across generations, so that working-class young people in these areas narrate that historical loss without having directly experienced it themselves. These shared working-class narratives then conflict with more official public narratives of regeneration and improvement that both rely upon and seek to redress the inheritance of industrial loss. This conflict is in part a temporal as well as a classed one, centring on the question of whether a place can continue to be defined by a collective experience of past loss or whether that loss should be re-narrated as the backdrop to an improved future. Attachments to particular temporal moments, according to particular class identities, are therefore implicit in the ways that a single place could be narrated in completely different ways by different people. This difference is demonstrated by Benson and Jackson’s (2013) analysis of middle-class gentrification of the London ‘neighbourhood’ (p. 793) of Peckham. They show their participants recounting narratives of Peckham as a deprived and dangerous area to live, in order to position themselves against these narratives and offer more positive alternatives. These participants see themselves and their involvement in the place as crucial to these positive future alternatives. Part of understanding the power-geometry that structures placed relationships is therefore asking who has the capacity to claim the future of a place, to determine the nature of its proposed progression or change, and to participate in that process. If the effects of industrialization and post-industrialization are one way of understanding collective definitions of place, however, these effects must also be problematized according to other inequalities such as those of gender and race/ ethnicity. In the areas of the UK mentioned earlier, whose industrial landscape has been shaped by mining and related industries, these landscapes are experienced in qualitatively different ways by men and women. The patriarchal natures of

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these industries and the continuing gendered distribution of housework and caring responsibilities mean that the small-scale, immediate and mundane places of the home and its surrounding streets are more likely to be known intimately by women than by men. Feminist geographies of place such as those by Massey (2013) and Rose (1993) show how often collective narratives of place rely on a male worker’s perspective, and how rarely working-class women’s narratives are traditionally sought or understood. There is a risk, in asking questions about how gender structures narratives of place, of reinscribing the common association between women and the home, men and the workplace; however, these questions also work as a reminder that there are silences in any account of place. If a locality is often narrated according to, for example, its past industry or its current attempts to recover from industrial loss, whose experiences are captured by that account, and whose are elided? Closely related to the question of whose experiences are captured in collective narratives of place is the question of how a relationship to place is one of belonging (Yarker, 2019). Literature on emotional geographies (see, for example, Benwell, 2019; Bondi, 2016; Davidson and Milligan, 2004) explores this aspect of placed relationships in detail and highlights the role of memories, both individual and collective, as shaping the way people see themselves as belonging to a particular place. Something as simple as a childhood holiday, a family home or a landscape, glimpsed from the window of a train, can form powerful memories that colour and characterize a locality. Again, however, there are questions to be asked about how inequality and power structure a relationship of belonging to a place. When, for example, the contemporary landscape of a place is shaped by industrial capitalism, and this capitalism was enabled by the displacement and enslavement of multiple populations, then this displaced and enslaved population has a complex relationship to place. Black geographies (Bledsoe, Eaves and Williams, 2017; McKittrick and Woods, 2007) and Black feminist geographies (McKittrick, 2006) show how forced geographical movement coupled with invisibility in the new locality results in a collective sense of displacement. As well as highlighting the racial privilege that comes with a given or straightforward belonging to place, these geographers ask questions about how belonging can be re-inscribed into a place that is not of someone’s choosing. They also ask whether belonging to place is a bodily relationship, and whether the body is read by others as belonging in a place, whether the feeling of belonging comes from within the body itself, or is a blurred combination of the two. Similar questions can be asked about bodies and place in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity (Johnston, 2019; Nash, 2010); if the collective narratives of a place are implicitly gendered, as

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discussed earlier, then do these narratives allow room for variance in gender identity or deviation from heterosexuality? The central question of this section, which has been about what human relationships to place consist of and how these relationships might be unequal, is for this book a precursor to considering how place, people and higher education interact. The ideas here, of collective and individual attachments to the temporality of a place, to the silenced narratives of placed experience, and to the privileges that come with belonging, will be carried into the next section which focuses on place and higher education. While the focus of this section is on the context of the empirical study on which this book is based, in the English higher education system specifically, connections are made to issues that are common across other higher education systems internationally.

Place, locality and higher education Place is fundamental to any system, level or age of education. England is not unusual in having a geographically structured state school system that uses the family home address as its primary determiner of school entry. Any student living within a particular geographical area of a school gains automatic entry to that school. According to this logic, state-funded schools serve the populations of their very immediate locality. Often, this locality includes only the children from a single housing estate, so that the school creates and reflects its own ‘microgeography’ (Reay and Lucey, 2000, p. 413). These micro-geographies shape and are, in turn, shaped by school reputation, so that families with the resources to do so move to within the catchment area of a school with a desirable reputation (Reay, 2012; Weller, 2012). Nearby schools therefore play a significant role in the ways that a place is defined and narrated, with clear implications for social-class inequality, and for relationships between dominant and minority ethnic groups. In turn, the role of education and the opportunities it offers are understood differently in different localities and according to multiple placed histories and inequalities, and these understandings shape narratives of what education is for that are specific to any given place. While this cyclical relationship between schooling and locality is complex enough, place occupies a still more complicated position in the English higher education system. Two interrelated geographies structure the places of English higher education. The first is the massified and hierarchical system of higher education in England, within which global, rather than local, reputation is the most sought after (Marginson, 2016). Within this system, the geographical distribution

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of higher education institutions is both highly organized and very unequal (HEFCE, 2015). It is highly organized in that, despite the increase in numbers of students studying at undergraduate level and in institutions providing higher education, members of the British Russell Group of elite universities are never located in the same city. It is unequal in that there are geographical areas of England which have concentrations of higher education provision, and others with little or no higher education provision. In terms of narratives of place, these inequalities mean that for some students, higher education is an accepted part of the way their locality is defined. This is particularly the case in cities in which universities in the internationally known Russell Group are located. By contrast, there are locations in which higher education has never occupied a physical part of the landscape or architecture, and within which it is possible to enter and leave compulsory education without ever having passed by an institution of higher education. Although the spatial organization of Russell Group institutions appears specific to the UK context, associations between place, higher education history and institutional status are common across other national contexts. As Munene (2016) notes of geographies of higher education in Kenya, rural branch campuses that are both inexpensive to run and commonly associated with low-quality teaching and learning are recent and highly lucrative investments for large universities historically associated with metropolitan areas of the country. Within these broadly defined distributional inequalities, there are further relationships between place and higher education that lead to discussions of ‘low participation neighbourhoods’ (Avis and Orr, 2016; Harrison and McCaig, 2014). As these discussions highlight, the distribution of provision alone is not enough to explain differences in rates of participation in higher education from one postcode to another. Similarly, Bedasso’s (2019) research in South Africa shows how ‘neighbourhood effect’ has an impact on higher education decision-making through processes such as peer role modelling and school-specific patterns of attainment. While higher education operates its own systems of geographical exclusion and elitism, then, these systems cannot be divided from the narratives of place discussed in the preceding section. Those narratives both incorporate the kinds of privileges and silences endemic in higher education systems and operate spatially outside of, chronologically before and after, higher education plays a role. Because of people’s complicated and unequal relationships to place, participation in higher education varies from place to place; because higher education is unequally distributed between places, narratives of place vary in their relationship to higher education.

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The second geographical concern structuring the places of English higher education is a long-established narrative of undergraduate mobility, which holds sway despite some recent divergent trends (Finn and Holton, 2019) and which means that the common expectation for students is to relocate from the familial home at the age of eighteen to study for their undergraduate degree. While universities have always necessarily been physically located within or on the outskirts of towns and cities, this tradition of mobility means that they have often been quite distant from their immediate localities, drawing their student population from across national and international contexts (Chatterton, 2000; Sabzalieva, 2016). As massification has progressed, the relationship between a higher education institution and its local area has become increasingly hierarchical, with elite universities retaining an international focus, and lowerstatus institutions recruiting from their surrounding places. As Stich (2014) demonstrates in her study of a ‘working-class college’ in the United States, where a lower-status institution is defined as part of a post-industrial place, there is a blurring of boundaries between the narratives of institutional status and placed history. The working class-ness (for example) that characterizes descriptions of local area comes to define the college, and vice versa. While the majority of undergraduate students in England still relocate for undergraduate study, places with large higher education institutions are then changed by the effects of this mass transient migration pattern. Far from being specific to England, this phenomenon of ‘studentification’ (Brookfield, 2019) is also found in other countries with mobile undergraduate populations such as Chile (Prada, 2019), Spain, (Garmendia, Coronado and Ureña, 2012) and Canada (Moos et al., 2019). The international acknowledgement of these effects demonstrates that while place can be seen to impact upon higher education in terms of the visibility and availability of local opportunities, higher education in turn impacts upon place. En masse, students are seen as defining a particular area or part of an area through their collective social practices. At the same time, their presences ask key questions about what it means to fully occupy and live in a place, and whether belonging to a particular social group can impede belonging to a place. With the seemingly generic nature of ‘studentified’ places in university towns and cities, are these students’ relationships to place merely relationships to any student place, or are they specific to the location itself? And, as discussed in the previous section, who is excluded, both from the studentified place and from the possibility of participating in studentification? These questions demonstrate the close connections between place and mobility in discussions of higher education, and the particular importance

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of mobility to understanding the English higher education context. The next section explores these questions in more detail, first thinking through how the inequalities that structure relationships to place are implicated in relationships to mobility, and then looking specifically at mobility in higher education.

Mobilities Decisions about whether to stay in a place or to move away from it can be categorized as being about ‘mobility’, but are also necessarily based on relationships to place. These decisions particularly bring together the way an individual positions themselves in relation to a place and its collective narratives, as well as the temporal aspects of spatial relationships; a decision to move away might be based on a dissonance between the histories and traditions associated with the place and the future an individual has imagined or planned for themselves. The factors involved in a sense of belonging to a place, as well as to the communities that are connected to that place, are also part of mobility decisions. In other words, while mobility is a complex and multifaceted concept in its own right (Adey, 2017), understanding mobility also means extending the previous section’s discussion of what place means, and what human relationships to place are made up of. For Massey (2005), mobility is a fundamental element in the unequal power-geometries of place; any one person’s mobility, she argues, relies upon the immobility of others. Similarly, while some choose and value the movements they have access to, others are compelled or required to move far more than they would like to. All of these lines of movement intersect around any given place in any given temporal moment. Leaving a place is often associated with transitional points in the life course and with the understanding that educational, career or relationship opportunities are associated with somewhere else. Inevitably, this act of leaving a place behind, temporally putting the place in the past of a life course, creates conflict with individual and collective identities. Loyalty to place, represented by a decision to stay rather than to leave, can be synonymous with loyalty to a family or a wider community such as a social class or ethnic group that are associated with the place. Because narratives of place are historically layered, a commitment to staying in a place might be part of continuing a tradition of doing so that has its roots in industrial work patterns (Bright, 2011), or a demonstration of belief in the possibilities for resisting that industrial tradition (Cahill, 2007). In the case of Cahill’s research participants, residents of an inner-city area associated

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with working-class African American histories, the desire to re-write a locality’s place narrative can pull in two directions. On the one hand, choosing to stay demonstrates an active commitment to the place and a participation in the processes of its revival. On the other hand, leaving in order to pursue career or educational success acts as proof that residents of the area are not limited in opportunity and rewrites the placed narrative from without rather than within. Given the multiple ways in which belonging to a place can be experienced, along with the complexity of historical, family, community and individual relationships to place, it is not surprising that decisions to leave a place are often preceded by strong claims of individual incompatibility with place; these justify and propel potential movement from place by denying or overriding belonging, loyalty or ‘place attachment’ (Scannell and Gifford, 2010). Leyshon and Bull’s (2011) narrative analysis of young people’s relationships to their English rural towns demonstrates how participants narrate their own identities as oppositional to narratives of the town. These narratives rely on collective understandings of ‘kinds of people’ and ‘kinds of place’, and the articulation of fit or lack of fit between the two. As Leyshon and Bull’s decision to conduct research in rural towns shows, there are common associations with kinds of place that might be designated as, for example, urban, rural, town, city or village; in turn, these commonly understood designations have particular associations with decisions to leave or stay. Morse and Mudgett (2018) argue that a commitment to staying in a rural area is sometimes understood as demonstrating lack of ambition in ways that might not be attributed to a decision to stay in a city location (though as Cahill (2007) demonstrates, any smaller area within a city has its own history and narratives). The narrative connections between a kind of place and a decision to remain or leave therefore have two components. The first of these is the relationship between place and opportunity, whether educational or economic. Remaining in a rural, remote, or even inner-city post-industrial area is understood as a negative decision if that area is also understood as lacking opportunity (Hodgson and Spours, 2015). This understanding of place shows how a place itself can be characterized by and described according to the kinds of opportunity available there, either currently or historically. A geographical area can, as Cahill shows, therefore be ‘working class’ in a way that blurs the boundary between a definition of a location and a population. The second, strongly related, component, is the privilege or disadvantage associated with moving away from a place, where the capacity, foresight or means to move in order to follow opportunity is associated with other intersectional advantages (Goodhart, 2017). Taken together, these

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two components suggest a cyclical process through which those who stay in places that are defined by lack of opportunity are those who are already socially disadvantaged. As Allen and Hollingworth (2013) find in their study of educational and employment aspirations in de-industrialized urban places in England, those pursuing middle-class career opportunities leave the area because it is seen as being unable to provide those opportunities; those who do so are also themselves more likely to be middle class. A risk of discussing mobility and inequality is that mobility is represented as the default goal of educational and career progression, while remaining in place is therefore defined only as a failure to conform to this pattern. In this understanding of mobility, privilege and mobility become synonymous, and disadvantage is linked to immobility. As the foregoing discussion shows, layered histories, loyalties and relationships of belonging to place are more complex than this dichotomy allows. A further risk in entering this debate is that remaining in place is defined as immobility, which is in turn associated with being stuck or unable to move. As will be discussed in more detail in relation to ‘local’ students in the following section, this definition ignores local movement in or around a place and reinforces the connection between immobility and disadvantage. Research such as Jackson’s (2012) on the forced mobility of homelessness is useful in disrupting these assumptions. This research serves as a reminder that geographical mobility is a productive way of understanding the relationships between socioeconomic inequality, place and the individual, but only if the approach allows for nuance and diversity in these relationships. The next section continues this exploration of mobility and place but does so in the specific context of higher education.

Mobilities and higher education In many places, in many countries across the world, studying for an undergraduate degree requires a student to move from one place to another. If the place they are living in is remote or rural enough not to have a higher education institution within daily travelling distance, then the student is presented with a choice between staying and not continuing in formal education post-school, or leaving and entering higher or further education (O’Shea et al., 2019; Stevens, 2009). This choice, however, must be expanded upon to take account of the multiple spatial dynamics involved. Higher education’s association with social as well as geographical mobility means that often a decision to leave in order to study is combined with an intended shift in social

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identity. If, as discussed earlier, part of belonging to a place is participating in its collective social class or racial identity, and if this narrative of belonging is constructed in a place without higher education in geographical proximity, then it is likely that leaving to study for a degree represents a double rejection of place. First, the place and the opportunities it represents are left behind for a different educational future. Secondly, the communities that are narratively associated with that place are rejected in favour of the social mobilities offered by degree education. As explored by Corbett (2007a) in coastal Canadian towns, Alexander (2015) in the Scottish Outer Hebrides and Harris and Prout Quicke (2019) in rural Aboriginal territories in Australia, higher education occupies a particularly ambivalent position in the lives of those located furthest from it. Leaving in these contexts comes to mean leaving behind; distance comes to be metaphorical, emotional and social; and opportunity comes at the expense of placed belonging. While distance learning can mitigate some of these factors, students’ relationships to their place of living, the place of the university and the mobility possibilities between them remain complicated even with access to remote learning opportunities (Macintyre and Macdonald, 2011; Roos Breines, Raghuram and Gunter, 2019). Despite its relatively small size, and relatively small urban/rural disparities, the unequal distribution of higher education institutions across England means that some students are required to make a decision between staying without higher education and leaving for higher education. Particularly in postindustrial and coastal towns in England, the absence of a university from the town’s history is often accompanied by a lack of investment in the area during or following its industrial collapse. In these areas, already affected by inequalities in distribution of higher education and inequalities in industrial and postindustrial development, the decision to leave for degree-level education is also taken less often (HEFCE, 2017), representing as it does a rejection of inherited loyalties to place (Bright, 2011). This connection between more remote (from higher education), more economically deprived areas and less educational mobility can be seen to reinforce the association between privilege and mobility. Within these areas, Corbett argues, it is only those who have ‘mobility capital’ made up of prior experience of or encouragement towards mobility who become educationally mobile (Corbett, 2007b). Those from more affluent areas with more investment in higher education provision are also more likely to move for degree education, resulting in patterns of student movement across the country that are difficult to account for with any single analytical lens (Donnelly and Gamsu, 2018).

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Patterns of student mobility within England are not only affected by placespecific relationships to movement and higher education. Overlying these factors is also the traditional national narrative of undergraduate mobility. As is the case in many other national contexts, students conforming to this narrative relocate for degree education even if there is a higher education institution within daily commuting distance of their home. Despite the fact that this mode of degree study is rooted in an elite rather than massified system of higher education (Holdsworth, 2009b) and that it is incompatible with some family structures (Ahmad, 2001; Bhopal, 2016), mobility remains powerful in both the practice of undergraduate education and wider societal perceptions of what it means to be a student (Holdsworth, 2009a). These wider perceptions are reinforced by the ‘studentifying’ of areas of university towns and cities discussed earlier, which perpetuate a construction of student identity based on both the social practices and the transience of their occupation of place. Far from being only a geographical understanding of mobility, ‘going away’ to university as a national narrative is also temporal; beginning degree education also initiates a rite of passage and forms a temporal progression on the linear path to adulthood and independence (Holdsworth, 2006). Access to this rite of passage experience is, like access to any kind of mobility, shaped by inequality; of the growing numbers of students in England who do not make the geographical movement and instead study locally (where geographical distribution of higher education allows), many are from working-class backgrounds, and/or are the first in the families to attend higher education (Abrahams and Ingram, 2013; Millward, 2018). Seen in these terms, undergraduate mobility in England perpetuates as well as reflects structural inequalities, and privilege continues to both enable and be realized through mobility. However, the growing presence of students studying at ‘local’ institutions offers a counter-narrative to traditional perceptions of what it means to be a student, particularly if long-term attachment to place can be thought of as more than a consequence of lacking the capital required to move. Remaining ‘local’ when studying higher education allows for the long-term maintenance of friendships, familial relationships and employment connections. As Holton (2015) demonstrates, the multiple places within a single city locality mean that ‘local’ students explore their city in a new way as students. They are also often highly mobile within the locality, far more so than students who live, socialize and study in university accommodation spaces, so that distinctions between mobility and immobility are less stark than they might at first seem (Finn and Holton, 2019).

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When looking at higher education and geography in England, it is difficult not to conclude that the inequalities evident in relationships to place seem even more entrenched when mobility is taken into account. It is also difficult to counter the strong associations between mobility and privilege without ignoring or minimizing the effects of structural disadvantage. However, exploring mobility and its role in higher education also works to de-naturalize taken-for-granted assumptions about the times and places of higher education, their accessibility and their fixity. As discussed at the beginning of this subsection, analyses of mobility in higher education take as their starting point the importance of the university as a built space. It is this physical space to which students travel or relocate, and around which they move during their years of study. The following section brings the concerns of place and mobility first into an exploration of built spaces in general, and then into the spaces of higher education more specifically.

Built spaces The inequalities of built spaces are in some ways more obvious, more definitive, than those of place and mobility. Built space is planned by those in power, and the spaces are then occupied by a public who have rarely had input into that planning process. In this formulation of spaces and power relations, the meanings ascribed to spaces through the planning process are fixed and can only be adapted through subversive or oppositional uses that recast them as something other than originally intended (de Certeau, 1984; Lefebvre, 1991). There are two problems with seeing built spaces in this way. The first is that, while this understanding allows for and even celebrates the possibilities for resistance and re-appropriation, it also reinforces the idea of spaces having a single, original meaning that must be recast in order to be altered. The second is that users of space are seen as a homogenized group, rather than as differentiated, and using space differently, along lines of power-geometry drawn by structural social inequality (Massey, 2005). As these debates show, thinking about built spaces means asking what the relationships are between people and different kinds of space, and how the material arrangements of walls, objects and bodies interact with narratives of place and movement. In organizational spaces such as the office workplace, the notion of ‘desk space’ shows how smaller spaces within a single walled space are marked out and owned. Gendered attitudes to and access to employment, for example, discussed earlier as inherent to how places are narrated, have also been found to be

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reflected in unequal allocation of desk space (Taylor and Spicer, 2007). Similarly, the re-negotiation of office space as flexible and transparent through the practice of hot-desking asks important questions about who is able to characterize a space, and in what ways. As Halford’s (2004) analysis of the introduction of ‘hotdesking’ in several UK-based office firms shows, there are established individual and collective narratives of what it means to work in a particular space or kind of space. In Halford’s analysis, the original physical design of an office building does not in itself determine the way it is understood and used. Instead, its use is redefined by managers seeking to increase efficiency by introducing hotdesking; this redefinition is then negotiated by workers who acquiesce to hotdesking by reinstating their pre-existing arrangements and re-narrating these as flexible. Additionally, just as overarching narratives of place can mask silenced or displaced identities (McKittrick, 2007), the re-designation of an office space as flexible glosses over the exclusionary practices through which social groups are spatially established and maintained within the space. As the significance of desk arrangements within the walls of an office space demonstrates, material objects such as furniture, stationery, bags and crockery are very much part of spatial practice. There are debates in geographical research as to whether language can fully capture materiality, and whether objects have symbolic, narrative or material functions (Anderson and Harrison, 2016; Beyes and Steyaert, 2012). In some interpretations, all these readings of objects and materiality come together so that a single object has multiple significances. For example, in Moran and Disney’s (2019) analysis of absence in English prison visiting rooms, the empty chair of the expected but absent visitor makes absence into a material presence. At the same time, the chair becomes symbolic of multiple related absences in prisoners’ lives and is overlaid with narratives of the prisoner’s forced immobility, which is in conflict with the required mobility of their potential visitors. Like Gregson and Rose’s (2000) analysis of the temporary spaces of car boot sales in the UK, the empty chair in the prison visiting room demonstrates the inextricability of material objects from the meanings attached to them in particular moments and spaces. In the space of the car boot sale, the ways in which objects are understood as old or new are re-negotiated with opposing meanings for the buyer and the seller. Taken together, the myriad factors of embodiment, objects, ownership and demarcation of spaces, along with presences and absences from those spaces, coalesce in any one temporal moment in any space to produce expected behaviours. The mutually constitutive relationships between these factors are perhaps most visible in temporary spaces, or in spaces that are in the process

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of being redefined. In the space of the car boot sale (Gregson and Rose, 2000) for example, the re-designation of an object as an item for sale, and of the surrounding space as a place of consumerism, produces discourses of buying and selling that would be incongruous once the site has been cleared. Similarly, in the temporary redefinition of the city of Edinburgh as a festival space, street performers redefine public streets that might otherwise be seen as thoroughfares or consumerist spaces as performance spaces (Munro and Jordan, 2013). In both examples, there is a collective consensus that unites material objects and buildings with a different narrative of their use. In focusing on the commonalities across particular kinds of spaces, it is easy to elide differences of place and to assume that one workplace or street is the same as another. As the analysis of the streets of Edinburgh (Munro and Jordan, 2013) highlights, the redefinition of the streets as performance spaces is only possible through the longstanding associations between the place of Edinburgh and its annual festival. Even the most generic of spaces such as the chain supermarket or leisure complex is located in a particular place; in fact, as Hubbard (2003) argues, it is the positioning of large leisure complexes on the outskirts of urban areas and away from narrative associations with the ‘inner city’ that makes them desirable as spaces of family activity. As has been seen in the preceding sections on place and mobilities in higher education, the location of higher education institutions in England works to sustain reputational hierarchies, perpetuate geographical inequalities, and reinforce normative narratives of student mobility. The following section explores how higher education spaces are also implicated in these inequalities.

Built higher education spaces Higher education spaces give useful insights into current dominant ideas about how learning happens and what a university should be. The spatial design of new buildings and campuses is based on what is seen to be important in higher education, whether in facilitating learning or encouraging particular forms of social interaction. As a consequence, new buildings are created or adapted according to principles of the productive learning environment (Strange and Banning, 2015), green spaces are incorporated into campuses in line with ecological research (Lau and Yang, 2009) and the competitive marketplace of student recruitment drives decisions about outdoor seating and landscaping (Waite, 2014). However, thinking about higher education space must also take into account the heavily symbolic power of the university and the ways that this

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symbolism is physically and materially negotiated as students and staff interact with the space. The hierarchies and elitism that are deeply embedded in English higher education are manifest in student perceptions of university architecture; despite the work that goes into the construction of new environments for thinking and learning (Gieryn, 2002), the ancient buildings of Oxford and Cambridge universities dominate popular narratives of what a space of higher education should look like (Baker and Brown, 2007) and how they should be used. Alzeer’s (2018) ethnography of students’ uses of space in a university in the United Arab Emirates identifies the students’ practice of sitting on the floor rather than at a classroom desk as particularly controversial in the eyes of Western-educated university staff. The desk becomes an object of hierarchical and cultural struggle in this study, as students reject the ways in which educational space is organized according to the norms of a British colonial legacy. The object of the door is also particularly imbued with material and symbolic significance in higher education spaces. Like some discussions of widening undergraduate access (see, for example, Crozier et al., 2008), Habel and Whitman (2016) use the spatial ideas of inside and outside, doors and openings to conceptualize their female academic participants’ feelings of belonging to the academy in Australia. As they point out, these ideas are neither purely metaphorical nor purely material, but both at once. A closed door creates both a material experience of being external to a built environment and a powerful metaphorical representation of exclusion. In higher education systems such as England’s, student residences are as much a part of university architecture as are buildings for teaching and learning. As well as reinforcing the dominant narrative of student mobility through their physical presence amongst or near teaching buildings, these living spaces in themselves work along particular power-geometries of inclusion and exclusion. Their material design shapes as well as reflects assumed, normative student behaviours. Factors such as the number of students living alongside one another in confined spaces, along with the gendered divisions between male and female occupied floors or flats, create an emphasis on socializing in large groups and according to gendered group norms (Holton, 2016a; Holton, 2016b). In the United States, debates around the possibilities of trans-inclusive student housing (Nicolazzo and Marine, 2015), as well as accounts of challenging unspoken racialized hegemony in the residence halls of a predominantly White institution (Haynes, 2019) highlight the ways that inequalities constellate specifically around the practicalities of student living. In England, student living practices also reflect place-specific reputational hierarchies, with students from Russell

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Group institutions occupying different social spaces of the same city than those from the less elite post-1992 universities (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Hubbard, 2009). Despite the specificity of higher education spaces, a key part of their definition is that they prepare students for the occupation of other spaces in the future. As noted in the preceding section on student mobility, the association between undergraduates relocating for degree study and the beginning of their adult life suggests that the living spaces of higher education are transitional or trial living spaces that do important work in preparing students for living spaces in the future (Kenyon, 1999). The fact that higher education is by definition transient and future-oriented means that its spaces have blurred temporal and spatial boundaries. Learning spaces are therefore also preparatory for kinds of working in the imagined future of the student, as are the internships, termtime and holiday employment through which students switch spatially between educational and working environment. Here again, the structures of social and cultural capital determine the ways in which networks both within and outside the spaces of the higher education institution allow entry to the most prestigious futures (Papafilippou and Bathmaker, 2018). An example of this process is Turner and Manderson’s (2007) analysis of the ‘coffee house’ events taking place in the law faculty at McGill University in Canada. Funded and run by law firms and attended by students and law firm recruiters, the event redefines a university teaching space through its use of jazz music and cocktails into a competitive social interaction between legal practitioners. The students chosen to attend the event learn to perform their future identities as lawyers by participating in the event’s spatial practices, and the temporary space works as a transition between their present as students and their future as professionals. So far, the three sections of this chapter have demonstrated that higher education is always geographical, because geographies structure access to and experiences of higher education in multiple ways. The later chapters of this book will continue to use this tripartite geographical framing of place, mobilities and space as part of a developing spatial story but will do so in relation to a particular higher education context. This context is non-university higher education, specifically higher education taught in further education colleges in England. The following section applies the thinking developed in the chapter to this context, arguing that the geographical descriptor ‘local’ is fundamental to understanding higher education provision of this kind. As the next section demonstrates, this descriptor is anything but as simple as it seems, and in fact must be expanded if it is to be fully understood.

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Place, mobilities, spaces and Non-university higher education Place and locality Location matters in discussions of non-university higher education in England partly because of its unusual position between two education sectors, and therefore two geographical logics of education. Further education colleges, which provide college-based higher education, also provide compulsory, post-compulsory and adult education. These other kinds of educational provision operate according to the geographies of school education described earlier in the chapter. While having a wider ‘catchment area’ than the smaller primary (elementary) and secondary (high) schools, they nevertheless recruit students from their immediate locality (Gallacher et al., 2002). In addition, these colleges have traditionally focused on providing technical and vocational education at each of these levels. In doing so, they have established or sought to establish connections with local employers and the local community, and these connections have been a source of pride and distinction within the sector (Feather, 2013; Hodgson, 2015). These two factors, of local student (and faculty) recruitment and links to local community and employers, work in opposition to the ways that universities have historically established themselves in localities; as discussed earlier, global rather than local connections, recruitment and reputation are sought and valued in the English university sector. While the descriptor ‘local’ is quite commonly applied to nonuniversity provision in any national context (Petrosian, 2013; Pizarro Milian, 2016), the fact that the provision straddles two conflicting relationships to the concept of locality makes the English context all the more complex. Understanding the relationship of college-based higher education and place also means understanding the role the provision is seen to occupy in redressing geographical educational inequalities. As noted, these interrelated geographies work in several ways. First, there are areas of the country which have high numbers of higher education institutions, and other areas with little or no higher education provision. Secondly, there are areas that are defined as ‘low participation’ areas, from which relatively few students progress from school to higher education. The first of these geographies affects college-based higher education provision in that patterns of provision are relational to university provision. Where university provision is relatively scarce, further education colleges offer a greater range of subjects to a larger population of undergraduate students. The colleges are also heavily implicated in the second geographical inequality, because they are frequently positioned by policy narratives as

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perfectly suited to responding to the needs of ‘low participation areas’ (Avis and Orr, 2016). While this role in widening access to higher education conflicts with an alternative policy narrative of the provision as the answer to national and local technical skills shortages, it remains a dominant perception of the purpose of college-based higher education (Bathmaker, 2018). That further education colleges are so heavily embedded in their localities means that the definitional narratives of these localities are crucial to the ways the college itself is defined. If the place has an enduring collective definition of a particular ‘kind of ’ place, then the college will be part of that definition. Along with these more general placed narratives are the narratives that accompany an educational institution that is seen to offer vocational and technical rather than academic education (Roksa, 2006), and ‘local’ rather than global higher education. This ‘kind of ’ education, in this ‘kind of place’ creates a layered narrative that, as Stich (2014) demonstrated in relation to a lower-ranked US college, pervades place, institution and the populations of each. If, as is the case for the colleges at which the research for this book was conducted, the place in which a college is located is without university provision, and if this is accompanied by perceptions of the place as a ‘low participation’ area, then there are further definitional layers to be considered. There is no simple relationship between place and higher education in these cases; as later chapters will explore, the provision is caught up in multiple narratives of the lack of, need for and incongruity of higher education opportunities, all of which raise important questions about the role of higher education, and about the role place plays in defining educational access and opportunity.

Mobilities In contrast to the traditional narrative of higher education mobility in England, the majority of students studying for degrees in further education colleges do not relocate in order to study. In fact, the proximity of the college to students’ homes is often cited as a primary factor in students’ decisions to attend the college (McTaggart, 2016; Stoten, 2016). Several meanings of the term ‘local’ can therefore be applied to students and colleges. The students are ‘local’ because they have not moved away from their home area in order to study. They are also ‘local’ to the college in that they live in its immediate vicinity and may have chosen the college because it is ‘local’ to them. These definitions are layered upon the definition discussed before, through which the institution itself has a reputation as ‘local’ in its relationships to local employers and community, and

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‘local’ in its reputation as a provider of higher education. In the terms of higher education mobilities, it is therefore both difficult and important to question the common connection between mobility and privilege. Without problematizing this connection, the majority of any student population attending collegebased higher education could be seen as ‘local’ and therefore immobile, and as immobile and therefore disadvantaged. While there is evidence to show, as discussed earlier, that ‘local’ students are more likely to meet other characteristics of the ‘non-traditional student’ (Christie, 2007), it would be reductive to apply this description universally across a student population. Because of its majority of ‘local’ students, non-university higher education therefore represents a useful context from which to challenge assumptions about immobility and disadvantage. One of the implications of the fact that very few non-university students leave home in order to study is that colleges are not associated with the same patterns of ‘studentification’ as universities are. This implication is most visible in large towns where further education colleges are the only higher education provision, which is the case for the colleges researched for this book. Representations of student social practices are highly visible in towns and cities with one or more universities, as a direct consequence of the kind of student mobility that requires students to live, socialize and learn within the immediate area of the university itself. By contrast, in towns without university provision and therefore without students relocating in order to attend university, the town itself does not reflect or represent the traditional mode of student life in the same way, and spaces within the town are not given over to student life. As a consequence, in a place that might already have narratives of lack of educational provision or ongoing lack of investment in more general terms as discussed earlier, there is also no visible manifestation of student life in the ways that this life is commonly understood (Holdsworth, 2009a). There are questions to be asked in this context about the spatial representation of higher education opportunity more generally, and student identity more specifically, and the extent to which collective understandings of the relationship between place and higher education rely upon the traditional narrative of student mobility. In addition to the ways in which the particular English narrative of student mobility is diversified and problematized by the geographical contexts of nonuniversity provision, there are further aspects of educational mobility that are called into question. Patterns of studentification in England show that student populations in university towns and cities are transient (Sage, Smith and Hubbard, 2012b), with many students moving to a different location once

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their degree is completed. By contrast, students attending college-based higher education often do so as part of a long-term commitment to the locality; their decision not to relocate in order to study extends further into the future, to their graduate employment. As a result, the difficult and often contradictory relationship between the narrative of their area and higher education opportunity is all the more important. The place in which they study, which may be seen to need the higher education opportunity the student has taken up, also needs to be a place in which graduate careers are valued and available. These circumstances are, paradoxically, less likely in an area without a valued local history of higher education. Where higher education is offered to ‘local’ students in a place without a historical narrative of graduate opportunity, there is a clear dissonance between the narrative of belonging to place which has been reinforced by the possibility of remaining in place to study, and a subsequent lack of belonging to place as a consequence of having studied.

Educational spaces A further education college’s embeddedness in its local area means that the spaces of the college are often informally structured according to the spatial practices of that area. This can mean, for example, that students of different ethnic groups, who would occupy different micro-geographies in the surrounding area, occupy different tables or corners in the college’s social spaces (Bennett et al., 2016). Or, as is the case in some school spaces (Ralph and Levinson, 2019), socialclass structures the use of space, with a clear if unspoken hierarchy dictating the positioning of different student groups. While these spaces are divided according to social grouping (and social inequality), their design is likely to assume a kind of spatial practice that is specific to further education and to higher education courses offered in further education colleges. This spatial practice is defined by an assumption of both mobility and immobility; that is, the student is assumed to be immobile in that the college is not far from their home, and at the same time highly mobile in that that the college is one of the many local spaces they occupy in their daily lives. The spaces are therefore designed around the assumption of the student’s proximity to home, which means that social spaces are designed for brief, functional occupation as the student leaves, arrives or takes a break between classes. The assumed use of college higher education spaces, therefore, is in direct opposition to that of university and studentified spaces, where socializing, living and learning take place in close proximity and often entirely in university-owned and administered buildings.

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The educational spaces occupied by the non-university higher education student might therefore not be central to their everyday mobilities; the student might move from college to employment to childcare provider to home and only occupy each place for the length of time required by its function. Despite this seemingly functional use of educational space, the spaces of non-university higher education provision are, if anything, more heavily weighted with symbolism than are those of the traditional university. Here, the symbolism of the door as denoting access to higher education is particularly significant because of the association between college-based higher education and widening access. A student attending dual-sector provision is likely to have had reason to doubt their right to move through the higher education door. The visible presence of practical student support in a position immediately adjacent to the door, found to be useful in the further education context (Gallacher et al., 2002), is therefore both symbolically and materially crucial in non-university higher education as well. Spatial signals that differentiate the college’s higher education provision as different from the intimidating spaces of the traditional university might also be important in this type of higher education space. Small classrooms in contrast to the archetypal lecture theatre are therefore seen as significant spaces for the definition of college-based higher education as an accessible form of degree study (Henderson, 2018b). However, while it is important that college-based higher education spaces are discernibly different from university spaces, they also struggle to be different enough from the other, lower-level forms of education offered in the same college. The spaces are part of a larger further education college but must in some way symbolize a progression from or distinction between further and higher education. From a student perspective, this distinction is often represented by the provision of separate classrooms, social spaces or even whole buildings in which only higher education is taught (Dhillon and Bentley, 2016; Leahy, 2012). In evaluations and analyses of higher education provision in further education colleges, this distinction is more difficult to pin down in a material sense. These enquiries suggest that there is an ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ that defines higher education (Creasy, 2013; Lea and Simmons, 2012), and that is more difficult to find in college-based higher education provision. This can be located in a variety of institutional factors, from library resources to research activity, and appears to be manifest materially, discursively and symbolically in the spaces of the institution and the activities that take place there. Taking into account the impact of place-specific narratives in addition to these spatial symbolisms, the designation of specific higher education space might be all the more important

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to students studying in a place that does not have a history of higher education, and in an institution that offers a variety of educational levels. Paradoxically, it is precisely these factors that make the spaces more difficult to define according to the traditional practices of the higher education student.

Conclusion This chapter has argued not only that the spatial is fundamental to educational experience but also that understanding the spatial in education involves a complex layering of the geographical factors of place, mobilities and built space. This layered framing structures the chapters that follow, so that the book as a whole sees higher education experiences as located in place, as subject to collective narratives of student mobility that are also place specific, and as experienced in spaces that are located in place and designed according to expectations of mobility. The higher education provision researched in the project on which this book is based has a specific position within these geographies; specifically, the provision can be characterized as ‘local’, where that characterization could apply to narratives of place, mobility or space, and often conflates all three at once. The data analysis chapters later in the book make this focus all the more nuanced, positioning two colleges in their specific contexts and localities while showing how these are indivisible from wider national and international systems of higher education. Throughout this chapter and those that follow, these aspects of educational geography are used to highlight the privileges and disadvantages, inclusions and exclusions that are integral to any system of higher education, and the ways these work within the hierarchies and geographies of the English system particularly. Throughout this chapter, I have referred to human relationships to place, mobility and space, and then more specifically to students in these relationships. The chapter has also focused on the narrative structures of these relationships, as well as to the ways that identity characteristics such as those of ethnicity, gender and sexuality might mean that the relationships are experienced differently. The next chapter looks closely at the conceptual underpinnings of human subjectivity, and educational subjectivity more specifically. The chapter begins from an understanding of subjectivity as narrative and develops a theorization that accounts for the spatial ideas outlined in this chapter, along with the particular and particularly unequal structures of neoliberal higher education systems.

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Placed Possible Selves Theorizing Spatial and Temporal Educational Subjectivities

Introduction Place, mobilities and space. These are the aspects of the spatial that the previous chapter established as the framework of the ‘spatial story’ in general, and the spatial story of higher education more specifically. Now, the spatial story itself needs further elaboration; this chapter examines what is meant by a spatial story, considering de Certeau’s (1984) original theorization alongside the ways it is used in this book, and the ways it might be used in future educational research. In this book, the spatial story is part of a theorization of educational subjectivity. It is a way of understanding higher education students’ experiences as inherently both spatial and narrative. It is also a way of positioning students’ experiences within the unequal structures of higher education. As the previous chapter outlined, inequalities such as those of social class, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation are inflected by the geographical inequalities of higher education systems, including the traditions associated with mobility and the locations of higher education provision. This chapter demonstrates how the spatial story can be used to conceptualize students’ negotiation of these inequalities in ways that take account of individual lived experience without losing sight of the lines of power-geometry (Massey, 2012) within which that lived experience takes place. In its privileging of the spatial, this book sets out to reverse the common dominance of the temporal over the spatial (Massey, 2005). Where the temporal dominates, places and spaces are reduced to static containers within which time progresses. To refuse this reduction, and instead to see the complexity and the power of the spatial, is therefore both unusual and important, particularly in a higher education field that is increasingly driven by perceptions of time-pressure

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and future orientation (Clegg, 2010). However, this book also acknowledges that the temporal is always implicated in the spatial (May and Thrift, 2001). Place-specific histories of industry and industrial loss, moments of transition such as the progression from school to higher education, and the temporary or permanent possibilities of redefinition of space are all examples of the ways that the spatial is also temporal. The spatial story as it is used in this book therefore also requires a theorization of temporality, and one that remains firmly spatial while also acknowledging the specific temporal conditions of higher education. These are the temporal conditions in which higher education students form relationships to place, make decisions about mobility and occupy the spaces of higher and further education. This book uses the concept of ‘possible selves’ (Henderson, Stevenson and Bathmaker, 2018; Markus and Nurius, 1986), which is based on the idea that students’ imagined versions of themselves in the future have considerable power in the present. This concept, the chapter will go on to argue, can take account of the future-oriented and individualistic conditions of neoliberal higher education. Given the spatial concerns of the book, this concept is adapted to become ‘placed possible selves’. This adaptation follows Prince’s (2014) argument that if a future is imagined, it is imagined in a particular location. In this book, the placed possible self is conceptualized as a part of the spatial story, so that the spatial story is the wider context framing the placed possible self. The chapter begins by considering the relationship between the spatial, the subject and narrative. This section of the chapter develops a nuanced definition of the spatial story in the specific context of higher education research. The chapter then moves on to define this spatial narrative subjectivity in ways that allow for analysis of the kinds of inequality that structure higher education systems. Finally, the chapter introduces the possible selves concept, showing how this concept relates to other theorizations of temporality in sociological research, and how it can be used as part of the book’s theorization of spatial narrative subjectivity. While each section of the chapter on its own offers a conceptualization of an aspect of educational subjectivity, if taken as a whole, the chapter comprises a rich theorization of educational experience in all its specificity.

The spatial story De Certeau’s theorization of the spatial is unusual in its close focus on language and in seeing the narrative form as simultaneously a spatial and linguistic

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construct. His work also argues that place and space are inherent to narrative subjectivity. At its simplest, the spatial story (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 115–30) is a way of understanding how places come to be defined and described, and how these definitions can be multiple, individual and diverse as well as collective and enduring. In addition to showing how the boundaries around a place are positioned and maintained, the theorization explains how people characterize a place as being a particular kind of place, or as being similar or different to other places. As seen in the previous chapter, this process of characterization of place is implicated in other spatial concerns; movement away from a place or to another place is often premised upon the kind of place each location is defined as, and the possibilities and opportunities available there. Similarly, the ways that a built space is understood and used depends upon its location and the narratives that define that location. In terms of higher education, the ways that people in a particular location see the relationship between the place and undergraduate education inflects their perception of educational mobility, and of the built education spaces in that place. Each of these is an element of the spatial story, which begins with a description of a place along with a sense of where the place being described begins and ends; does the description to apply to a whole town, or to a street within the town, or to a state, a country or continent? As seen in Chapter 4 of this book, students in Tobston and Sebford often defined the larger town in which the college was located differently to the smaller town or village in which they lived; the difference between the two was important to the way they explained their educational decisions as well as to their sense of being educationally mobile. De Certeau uses the example of colonial history to show that the process of drawing boundaries around places, or ‘founding’ (p. 123) has always been bound up with narratives of belonging or ownership. A boundary drawn on a map around a place tells the story that the place within the boundary belongs to and is occupied by one person or set of people, and the place outside of the boundary to others. This process also establishes the place within the boundary as being a different kind of place to the place outside of the boundary, through that relationship of belonging and occupation. While the original ‘primary role’ (p. 125) of the story as founding, or laying claim and name to space, can no longer be seen so simply, de Certeau argues that this function still operates. He suggests that the founding function is now ‘fragmented (not unique and whole), miniaturized (not on a national scale), and polyvalent (not specialized)’ (ibid.). His explanation of these differences draws upon the multiplicity of narratives that describe and delimit spaces, ranging from inherited familial or cultural

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narratives, to media representations and official documentation. He sees this narrative practice as echoed and reproduced in the way buildings and streets are named and negotiated, as well as in the ways that places are understood to be occupied by particular populations at different times. Despite the absence of single or dominant founding narratives, de Certeau argues, places are defined and therefore produced narratively, in multiple and often unnoticed ways. People establish boundaries around a place based on its meaningfulness to them, or on their occupation of it, and their relationship to that place is also a story of what the place is or is not. It is this connection between what a place is and what it is therefore also not that is the focus of the second section of the theorization. Having established that any description of a place, however momentary or informal, also necessarily creates a boundary around the place to define what is included in the description, the theorization then looks more closely at what the boundary itself consists of. De Certeau focuses on the boundary as a spatial and narrative concept (1984, pp. 126–9). He suggests that boundaries represent both ‘frontiers and bridges’ (p. 126), each of which is an ambiguous marker that acts as the point of division between places as well as the point that unites places. He sees the boundary, drawn by a narrative act of ‘founding’, as marking an interaction between included and excluded space. It acts as a frontier because it marks the edge of what can be narratively understood as ‘this place’, and places beyond the boundary are signified as alien to that space. The boundary also functions as a bridge, or a point of transition between what is and is not contained by the boundary, and a boundary can only exist if there is space that is both contained and not contained. In this way, the boundary produces inclusion and exclusion, and at the same time relies upon these for its own definition. De Certeau uses the analogy of the body as a place in order to explain the ‘paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them’ (p. 127). In this theorization, the founding narrative through which spaces are designated and produced as places is a contradictory space of its own. In this contradictory space, difference and sameness constitute, dispute and reconstitute each other, and the function of the boundary relies upon this cyclical and dynamic process. Narratives of where a place begins and ends are also therefore narratives of what a place is and is not, and an understanding of what is possible within the boundaries of a place is also an understanding of what might be possible outside those boundaries. The entire structure of a higher education system, including its geographical inequalities, its institutional hierarchies and its historical mobility

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traditions, are therefore involved in the spatial stories of any one place within that system. In the example of the case colleges in the research project for this book, the educational and graduate opportunities available in their locations are always necessarily defined against what might be possible somewhere else. These definitions, felt and expressed differently by different people, are impacted by the collective history, in these towns, of a lack of university provision and the effects of recent industrial loss. The possibilities for movement away from the town are also bound up in definitions of what the place offers in relation to other places, as well as what might be lost in leaving it behind in favour of another place. The public and educational spaces of the town and the possibilities for their use are defined along with the narratives of the place and its possibilities for movement, but also in relation to the spaces that might be in other towns or cities with different histories and different future opportunities. As Chapter 5 in particular demonstrates, students at Tobston and Sebford College often narrated their choice to study at the college as a rejection of traditional expectations of student mobility, or as a way of retaining the ties to family, friends and employment that existed in their local area.

The spatial story and subjectivity The spatial story is fundamentally an account of how people relate to place and the role of place in people’s understanding of themselves. De Certeau’s theorization is not only an account of how places are understood. It is also an account of how the understanding of place is part of the understanding of the self as a subject. For de Certeau, the subject and the spatial are indivisible. His conceptualization of narrative spatial subjectivity begins with the Lacanian moment of the splitting that forms the subject. It is in these moments that the subject recognizes themselves as a distinct entity that is both made up of themselves and recognizable externally from themselves. They can point to themselves in a mirror in the way that they can see someone else and know them as another person. De Certeau suggests that this moment is implicitly a recognition of the self as occupying space, and as in located in a distinct place. In the moment that the subject can identify themselves as a person, they can also see themselves as being somewhere. According to this logic, from the beginning of the subject’s knowledge of themselves, they understand themselves as being in a place. The Lacanian moment of self-recognition is also a moment in which the subject begins to form a narrative through which to describe themselves. In pointing to an external self in the mirror, they narrate an account of what that

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self is, how it came to be and what it might do. For de Certeau, this narrative of subjectivity must also be a narrative of the place in which the subject has found themselves. It must be a spatial story. Crucially, every subject has many spatial stories that build from this first narrative of self-recognition. The stories are plural, ‘fragmented’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 125) and made up of the many ways in which subjects narrate themselves in relation to place, movements and materiality in everyday, often unnoticed story-telling practices. For the students involved in this project, for example, the story of how they came to study at the local college was inevitably also a narrative about the place in which the college was located and their experiences in that place. The spatial story is therefore not only a story of what a place is, because any story is told by a person, and is at least in part a story of their subjectivity, their place in the world. Contained within a spatial story is therefore a narrative of how the subject relates to place, and how their sense of self is formed through that location of themselves in that particular kind of place. The spatial and the subject are so intertwined in the spatial story that they cyclically reinforce each other. A story of a place is a story of the subject in that place (and not in another place, according to the boundary-marking processes of the spatial story). A story of a subject is also a story of the place in which that subject is located (and the places in which the subject is not located, according to the boundary-making processes of the spatial story). According to Massey (2005), the place occupied by the subject is already structured, at the moment of their self-recognition, by the power-geometries that allow and delimit the possibilities of certain kinds of spatial practices for certain subjects. Therefore, if a narrative of subjectivity locates the subject in a place, then that process of self-location requires the subject to narrate their relationship of belonging to and ownership of that place, as part of the ‘spatial stories’ of their subjectivity. And, as Massey (2005) points out, relationships of belonging to place are fraught with collective and individual struggles for and against power structures. If this narrative of spatial subjectivity is then seen in educational terms, then the educational subject’s stories are stories of the places and spaces in which they come to know themselves as educational subjects. All of the inequalities that structure these places, movements and spaces are inherent to the subject’s spatial stories. For the educational subjects who participated in the research for this book, the ‘local’ was a focal point for their spatial stories. As outlined in the previous chapter, ‘local’ describes their relationship to college-based higher education provision in multiple ways, including the ways they are characterized against a national narrative of undergraduate mobility, the ways that the college in which

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they are studying is ‘local’ enough to them to make higher education possible, and the ways that the institution itself is characterized in national further and higher education systems. The theorization of the spatial story sees this relationship to the local, alongside the multiple other ways in which the participants narrate themselves, as part of a spatial story. The local is formative in their individual stories of educational subjectivity, and therefore becomes part of a wider spatial story of the possibilities and inequalities of higher education provision. In order to further locate narratives of subjectivity within these structures, the following section outlines a theorization of narrative subjectivity that I see as underpinning the spatial story. This theorization enables an understanding of how and why educational subjects conform to particular (spatial) narratives, and the unequal terms on which they do so. In the later chapters of this book, for example, the theorization is used to explore how dominant societal narratives of undergraduate mobility are incorporated into the accounts of students who have not relocated for undergraduate study.

Narrative educational subjectivity The theorization of educational subjectivity used throughout this book begins from the perspective that experiences are understood and articulated in narrative form, but that this way of articulating the self is complex and often contradictory. The complex relationship between subjectivity and narrative is especially visible in educational contexts. In these contexts, students learn to give an account of their linear progression from one level or age group to another. They answer questions about what they have learnt, about what activities they have done and about what they are planning to do. Each of these questions requires an answer in some kind of narrative form, in which events are placed in sequential and causal relationships to one another. Because an activity has taken place, something has been learnt from it. This learning in turn has enabled a further activity, and the activities and learning as a whole sequence might have led towards a recognized educational progression. While this kind of sequencing and causality is not specific to education, it is exaggerated by the structures of education in their reliance upon linearity and succession. To be a successful educational subject is to be able to say what has been learnt, how the learning took place and what it might lead to in the future. But while such narratives are expected and naturalized within educational contexts, they also require considerable work on the part of the narrator. They require that experiences are perpetually adapted

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into the narrative, that causal connections are discerned and articulated as part of the narrative, and that sometimes incongruous events are made coherent. Though often seen as a philosopher, Ricoeur’s theorization of narrative, particularly in relation to temporality and subjectivity, crosses disciplinary boundaries between literature, psychoanalysis and social science. His work is useful in thinking through the conditions of narrative subjectivity because he analyses the workings of the narrative form while asserting its fundamental role in human interaction. Ricoeur’s writing on narrative temporality foregrounds the work done by the narrator to make the narrative comprehensible and highlights the temporal impossibilities and dissonances on which, paradoxically, narrative coherence relies. Ricoeur’s later work (1992) shows how the causal relationships between events upon which a narrative relies must be drawn retrospectively, even while they must then be represented as precipitating the events. His earlier work (Ricoeur, 2000, first published 1980) highlights the ways in which temporalities clash in the telling of a narrative, suggesting that there are two contradictory but coexisting narrative temporalities. He argues that a narrative is represented and understood in a linear way, with one event preceding the other, leading to a conclusion. At the same time, he argues, the events of the narrative are weighed against one another in a retrospective way, to ensure that the causal connections are strong enough to sustain the narrative’s coherence. Ricoeur’s focus here is on the work done by the receiver of the narrative, who follows the narrative as it progresses, anticipating the conclusion while also weighing each progression against what has come before. For the purposes of this book, I instead highlight the work done by the narrator in accounting for these competing temporal understandings. In particular, I show how the recourse to narrate a coherent educational subjectivity requires the narrator to create strong causal connections that both anticipate a conclusion and retrospectively justify that conclusion. In highlighting the temporal impossibilities of the narrating position, while arguing for the fundamental place of narrative in understandings of subjectivity, Ricoeur’s work shows the fragility and unknowability of the narrating self. He highlights that the subject is inevitably bound to function narratively, but must occupy two contradictory temporalities in order to do so. Ricoeur’s theorization is explicitly focused on temporality. His discussion of contingency, for example, explores how the past is re-configured in the process of telling a narrative in the present. This re-configuration works to establish causal relationships between past events. Causality, he argues, will be retrospectively applied to events that have already happened, in order to configure these events within a construction of ‘retrograde necessity’ (1992, p. 142). The terms of the

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spatial story suggest, however, that narratives of subjectivity are also spatial. Part of their work, therefore, locates the subject in the place that they are in, and amongst the narratives through which that place is defined. As well as establishing causal connections between temporal events, the subject must also account for the events as having taken place in particular locations and as having necessitated movements or stasis in those locations. This spatial narrative work can be seen in the ways that accounts of place create causal continuity or discontinuity between places and people; because a place is this kind of place, then a particular kind of movement through it or from it is necessary. The spatial stories through which places are established and described, and which define the possibilities available within a place, are therefore integral to the subject’s narrative of themselves because they establish causality. What is possible within one place, as opposed to what might be possible in another, is a crucial part of the narrative of what has been necessary for the subject to do or be. The contradictory processes of boundary-drawing, as previously discussed, accompany the dual temporalities of narrative subjectivity; the subject narrates temporally forward while checking backwards, and also locates themselves in a place that is defined by not being another place. This story, the subject says, makes sense because this place is a particular kind of place; this place is a particular kind of place because it is not another kind of place. The work of maintaining the coherence of these two dual processes is belied by the simplicity of the educational narrative, which suggests a linear temporality and a single, coherent spatial story. This focus on narrative process means that in later chapters it is possible to disrupt linearity by asking not just where or when stories of place come into students’ accounts of their education, but what work is done by these stories in the construction of educational subjectivity. A focus on narrative can risk individualizing accounts of educational experience, at the expense of attention to structural inequality. It is therefore important to stress that narratives of educational subjectivity are produced as a condition of participating in education systems and are therefore constructed according to systemic inequalities. In order to think through the relationship between an individualized version of selfhood produced through narrative and the structural constraints that work to produce and underpin that narrative, I now turn to Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997), which theorizes the subject’s entry into discourse. Butler provides a performative theorization of subjectivity that builds on the Foucauldian concept of subjectivation. According to this theorization, the subject’s desire for recognition drives their submission to the discursive and material conditions that make them intelligible as a subject

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(see  also Butler, 2004). The term ‘subjectivation’ describes a simultaneous process through which the subject is recognized as a subject and is also therefore subjected to the conditions that structure recognition. In educational contexts, the successful educational subject performs and narrates themselves according to educational norms (Youdell, 2006) and is therefore recognizable within the terms of the educational system. In Excitable Speech, Butler focuses on the discursive conditions of subjectivity, showing how the subject’s entry into discourse relies upon obedience to the norms ‘that govern speakability’ (p. 133). In her chapter on censorship (‘Implicit censorship and discursive agency’ pp. 129–64), Butler differentiates between explicit and implicit censorship in speech. She argues that explicit censorship is externally imposed and consciously understood as defining words or concepts that are forbidden from utterance. By contrast, implicit censorship is rarely seen as such and instead describes the process through which a subject obeys the rules that will make their speech comprehensible and which ‘consummate one’s status as a subject of speech’ (ibid.). This theorization of subjectivity highlights the repetitive, perpetual self-constitution of the subject, showing subjectivity to be performed and negotiated through multiple discursive acts. Much of Butler’s analysis in this volume focuses on specific speech acts, exploring, for example, the impetus for the subject to respond to an injurious name despite its negative properties. This book aligns her theorization of subjectivity with an understanding of narrative. I argue that, if a subject enters subjecthood through each entry into discourse, an educational subject is repeatedly formed through the construction of educational narrative. Not only this, but the narrative formed by each subject is also governed by the ‘norms’ that might make that subject intelligible, and that determine what is ‘speakable’. Therefore, the educational subject’s repeated participation in discourse relies upon a double compliance with the norms of educational speech. First, the subject must understand and speak their educational subjectivity narratively. Secondly, the narrative itself is formed through a negotiation with the norms of what is speakable in their educational context. Using this theorization, it is possible to see how dominant or collective narratives of place determine what an individual understands to be possible in that place. While the kinds of educational subjectivity that are possible to occupy and ‘speak’ are delineated along lines such as those of social class (Willis, 1977) or ethnicity (Avis, Orr and Warmington, 2017), these inequalities are inflected differently in different placed narratives (Pahl, 2008). If higher education, for example, does not have a historical or traditional role in the place’s definition,

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then this level of education might be less ‘speakable’ in a narrative of educational subjectivity. As discussed earlier in relation to Ricoeur’s theorization of narrative temporality, the educational subject must establish a causal connection between the narratives of the place in which they are located and their educational trajectory. According to Butler, however, this causal connection is further complicated in that it must conform to what is possible to say in that place and the kind of educational subjectivity that is recognizable as part of collective narratives of that place. Prince (2014) argues that the delimiting role of place is particularly evident in places such as the juvenile detention units in studies she refers to; here, young people’s struggles to articulate educational futures should be seen as related to the walls around the place in which they are living. The futures they are asked to imagine are made less ‘speakable’ by the boundaries around the place and by the narratives that go along with those particular boundaries. Prince uses the concept of possible selves in her analysis and suggests that the concept can and should be used in conjunction with spatial concerns. The section that follows does just that, outlining the origins of the possible selves concept and considering how it might form a part of the spatial story in educational contexts.

Possible selves Thus far, the chapter has developed a spatial, narrative theorization of subjectivity that draws together geographies with the processes of subjectivation. This theorization has established that educational subjects narrate their subjectivity from their specific location, within the constraints of the narrative form and the possibilities that have been made ‘speakable’ within that location. The theorization makes visible the narrative work done by the student creating causal connections between their educational trajectory and the place in which their education has taken place, so that further questions can be asked about how place has shaped educational possibility. It is to the term ‘possibility’ that the chapter now turns. The chapter has used the term in defining the spatial story, to highlight that places are sometimes described according to what is possible within or outside of them. The concept of possibility is also temporal in that it articulates a conditional future. It is a concept that is particularly pertinent to the neoliberal, future-oriented temporal conditions of the higher education, as this section will demonstrate. This book uses the concept of possible selves to capture the ways that this future orientation becomes embodied in and narrated by the

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educational subject, as well as the ways that futures are structured through the inequalities of the higher education system. The possible selves concept (Markus and Nurius, 1986), which originates in the research discipline of social psychology, suggests that present behaviour is influenced by how individuals imagine their futures, and particularly by personalized imagined versions of themselves enacting those futures. The concept is one of several ways in which future temporalities in higher education have been theorized in recent research literature. A range of theorizations aims to take account of the role of the future in issues such as pressures on academic time (Clegg, 2010), student career and educational decision-making (Duggan, 2017; Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997), and student experiences (Bennett and Burke, 2017). Possible selves as a concept is unusual amongst these theorizations for four key reasons. The first is the concept’s emphasis on the plurality of imagined futures, which suggests that several different and potentially contradictory versions of the future might coexist in the present. The second is the concept’s partial collapsing of linear temporality, seeing the imagined future as shaping present experience. The future is imagined as following on from the present, but this linear imagining of the future is also experienced in the present, determining present behaviour and justifying present choices. The concept can also be used to show how the multiple imagined versions of the future persist long after the future becomes present; the institution not chosen for undergraduate study, for example, can remain crucial to the ways that the chosen institution is understood. The third key aspect of the possible selves concept is its focus on the personalized, embodied nature of the imagined future: The assistant professor who fears he or she will not become an associate professor carries with him or her much more than a shadowy, undifferentiated fear of not getting tenure. Instead the fear is personalized. (Markus and Nurius, 1986, p. 954)

Here, Markus and Nurius create a contrast between the ‘shadowy’ nature of an imagined future that is not attached to an embodied subjectivity and the ‘much more’ of the ‘personalized’ future. The extent to which the future is imagined in detail and individualized to a particular subject is referred to in possible selves literature as ‘elaboration’, with much of the literature arguing that more strongly elaborated possible selves are more likely to affect behaviour. This effect of elaboration is implied in the preceding example, where the ‘personalized’ fear of the assistant professor is more powerful than a ‘shadowy, undifferentiated’ fear might be. As shown in the following section, many studies using the possible selves concept have focused on this aspect of the concept, exploring how the

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elaboration of positive possible selves might be enhanced in order to increase the likelihood of their being realized. Finally, the fourth way in which the possible selves concept is unusual is that it allows analysis of how the individualized future both conforms to and makes visible some of the conditions of educational subjectivity (Henderson, 2018a). This understanding of the concept is not set out in the original definition of possible selves, in part because this original definition is situated in the discipline of cognitive psychology and relies upon the language of self-efficacy, self-concept and self-regulation. Both within and outside of the discipline of education, psychological uses of the possible selves concept have often focused on behaviour and motivation. Broadly, this work argues that if different, more positive and more elaborated futures can be imagined, then the motivation to work towards these futures in the present can be improved (Dark-Freudeman and West, 2016; Hamman et al., 2013). This book joins a different tradition of work on possible selves in higher education. Using a sociological lens, this work demonstrates that structural inequalities in education render some futures more imaginable than others (Gartland and Smith, 2018; Harrison, 2018). For example, Stevenson (2012) uses the concept to show how White and BAME1 students have access to differently elaborated futures as successful university students. Papafilippou and Bentley (2017) and Papafilippou and Bathmaker (2018) explore graduate experiences, highlighting where transitions from higher education are enabled or limited by unequal access not only to imagined futures but also to the processes through which elite employment futures are realized. A further key development in recent research on possible selves in higher education has been to identify the role of ‘others’ in the production of possible selves. ‘Others’ in this context can refer to the role of family in the joint production of an individual’s educational narrative (Murphy, 2018), to the role of people imagined alongside the self in the narrative itself (Erikson, 2018), or crucially, to the role of other, lost futures that were once imagined (Stevenson, 2018). As each example demonstrates, the access to and impacts of ‘others’ on individuals’ imagined future is differentiated along lines of inequality. If it is used alongside the theoretical tools already developed in this chapter, the possible selves concept also has the capacity to both acknowledge and critique the dominant temporal structures of higher education. Rather than using the concept in opposition to individualistic approaches, this book uses the concept in order to take account of the dominance of individualism in educational contexts. Black, Asian and minority ethnic

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The concept describes precisely the ways that students in neoliberal education systems are encouraged or even required to think. To have a coherent account of one’s self in the future, and to be able to explain the ways in which one’s current behaviour is oriented towards that future, is to be a recognizable educational subject. By first identifying this imperative as a structural condition in itself, the lenses of Ricoeur’s narrative temporality and Butler’s implicit censorship can be used to explore further structural factors at work. For example, what are the events that any particular educational subject must make coherent in order to produce a linear narrative of themselves as a future-oriented educational subject? Are there some kinds of educational privilege and disadvantage that allow more or less narrative work in the production of such a narrative? If the narrative contains what is ‘speakable’ for an educational subjects, then what is ‘unspeakable’ and what factors have determined speakability? Finally, are there circumstances in which it is impossible to produce a narrative of one’s future self, and does this threaten the very possibility of being (recognized as) an educational subject? The narrative structures of the possible self must also be seen in spatial terms; the words ‘in this place’ should be added to each of the questions asked in the previous paragraph. In narrating themselves as an educational subject, a student is necessarily narrating themselves as a subject in and of their particular place. What is possible for them to speak as a (required) narrative of imagined future is also what is possible to speak in that place, because of the stories that define education and the future in that place. According to the theorization of the spatial story, narratives of imagined future also rely on what is not possible in that place, and what might be or might once have been possible in another place. As established earlier, the possible selves concept allows for multiple versions of the imagined self to persist alongside one another in a student’s narrative and for causal connections to be drawn between them in order to create a coherent and recognizable narrative. A student might articulate the narrative of the degree course they ultimately chose, for example, as justified by and measured against the choice they did not or could not make. These lost, other, or once-imagined futures are also placed futures, reliant on particular definitions of place and higher education. Because an educational future (chosen or not chosen, possible or impossible) is also a location in place, a movement from or within place, and an occupation of specific educational spaces, it is always spatial as well as temporal. Acknowledging the role of the spatial in possible selves leads to the theoretical framework that will be used in the chapters that follow: placed possible selves, where ‘place’ expands to include the educational geographies of location, mobility and built space.

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Conclusion: Placed possible selves Beginning and ending with the spatial, this chapter has built a theoretical framework that accounts for the conditions in which students form and narrate their educational subjectivities. The framework can be summarized according to a sequence of interlinked concerns. First, the framework locates the higher education student amongst the narratives that define the place in which they are located and the ways that they understand themselves as located there. Which narratives of the place do they align themselves with, or position themselves against? What do they see as more or less possible because they are located in this place, or because they are not located in a different place? Secondly, the framework asks how the conditions of educational subjectivity have structured this self-location. What causal connections have been drawn in order to reach a coherent conclusion? Are there impossibilities or incoherences that threaten the recognizability of the narrative and therefore the recognition of the subject? Thirdly, given the neoliberal emphasis on the future in higher education, what kinds of future are imagined alongside, around, in connection or in opposition to the present? Are there futures that are unimaginable? Finally, how do these questions work together? What does the imagined future tell us about how narratives of place, subjectivity and education are constructed in this educational moment and location? Holding these multiple factors together in a conceptualization of the higher education student is challenging, particularly given the complexity of the spatial as outlined in the previous chapter. The rewards of doing so are in the capacity of this framework to complicate given categories of inequality such as those of social class or ethnicity and their relationship to higher education. What the framework does is to make it impossible to discuss a higher education student or institution as though these are universal, place-less categories. Through insisting upon an exploration of how a student or institution is implicated in and produced through the power-geometries of space and time, the framework demands more detail and nuance in discussions of unequal access to higher education. The framework also works against broad geographical categories that conflate the geographical inequalities of higher education systems. Specifically, as the following chapter will demonstrate, the framework resists the ease with which the category of ‘local’ is used to signal and conflate multiple geographical inequalities. Using the framework, this book expands upon ‘local’ by asking how this term is implicated in narratives of place, possibility and higher education.

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What Does ‘Local’ Mean? Non-University Provision as ‘Local’ Higher Education

Introduction What does ‘local’ mean? Does the word describe a geographical area? If so, how large or small is that area? Or, does the word describe the people within an area? Could it even describe a type of building within an area? As Holdsworth notes (Holdsworth, 2009a), the phrase ‘the local’ can signify a person, but in the English context it can also signify the nearest or most familiar pub or bar. In any of these or other uses of the word, ‘local’ is neither a simple nor a neutral term. As well as being highly subjective in reference to geographical area, it also often carries the weight of implied or even euphemistic meaning. For example, to describe someone as being ‘local’ to their area can imply that they belong in that place, and this belonging might be based on perceptions of ethnicity or social class. Where a place has strong shared narrative associations with, for example, poverty or privilege, then ‘local’ might be used to describe someone as embedded within these narratives rather than as passing through the area and therefore not implicated in them. To describe a product or business as ‘local’ often defines it in opposition to global trade networks and can signify a rejection of global capitalism as well as a smaller scope. There is also something paradoxical about the word ‘local’. The word implies that something or someone is specific to a particular geographical area, but the area itself is not specified by the word. It is possible to say that something is local without saying where the locality is or what is specific about it; ‘local’ can be used as a general term while always signifying some form of geographical specificity. Where ‘local’ is used in the context of higher education, it gains further possible significations and even weightier underlying implications. If ‘local’ were a neutral or objective term, then it could apply to any educational institution. After

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all, any institution is physically based in a geographical location and is therefore local to that location. However, just as ‘local’ industry is defined in opposition to global trade, a ‘local’ provider of higher education is local rather than global. As discussed in Chapter 1, this designation draws broadly upon a combination of interconnected factors such as the area from which faculty and students are recruited, standings in national and international rankings and relationships with surrounding employers and communities. It is this latter association with the local that is often connected with dual-sector or non-university provision. In an international edited collection on community colleges and their international equivalents, Elsner Boggs and Irwin (2008) argue that ‘responsiveness to the education needs of local communities and their employers’ (p. ix) is one of the few common features in a sector that is strikingly diverse across and sometimes within national contexts. That this commonality endures despite considerable international disparities demonstrates the strength of the association between higher education provided outside of the university and a collective sense of what ‘local’ means. The designation of a student as ‘local’ has additional significance in the many higher education systems with a history of undergraduate mobility such as England. In these countries, the word signifies students who have not left home in order to study for their undergraduate degree. The term is therefore not only a geographical marker but also a signal that the student has not followed the expected or traditional pattern of undergraduate mobility; given the associations between mobility and privilege, it is easy for a word that signifies a lack of mobility to become a shorthand for disadvantage. The relationship between the institution and the student can be described as ‘local’ in a variety of ways. Students can be seen as ‘local’ to the institution in that they have not relocated in order to study there, and as ‘local’ in that the institution is the closest higher education provider to their home. In turn, students can describe the institution as ‘local’ to them as an explanation for their choice to study there, or as a description of their mode of study. Again, in a context with a historical pattern of relocation for degree study, any of these ‘local’ relationships between student and institution are non-traditional, and so the word is further layered with implications of disadvantage. This chapter explores the ways that non-university provision – in this case, non-university higher education in England – is understood as ‘local’ higher education provision, for ‘local’ students, in multiple ways. Subsequent chapters analyse the placed possible selves of non-university higher education using the framework set out in Chapter 2; this chapter therefore establishes the spatial

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story of the ‘local’ within which those placed possible selves are situated. The chapter analyses the ways that geographies, and especially the term ‘local’, come to define non-university higher education provision, asking how specific places or kinds of places are narratively associated with non-university higher education. Expanding the category of the ‘local’ in this way highlights the complexity of the signifier, the inequalities it often conflates and the risks of applying the word in a universalizing way. The chapter also analyses the ‘local’ conditions of each of the case colleges in the research project on which this book is based. In doing so, the chapter enacts a shift across the paradoxical meanings of ‘local’, moving from ‘local’ as a general description of nonuniversity higher education provision in England, to ‘local’ as a description of two very particular localities. The first half of the chapter explores the ways that ‘local’ non-university students are understood by those working in the further education sector, where the provision is situated in England. The views in this section come from interviews with national figures in English further education associations and provide an overview of the multiple ways in which non-university higher education is understood as local, and the complexities within these understandings. The case study colleges are introduced in the second half of the chapter. The introductions begin with the ways that the colleges advertise their higher education provision, before moving to insights from staff working in higher education at each college. This layered approach to the chapter, beginning at the national level and working to the local level through a variety of perspectives, has two purposes. The first is to demonstrate the different ways that spatial stories of a single place, or institution within a place, can be narrated. They can be examples of a national or even international phenomenon, and they can, at the same time, be specifically located within a particular placed history. The second purpose of this chapter’s organization is to show that, despite the diversity of sources and perspectives from which non-university provision is viewed, there is a startling homogeneity to the narratives used to describe the provision. This homogeneity will become evident as the chapter progresses.

The construction of the ‘local’ college at national level In many ways, the policy context of college-based higher education in England is not dissimilar to that of dual-sector or non-university provision in other international contexts, from the United States and Canada (Gallacher and

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Reeve, 2018) and Australia (Webb et al., 2017) to Indonesia (Cissell and Iskander, 2008) and Hong Kong (Postiglione and Sai Kit Kwok, 2008). This kind of provision often occupies an uneasy position in terms of education policy discourses, between meeting the demands of skills education, on the one hand, and providing ‘second chance’ or more accessible higher education, on the other hand. Despite these broad commonalities, there are specificities to the current national policy context in which English non-university higher education sits. Because non-university higher education is provided in further education colleges, it is subject to policy changes in both the further and higher education sectors. For example, there is an increased national focus on technical education from school level (BIS and DfE, 2016) to higher level (DfE, 2019), as well as an ongoing review of all further education provision aimed at increasing efficiency in the sector (BIS, 2015). At the same time, the numbers of students undertaking higher education has continued to increase, with further education colleges identified in policy as particularly suited to meeting the needs of non-traditional and disadvantaged entrants (BIS, 2011). It was therefore important to the project of this book to meet with key policy actors in the further education sector and to discuss their views of higher education provision in the sector, and it is these interviews that form the basis of the analysis in this section. Two of the participants in these interviews were active in responding to further education policy as members of lobbying groups. The first was a member of one of these groups as well as a further education college principal. The second was employed by a lobbying group as a higher education policy manager. Lobbying groups work together to represent the interests of further education colleges, as well as conducting their own research into issues of importance to the sector. The third participant in the interviews was leading a research project into higher education in the college sector. Details such as the participants’ names and the specific names of the institutions, lobbying groups and research projects they were working for have been omitted in order to maintain anonymity as far as is possible. These interviews focused on the history, current moment and possible futures of dual-sector higher education in England at the national level. The interviews therefore invited definitions of non-university higher education as a generalizable type of higher education provision, and these were often given in terms of its distinctive purpose or its particular challenges, either in opposition to university higher education or in accordance with the traditions of further education.

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Local employers and local people: Non-university higher education and local need In response to a question about what makes non-university higher education a distinctive type of higher education provision, the non-university higher education research project director described the provision in the following way: It [non-university higher education] clearly does want to support local people. It clearly does want to support local employers. And it clearly does want to enrich the local community. Now some of these things are quite sort of clichéd comments, but the typical university doesn’t do that. Why? Because it doesn’t recruit local students. Most of those students don’t go on and get jobs in the local area, and actually they have very little connection with the local community.

In listing the connections between non-university higher education and local people, employers and community, this excerpt described key strengths of non-university higher education provision, while at the same time indicating the complexity of the role played by the ‘local’ college. In this relationship, and in contrast to university practices (Chatterton, 2000), students were recruited from the local area, were supported through their higher education and their completed higher level courses allowed them to contribute more to the area than they might otherwise have done. The relationship therefore relied upon a definition of the local both as a place that could be invested in and enriched and as part of a narrative of undergraduate immobility. In the latter of these definitions, the common understanding of the local student as ‘missing out’ on the traditional undergraduate experience (Holdsworth, 2006) was recast, so that non-university higher education as ‘local’ provision offered an alternative to a historically elite and exclusionary narrative. However, this strong relationship between college and locality is also complicated for several reasons. First, a locality is always specific, rather than general. If dual-sector higher education is generally understood as ‘local’ higher education provision, then it must also always be different in each locality, according to the narratives that define that locality. Secondly, although in the foregoing description, the needs of local people and local employers could be met simultaneously through providing higher education in the local area, this is not always the case. The higher education policy manager of a national further education lobbying group described a split in non-university higher education provision between the response to localized educational needs according to a national WP agenda and the response to local labour markets according to a national skills agenda (Bathmaker, 2018):

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Non-University Higher Education Some colleges have got an exclusive WP mission. They will tend to be colleges with smaller numbers but give an opportunity particularly to those who have childcare responsibilities, those who are poor and can’t afford transport costs to go to a local university. There are other colleges who relate to a very localized labour market. [. . .] The way that they work is that they’re very strongly engaged with their local employers. There’s a history in those local manufacturing, engineering and construction industries.

In this description, non-university higher education served a different purpose in different localities, and according to narratives of the local that relied first upon the local as signifying immobility and then upon the local as signifying a geographical area with a historical narrative of industry. Where access to higher education in itself was a concern, the local college stood in for the less local university. Here, in contrast to the construction in the first data excerpt, undergraduate immobility was seen much more in accordance with deficits that tied ‘local’ students to place (Corbett, 2007b); non-university higher education was local provision where it provided for those who could not leave their locality. On the other hand, a spatial story linking place to industry was evoked to describe provision that is instrumental in contributing to and furthering local industry. Although both could be seen to ‘enrich’ the local area, each can also be seen to do so according to a different understanding of the ‘local’. Each of these different understandings, in turn, reflects separate policy agendas and separate definitions of the purpose of non-university higher education. The provision was required to do something different in each case, whether to redress social inequalities (Avis and Orr, 2016) through being available, affordable or accessible where university is not, or to create opportunities to gain the skills required for specific industries. In this way, the purpose of non-university higher education becomes defined by the ways that spatial stories of local need are understood, narrated and provided for.

Local students and local possibilities As discussed earlier, non-university higher education as ‘local’ higher education provision can offer a counter-narrative to the dominant understanding of undergraduate mobility in English and other national higher education contexts. However, the ‘typical’ non-university higher education student was also described in these interviews as bound or fixed in place by disadvantage. This section brings together discussions of the typical non-university higher education student, in which narratives of immobility featured strongly, with

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conversations about the higher education subjects and course types offered in particular colleges or in non-university higher education in general. The purpose of bringing these seemingly distinct data together is to demonstrate that if nonuniversity higher education students are seen to be attending non-university higher education as the only possible higher education option for them, the breadth of subjects and course types offered in non-university higher education determines what higher education futures are possible for those students. The higher education policy manager suggested that The reality is, because they [non-university higher education students] are unable to move, or because they’ve got worse grades than they thought, they’re at college higher education.

Here, mobility was constrained either alongside or as a result of low achievement in previous education, and non-university higher education was the only possible option for students in this position. The college principal and lobbying group chair similarly characterized non-university higher education students as fixed in place, though with different accompanying reasons for attending nonuniversity higher education: I think there’s quite a large category [of non-university higher education students] who are there because of the transport, or the costs, or the lack of confidence.

Again here, spatial immobility worked alongside financial constraint or academic confidence to construct a type of non-university higher education student who could not attend higher education at any other institution than their local college. This therefore further constructed the local college as serving a WP agenda, primarily addressing inequalities of access to higher education through its higher education provision (Jephcote and Raby, 2012). Another similar narrative of the non-university higher education student was given by the research project director: Some of these students might be intimidated by the university, or the university is quite a long way away, and some of these students need to live at home and they need to access part time.

This list of possible reasons to attend non-university higher education included some of the defining characteristics of the non-traditional or WP student in England higher education (Baker and Brown, 2007; Leathwood and O’Connell, 2003), so that non-university higher education was therefore again constructed as

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meeting this national agenda. Importantly, non-university higher education was also described as uniquely able to meet the needs of these students, discursively positioned in the earlier narrative in contrast to a homogenous definition of the exclusionary university (see also Leahy, 2012). Echoing this definition, the further education college principal described how his college’s higher education provision contrasted with nearby university-based higher education: Colleges tend to do things that universities find difficult, like part-time, like flexible provision. So the university closest to me doesn’t do part time undergraduate at all, really. It’s not part of what they do.

The strengths of non-university higher education emerged through these narratives, which emphasized the multiple ways in which the provision was positioned to redress educational inequalities that might otherwise bar students from accessing higher level study at all. However, these constructions of the role of non-university higher education and the typical characteristics of the non-university higher education student must also be seen in the context of the complexities of locality discussed earlier. If higher education is being made uniquely accessible in a further education college, which types of higher education are made accessible there? If the locality is defined through, for example, a strong industrial heritage and links with local employers which create an emphasis on technical and skills education, are students who ‘need’ to attend non-university higher education therefore offered technical and skills education as the single undergraduate possibility? These questions are further complicated by waves of policy initiatives which, without removing the imperative to widen participation, also structure the available options within non-university higher education: Clearly, the government’s pressure to increase the number of apprenticeships is a big driver. Being very mercenary about it, that’s where the money is. That’s where the funding is, and it would be foolish not to do that. It’s also the first time, I think, where we’ve had an initiative from central government which pretty overtly says colleges can and should do this. The minister’s speech at the AoC [Association of Colleges] conference last year [2015] was about colleges doubling their 30% share in apprenticeships within 4 years. [. . .] I think it’s early days yet, but we’re certainly beginning to see in my own institution evidence of substitution effect, so what we’ve lost in part time higher education through the traditional route, we might be picking up through Higher Level apprenticeships. (College Principal and National Lobbying Group Chair)

Two effects of national policy were discussed here. The first was a decline in parttime HE students as a result of tuition fee increases of 27 per cent between 2007/8

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and 2010/11, combined with reduced funding available to students for subdegree and postgraduate qualifications (Avis and Orr, 2016, p. 54). The second was a national programme of investment in higher level apprenticeships, which in the earlier narrative acted to ‘substitute’ the lost numbers of part-time students. This highlights the particular financial difficulties of further education colleges, for whom loss of part-time student numbers means an immediate economic loss that must be just as immediately filled. Just as non-university higher education was described as particularly suited to the needs of non-traditional students, so the provision was also narrated here as being especially suited to offering apprenticeships. Although these discourses of suitability were constructed separately, bringing them together highlights that the non-traditional student, for whom non-university higher education and specifically the non-university higher education offered in their immediate locality is the best or the only option, is therefore subject to a further narrative. In this narrative, the higher education on offer to that student is that to which non-university higher education itself is seen to be most suited. This narrative of suitability is further complicated by contradictions in the ways that national policy is enacted; as Bathmaker (2017) points out, despite the positioning of further education colleges as the logical providers of higher level apprenticeships, in practice colleges are not always chosen as providers. It is within the intertwined logic of the marketplace and of local need that the range of subjects offered at higher level in some colleges is far greater than others. As the higher education policy director explained: There are colleges, particularly but not exclusively in reasonably sized towns, which do not have a university. Examples would be Grimsby, Blackpool, Blackburn, where the colleges are effectively providing a mini university service for local people.

Here the spatial story of the local signalled a WP agenda, in which non-university higher education provided access to higher education for people who were unlikely or unable to move away from home for higher education. This local access agenda intersected with the local-national higher education marketplace, so that those less likely to attend a university in these particular localities had access to a ‘mini university’. The term ‘mini university’ implied a breadth of subjects offered, and a significant, if small in relative size to university numbers, population of higher education students. The typical non-university higher education student in most descriptions is tied to or embedded in their locality, and these ties are one of a range of reasons that a college is more accessible than

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a university. The subjects and types of higher education offered by their local college are then subject to a further range of place-specific responses to national policy imperatives. Taken together, the structures that define the local student and the local college combine to delimit the higher education possibilities available, or imaginable, within a particular locality. As the previous data excerpt also demonstrates, while higher education can be understood as a distinct form of higher education provision, it is also defined alongside and against university-based higher education. In describing some types of non-university higher education provision as ‘mini universities’, the speaker assumed a collective understanding of what a ‘university service’ was, showing the dominance and the homogeneity of constructions of the university in discourses of higher education in England. The local student in non-university higher education therefore offers a possible counter-narrative to accepted understandings of undergraduate study. The next section examines this counter-narrative in more detail, particularly focusing on the ways that descriptions of students as local also imply particular uses of educational spaces and buildings.

Local students, not ‘boarding school’ students The higher education policy manager described the historical patterns of mobility and spatial practice associated with traditional university students in England as a ‘boarding school model’, arguing: The problem is when you’ve established something, when you’ve constructed something, and when you’ve supported that model as English governments have successively in the post-war period, you’ve supported that particular form of higher education. You’ve expanded that, and it’s become part of the ritual culture, particularly of the middle class kids in England, and it’s very difficult to change. So I think we will probably have that model for a long time.

Seen in this way, the imperative to live and study within the same institution has its roots in the elite modes of schooling in England, available to a privileged minority of students. His use of the term ‘ritual culture’ went some way towards explaining how, despite shifts in recent years in the proportion of students who do not leave home in order to study for a degree (Finn and Holton, 2019), the narrative remains strong. In this narrative, the university as an all-encompassing space, a ‘bubble’ (Bathmaker et al., 2016, p. 102) containing living, socializing and learning spaces together, is central to the lived experience of undergraduate

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study. As Holton’s (2015) study of ‘local’ university students shows, this central position is destabilized in the experiences of students who have enduring relationships, employment and family commitments that extend beyond the spaces and the temporality of their degree courses. In non-university higher education institutions, where the majority of students are local, the physical spaces of the college play a different and less central role than those of a university. Describing the expectations that non-university higher education students have of educational spaces, the higher education policy manager suggested: The mature students, they’re not particularly interested, especially if they have childcare responsibilities, and possibly have quite long hours in the form of part-time work. And obviously if they’re being seconded or supported by the employer, they kind of see themselves as slightly different. They turn up at the college, they do their sessions, and they leave. It’s quite difficult to engage them in what we might call traditional student experience type activities.

Here, students defined as ‘mature’ were also defined through a spatial story of locality. They were described as more embedded in their locality than the ‘traditional student’, either through employment or through childcare, and were seen to have instrumental relationships with the spaces of the college. As discussed earlier, the provision of local higher education as the only possible higher level study for these groups of ‘non-traditional’ students is part of the definition of non-university higher education. At the same time, it is the very relationship to their locality that de-centralizes the position of higher education spaces in the degree experience of these groups of students; because they have pre-existing connections to their local area, the students are more likely to study locally. In turn, because they have pre-existing connections to their local area, the students are less likely to spend time in their local higher education buildings. Nonuniversity higher education spaces can therefore be seen as both more and less important in the lives of their local student populations than university spaces are in the lives of traditional, perceived-as-mobile undergraduate students. For the further education college principal and lobbying group chair, there was a similar contrast between elite undergraduates and local students. His description here referred to a study he had been involved in that compared student expectations in a Russell Group and post-19921 university in the same In the English higher education system ‘Post-1992’ refers to the year in which polytechnic colleges, known for their provision of technical higher education, attained university status. These universities do not have the elite history associated with the Russell Group institutions and are therefore often positioned in opposition to them.

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city. This study led him to differentiate between types of university, seeing nonuniversity higher education students as similar to those at post-1992 universities in terms of spatial practice: Student expectations of [Russell group university] were the student union, sports facilities, leisure. Their whole social life revolved around the university. For [post-1992 university] students, they regarded it much more as a job, so that they arrived in the morning, they did their work, and they finished their work and they went back home again. A lot of their social networks were outside the institution. A further education college is much like the second of those things.

Here, institutional status brought with it a set of spatial associations that included students’ embeddedness in locality rather than higher education institution, connections to employment and proximity to ‘home’. The local student therefore always occupies a position in the reputational hierarchy of higher education (Stich, 2014), which their use of institutional spaces both reflects and reinforces. Although the excerpt suggests similarities between further education colleges as higher education providers and the post-1992 university in the study described, there are important differences between the two. Aside from catering for a majority of ‘local’ students (ETF, 2016), college providers in England offer higher education alongside general further education courses, with further education occupying the bulk of the spaces and resources of the college. Therefore, as well as the challenge of providing spaces that are both vital and insignificant in students’ lives, their higher education spaces are also required to signify a distinction from further education. As the college principal reported: We had a relatively high dropout rate, which we were very concerned about, so we followed up, and basically the students were saying, ‘Well, we’re being taught in the same rooms, by the same staff, in much the same way as we were at Level 3, and that’s just a bit dull actually.’

For the students described here, a significant barrier to continuing with higher education was that they did not see the educational space as specific to higher education interactions and pedagogies. Educational spaces, de-centred for the local higher education student, are also important signifiers of educational status precisely because they are experienced in the local college and could therefore be read as further education spaces. The college itself is not understood as a higher education-specific institution, so the higher education spaces within it are required to do so. For the traditional, perceived-as-mobile student, as described before, all spaces are by assumption and by definition associated with

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the university and therefore with degree study. For a local student at a college, the space is required to work harder in signifying and shaping higher educationspecific identities. Given the practical ways in which local students are perceived as using institutional spaces, however, as well as the small proportion of each college’s population that study higher education, non-university higher education spaces cannot replicate the spatial markers of elite ‘ritual’ university culture. Instead, as the research project director argued, many colleges designate some rooms or buildings as higher education specific: I have observed a tendency for colleges to think that higher education is very different and therefore needs to occupy a different space. But when I go and look in these spaces, because sometimes I go on tours, and somebody very proudly says, ‘Here’s our higher education room’, and I look in the room, and I think, ‘That doesn’t look any different to any other room’.

Where spaces are simply divided between further education and higher education, this division both underlines the importance of that distinction within a dualsector institution and reveals the elusiveness and abstraction of higher education as a spatial and material entity. It is at once contained by the spaces and places in which it happens, and something less tangible that takes place in those spaces. As is clear from the significance attached to particular rooms in non-university higher education institutions, however, experiences of higher education spaces are inextricable from the complex hierarchies and dominant narratives of what higher education should and can be. Within these narratives, the local student in the local college occupies a position that is both an alternative to the ways that higher education in England is commonly understood and a precarious spatial relationship that is always threatened and yet more important because of that threat. This section has demonstrated the strong spatial stories that narratively define non-university higher education and the ‘local’. The section has also shown how complex the construction of the local is in its relationship to non-university or dual-sector higher education. While colleges’ responsiveness to locality can be to reinforce a labour market, it can also be to redress educational inequalities, and each of these definitions of local response brings with it a different set of educational priorities. While connections to the labour market can be broadly categorized as part of a national skills agenda, and educational inequalities as part of a WP agenda, there are further policy drivers which also affect nonuniversity higher education provision. In particular, the financial concerns

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associated with a marketized higher education system mean that colleges’ local responses might also be responses to national imperatives like the increased funding for apprenticeships. If non-university higher education is the only or the best option for some students, then these shifts in what is offered locally are also changes to the available opportunities. The local is also significant in seeing non-university higher education as a counter-narrative to the ‘boarding school’ model of English undergraduate mobilities, which is historically reinforced as an elite mode of study. As perceptions of undergraduate spaces in non-university higher education institutions show, this counter-narrative is complex and contradictory, de-centring the institution in the lived experience of the undergraduate even as the existence of the institutional spaces are rendered more important in that lived experience.

Tobston College and Sebford College If a defining narrative of higher education provision outside of universities is its relationship to the ‘local’, then this narrative needs to be explored in relation to specific localities, as well as in terms of a national system or international phenomenon. This section shifts the chapter’s focus to the localities of the colleges in which the research for this book was conducted, exploring spatial stories that unite place and higher education. These towns in which these colleges are situated are unique, each with its own placed history and its multiple narratives. At the same time, they are instances of a type of town (single-industry, relatively large but not city) in a particular moment (post-industrial), situated within but largely excluded from a geographically unequal higher education system. In an era of higher education massification, these towns therefore prompt important questions about the role of higher education in the development or recovery of a place, and about the role of place in the provision of higher education. The towns also highlight that non-university higher education provision at a national or international level cannot be understood as local in general without attention being paid to the local in its specificity. To introduce each case college, I draw on two separate representations of them. The first is the representation of higher education provision in marketing materials from each college, including their higher education prospectus, the higher education pages of their institutional website and any additional documents such as guides to the local area. I have argued elsewhere (Henderson, 2018) that, although the competitive higher education marketplace in England

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limits the available discourses for institutions to use in their self-representation, there are particular discourses that are common to non-university higher education providers’ marketing materials. Unsurprisingly, the discourse of the ‘local’ is one of the most prevalent of these. The presence of this discourse in marketing strategy marks non-university higher education out from university provision that promotes itself as operating within a global market. Without claiming a causal link between the ways that an institution markets its provision and the ways that it is encountered by students, I consider that these materials are important representations of the available discourses through which it is possible to understand higher education provision (Symes and Drew, 2017). These materials are also representative of my first encounters with each case college; the materials therefore contributed to important first impressions of the research sites and the spatial stories through which I came to understand them. The second representation in each section is made up from interviews with higher education staff members in the college. In each college, interviews were conducted with the college’s higher education director and with course tutors on two-degree courses. These sections focus on parts of our conversations in which directors and tutors described the locality of the college, and non-university higher education’s relationship to that locality. These interview excerpts combine to serve as a different, or alternative, introduction to the case colleges than those offered by the marketing materials. The college staff are similar to the participants in the first section of the chapter in their experience and knowledge of working in the English further education sector. They are different in that they are embedded in their particular college and locality and therefore offer a view of how the national understandings of non-university provision and the nonuniversity higher education student discussed earlier are experienced in and shaped by a specific place and institution. In each case, the staff members are named using their chosen pseudonym, with a brief description of their spatial relationship to the college and the locality.

Tobston College Non-university higher education and local history: Tobston College marketing materials This section analyses Tobston College’s ‘About Higher Education’ web page, Tobston College’s higher education prospectus and a smaller booklet called ‘Hello, we’re [name of higher education site]’. The last of these reflects Tobston College’s position, at the time, as having a separate site for their higher education provision.

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This site was on the outskirts of a small village five miles from Tobston town centre. The main further education site of the college was in the town centre. As will be discussed in this and subsequent chapters, Tobston College announced the closure of this separate site in the year in which I conducted my fieldwork and moved their HE provision to the main town centre site in September 2017. I am focusing on the marketing materials from before this move, because these reflect the college as it was accessed and experienced by the student participants in the study, who completed their undergraduate studies before the changes to the site. Although, as I will go on to show, the marketing materials often draw upon the discourses of ‘local’ higher education provision set out in the earlier section, both the prospectus and the ‘Hello’ booklet also gave information to introduce Tobston as a town to students from elsewhere: Tobston is a thriving region of business and retail growth, making it an exciting time to study here. A former Roman settlement named [name], it is one of the largest and oldest boroughs in the UK, and is ideally situated in [name of region of England].

The photograph on the brochure’s opening page positioned the town’s medieval church behind a large motorway junction, and amongst industrial and commercial buildings. These visual and textual narrative markers can be read as signifying a movement from a legitimizing past to an economically thriving future. This emphasis on the historical legacy of the town, as well as its relationship to future industry, is perhaps all the more important given that the college cannot draw upon a history of higher education in the town. As an example of a ‘reasonably sized town that does not have a university’, the college situated itself and its higher education provision firmly in the history of the town. Similarly, the ‘Hello’ booklet used a double-page timeline to show the shifts in the higher education site’s use over a millennium, since its mention in the Domesday book. This visual representation of a journey steeped in English history drew upon national associations between historical architecture and educational excellence regularly found in elite universities (Baker and Brown, 2007), despite the fact that the site had been used for educational purposes for only the latter forty years of that history. Again, there was a blurring of the boundaries between the history of the locality and the history of the college itself, with the local lending authority to the educational space. Despite strong narratives of introduction to Tobston and its higher education site, the marketing materials also acknowledged and drew upon the expectation

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that many of their higher education students will be ‘local’. The following sentences were at the top of the college’s higher education web page, above a map showing the higher education site’s location, and a more detailed description of the facilities offered there: We’re a friendly, less intimidating alternative to the larger city universities. And if you’re local, more convenient too. And with Tobston’s excellent transport links by road, rail and air, even if you’re from further afield, we can be pretty local to you too.

The first section of this chapter highlighted the narrative of non-university higher education and local provision as a counter-narrative to traditional models of undergraduate study in England. This web page took this approach, explicitly creating a contrast between university and non-university higher education. Tobston as a place was closely linked with its identity as a nonuniversity higher education provider in this example. Where ‘city’ and ‘universities’ were understood together as ‘intimidating’, non-university higher education in the town was associated with friendliness and convenience. While there were markers of the same discourses of local need, such as students imagined as finding universities ‘intimidating’, these were also cast as an opportunity to study in a different place and a different way. Similarly, in order to emphasize the ease of transport access to the town, the local was redefined, signifying proximity to other places rather than specificity. This excerpt demonstrates how concepts of locality and localism were crucial to the way the college marketed its higher education provision, even as these concepts were redefined through their use. The college’s marketing materials also focused heavily on the possibility of accessing higher education without leaving home. In the ‘Hello’ booklet, two consecutive double-page spreads were dedicated to accommodation choices. The first described the advantages associated with ‘staying at home’, arguing that this option allowed for the student to ‘keep your job’, ‘keep your friends’ and reach the ‘same destination, different route’. The implicit comparison to traditional modes of mobile degree study was used to suggest that ‘staying at home’ was a redefinition of a familiar and outdated mode of study. These documents show how non-university higher education could be seen as offering a counter-narrative to traditional models of undergraduate study. In this alternative, embeddedness in locality was valid and valued as part of higher education student subjectivity.

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‘We Have Had a Big Part to Play’: Staff perceptions of higher education at Tobston College In interviews with the higher education director and tutors, I asked how they felt about Tobston as a place. Inevitably, their answers drew connections between the town of Tobston and the educational needs of its population. Liza, a graphic design degree tutor, had grown up in ‘the area’, as she described it. She had completed her degree and worked for several years in industry in London and returned to Tobston to begin her teaching career at the college over twenty years ago. She had been instrumental in setting up the college’s graphic design degree just over ten years previously. For Liza, there were specific challenges associated with teaching in Tobston and a spatial story of educational deprivation: There’s no getting away from the fact that Tobston, well, this area, has had its problems. In 2004 it had the worst adult literacy and numeracy rates in the UK, hence a lot of widening participation and there was a lot of money, European social fund money, so that we could try to engage a lot of these disenfranchised learners.

Here, the college’s position in its locality was portrayed as part of an imperative to redress educational inequalities. Situating the town within the national educational geography suggested that what was particular to this area was an enduring and negative educational legacy. In this description, the low literacy and numeracy rates of the people in the area were characteristic of the place itself, so that, as Stich’s (2014) concept of reputational affect highlights, place, institution and students were narrated together. Therefore, to study at this particular local college, as a student from the locality, was to already be implicated in educational narratives that intertwine and define. The college’s higher education director similarly portrayed Tobston’s higher education provision as at least in part a response to a spatial story of locally specific educational need. Catherine, like Liza, had held a teaching or leadership position at Tobston College for over twenty years, having begun teaching after a successful career in the music industry. Taking on different leadership roles over that time, she had moved from combined further and higher education focused positions to specializing in higher education over the past decade. She described herself as having lived in Tobston for over thirty years, and saw the college as an important step towards the kind of educational intervention the area needed: Catherine:  I think Tobston does need a proper university, and I do hope that in the next decade it achieves it, because I think it’s a big enough entity,

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and I think it’s shown itself willing to change and be transformed, and that’s been a long time coming. I moved here in 1986, just after the miners’ strike, and it was a very sad place then Holly: 

Do you think it has changed?

Catherine:  Mm [indicates agreement]. And I do think we [Tobston College’s higher education provision] have had a big part to play in that.

Here, the college was intertwined with a spatial story of local industrial ‘sadness’ and was instrumental in redressing it. Higher education was associated with recognition of the town’s capacity for positive change. This association demonstrated the work done by higher education institutions in not only meeting local need, but also visibly signifying a relationship between higher education and the locality. The spatial story that united the locality, its history of educational and industrial disadvantage, and the role of non-university higher education was also evident in the tutors’ descriptions of their students. These data highlight the tensions between narrating non-university higher education and its students as taking the opportunity to study higher education in a different or nontraditional way and reinforcing the dominance of the traditional university and all its connotations. For Catherine, the higher education students at Tobston represented a growing national trend, in response to tuition fee increases, that were moving away from the traditional English higher education model: What I think has happened is more students, particularly from poorer families, said, ‘We can’t afford to go away, because we don’t want more than the student loan to owe back, rather than student loan and accommodation costs.’

As in the discussion of the ‘ritual culture’ and ‘boarding school model’ of traditional undergraduate study in England, this excerpt highlighted a challenge to the contemporary relevance of that elite model. The non-university higher education student in this description was fixed in place, unable to afford undergraduate mobility, and was choosing a different mode of engagement with undergraduate study. Catherine went on to describe Tobston’s non-university higher education students as engaging with higher education spaces in non-traditional ways because of their ties to place: We haven’t got the capacity to offer them the razzmatazz of the big student union or things like that, but this is what our students like. A lot of our students work, a lot of our students live at home, so they’re not interested in that.

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This common construction of the spatial practices of the non-university higher education student was echoed again by Gavin, a tutor on the English degree course at Tobston. Gavin moved abroad after gaining a doctorate in the UK and began teaching higher education at Tobston when he found it difficult to gain a university position upon his return. He had been at the college for seven years and imagined staying because he had a young family. Like Catherine, Gavin saw his students as tied to place by employment and family commitments, and as therefore needing something other than a traditional university spatial environment: We just don’t have that social infrastructure in place like they do at [nearby universities] and so on, but the type of students we have tend to be, they live at home and they work, so they don’t really want that life.

Again, the normative traditional student ‘life’ was present in both of these accounts, as the experience that the local student’s engagement with institutional space was defined against. Specifically, the student’s status as ‘local’ was conflated with an explicit rejection of traditional student spatial practice. The accounts were also accounts of non-traditional student mobility, in which the institution was de-centred by the multiple spaces that comprise a local student’s daily movement (Holton and Finn, 2018), in contrast to the more confined daily movements of the traditionally mobile student around the university’s spaces (Smith and Hubbard, 2014). In these accounts, the local higher education site was important in that it made it possible for local students to study while working and keeping family commitments. At the same time, these commitments were described as making the site’s similarity to traditional higher education spaces unimportant. However, the staff also attached a great deal of significance to the spatial separation between higher and further education, and their accounts suggest a connection between the higher education site and understandings of the traditional university. When I asked how important the separate site was to students, Gavin responded: It gives a sort of an atmosphere of it being a university campus in a way, and you can see the way they talk about it that they see it as separate. It’s quite important to separate it off, at least in my opinion. I think it gives a separate identity to them that is really important.

Catherine answered the same question in a similar vein: Students have a definite sense of coming to university, rather than being in college. They feel they’ve gone to university, and I’ve been really trying to cultivate that.

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The ‘atmosphere’ and the ‘sense’ that are associated with the separate higher education site are constructed here as important because they define the spatial experience as related to university. Despite the rejection of the university ‘life’ that the local student is seen to have made, the spatial practice of ‘go[ing] to university’ is all the more important to define when there is a risk of elision with ‘being in college’. The higher education site is vital in its definition against traditional university spaces, and simultaneously vital in its similarity to them. As highlighted by Gavin’s description of this similarity as ‘really important’, and Catherine’s suggestion that she ‘cultivate[s]’ that perception of similarity, the non-university space must be perpetually reinforced as university space, even while it also offers an alternative to it. These accounts of Tobston’s non-university higher education provision and its typical students demonstrate how the college must be understood in the context of the spatial stories within which it is embedded and intertwined. The college’s undergraduate provision was constructed as an important response to local need. This need could be seen in terms of both the visibility of higher education in a place from which it has been absent and the policy agendas of widening higher education access and promoting technical and skills education in response to local labour market demands. The staff at the college saw the provision as offering an important alternative to traditional university education, but this alternative remained steeped in the definitional power of the traditional university. The negotiation between these two narratives was also a negotiation of the spatial stories of the area, in which a history of higher education is a very present absence, and of the ‘local’ student as enacting particular material educational practices.

Sebford College Investment in education: Sebford College’s marketing materials This section draws on Sebford College’s ‘Why choose Sebford College University Centre?’ page and the University Centre prospectus. Unlike Tobston College (at the time of this fieldwork), Sebford College’s higher education provision was on the same site as its further education provision. The higher education building, named a ‘University Centre’, was one of the ten buildings on the college’s town centre further education campus. In contrast to the marketing material for Tobston College, Sebford’s prospectus did not have a page dedicated to describing the town, and there were no images of the town at all throughout the prospectus. The prospectus suggested, without stating this, that prospective

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students would already know the town, and need no introduction to it. The prospectus focused instead on two different spatial topics. The first of these was the University Centre building and its position on the college campus. The second was the college’s association with its partner institution, a high-ranked university around thirty miles from the town. A double-page spread in the prospectus was entitled ‘Our £65 million campus’. The pages were largely taken up by a bird’s eye view photograph of the whole campus, each building numbered and labelled with a key in the corner of the second page. The photograph framed the campus so the town around its edges cannot be seen. Rather than establishing the town, or the educational spaces of the institution, as historically grounded as in Tobston’s materials, this representation of the campus drew attention to recent investment and contemporary architecture. The photograph captured the spread of the campus and emphasizes its multiple spaces, situating the higher education building within a network of educational structures. On the following page, the second on a list of ‘seven key’ reasons to ‘choose Sebford College’ was: £14 million dedicated University Centre and £7 million Science, Technology and Engineering Centre

The list was accompanied by a photograph of the University Centre, with light from its rows of windows evoking the building being in use. There was a clear narrative in these pages of investment in education and of studying at the University Centre as an opportunity to participate in a thriving institution. The ‘dedicated’ University Centre, tagged with its monetary investment, suggested that higher education was a priority in the institution and was allocated a specific, separate place on the campus. Unlike in Tobston’s prospectus, these were not spatial stories that related the institution to its locality, other than to demonstrate the presence of investment in education in a town where this investment might otherwise be assumed to be absent. The resulting impression of the institution was place-less. The first on the list of ‘key reasons’ to study at Sebford was that a high percentage of its degrees are awarded by the nearby, highly ranked university. There is a borrowing of reputation here, so that the college’s undergraduate provision was associated both with the college and with the more elite reputation of the partner university. At the same time, there was a suggestion that the potential students looking at the prospectus would prefer not to travel as far as the nearby university to gain a degree from there, and therefore that the opportunity to gain a degree at a distance from that university was a clear selling point. The University Centre

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was reliant upon Sebford and the partner university both as separate place and as elided in reputation. The college’s ‘Why Choose Sebford University Centre’ web page made it clear that the anticipated non-university higher education student was one who was fixed in the local area. In a section entitled, ‘A degree on your doorstep’, the web page stated: The vast majority of our students live within 20 miles of Sebford. We especially attract students from the areas of [surrounding towns and villages]. Although some students travel from further afield, and we do have accommodation available, these students have chosen us as living at home is the financially sensible option. You may be able to keep your job (many students work full/part-time while studying), study while looking after children or caring for others or fit your study around the commitments you have.

In a similar way to the Tobston prospectus and web page, this excerpt used the narrative of the ‘financially sensible’ option, reinforcing the monetary and ethical value of a non-traditional alternative to undergraduate study. Similarly, the page made clear that students were anticipated to have commitments that keep them in place, and that non-university higher education at Sebford was unusual in catering for these kinds of students and this kind of study. Although the local area was almost divided from the spaces of the college in its marketing, then, the discourse of the ‘local’ was present, both in the fact that an introduction to the area was seen as unnecessary and in that the most ‘sensible’ option for potential students in Sebford was to study locally.

A local ‘mindset’: Staff perceptions of higher education at Sebford College In interviews with the staff at Sebford College, I asked about how they saw Sebford as a place. Linda, the college’s higher education director, had been in position at the college for only two months at the time of my interview with her and had moved to Sebford in order to take up the role. She described herself as having ‘travelled and moved around’ and had previously always worked in universities. Her perceptions of Sebford were therefore as a relative newcomer to the area and to the college. Linda repeatedly referred throughout our interview to what she called the ‘Sebford mindset’, which she reported having been warned about by tutors when she first arrived. The mindset was narrated as being specific to the town, and as limiting the people of the town to their immediate locality: Sometimes they [the higher education students] are talking to me, and they say, ‘But I’d have to go and travel there.’ And I kind of think, ‘Gosh, I’ve travelled the

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In describing the typical non-university higher education student as hesitant to travel beyond a particular boundary, Linda narrated a clear spatial story of locality and mobility. In this local area, she argued, the ties to the local area were particularly strong, in comparison to her own as an outsider to the area. The contrast she drew was also a classed comparison which made the previously discussed association between mobility and privilege and immobility and disadvantage (Corbett, 2007b). Describing Sebford, Linda highlighted the history of economic poverty in the area, saying that the college and its higher education provision were ‘firmly rooted in its local context’: When you look at it, it’s very deprived, and you don’t want to have generations of people who don’t have hope, who don’t have prospects. So I think of the work that we do in terms of raising aspirations – academically, personally, helping students.

Like Catherine, the higher education director at Tobston College, Linda saw the undergraduate provision at Sebford as implicated in redressing some of the place-specific legacies of deprivation that had led to a lack of hope. She constructed higher education as a positive force in relation to the local lack of ‘hope’, much as Catherine described Tobston’s higher education as working to change the town’s ‘sadness’. For one of the tutors, the importance of access to higher education in the town was as much related to the present as to the legacy of the past. Tony was in his seventh year as an English higher education tutor at the college at the time of our interview. He described himself as being ‘from a council estate in the next town’ and had returned to the area to teach at the college after a brief period as an associate lecturer at a university. He saw Sebford’s non-university higher education provision as especially crucial given the spatial story of racial and religious diversity in the town. With just over 30 per cent of the town’s population identified as BAME2 in the 2011 census, and the largest group of these identified as Asian or British Asian, Tony described the specific role played by the local college in this context: We have a lot of students from the Asian community. We get quite a lot of young Muslim females, who I think otherwise may have been prevented from going to university. I think for them it’s a kind of lifeline.

Black, Asian and minority ethnic

2

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This understanding of Sebford’s locality tied together narratives of religion and educational im/mobility (Ahmad, 2001; Bhopal, 2016), along with the town’s historical lack of university provision. In this narrative, higher education offered emancipation to those fixed in place by the racial and religious difference that itself constructed a particular narrative of the town. While Linda described the town’s history, and non-university higher education’s intervention in that history, in terms of economic deprivation, Tony saw a different local imperative for non-university higher education. In his terms, the college redressed religious and racial exclusion from higher education that was exacerbated by the lack of university provision in the locality. The photography degree tutor at Sebford represented local students slightly differently. Lewis had been a photography tutor at the college for twenty-six years, first in further education and then as the tutor responsible for writing and delivering a Higher National Diploma3 and then a three-year BA programme in photography. Lewis had grown up ‘in the area’ but had left to go to university. When he returned to the area, after working in London for several years, it was to set up his own company, and he described an ‘accidental’ route in to teaching that began when Sebford College advertised for part-time further education tutors. Lewis drew on the familiar construction of the ‘immobile’ local student, and, like Linda, highlighted the crucial role played by non-university higher education in a town like Sebford: They [students on the course] are mainly from around here. The students we get, I would say as a majority, are people who cannot or it would be very difficult for them to move to another part of the country. So we get a lot of students with jobs, with job responsibilities. We get a lot of students who have got families. Perhaps they’re carers to older people, younger people. You know, those sort of students choose us because it means that they can study something that, that’s quite, well, exotic or quite unusual, in a college like this. It’s a good opportunity for them.

Here, Lewis’s account echoed that of the higher education policy director in the first section of this chapter, who described colleges that offer a ‘mini university service for local people’. The breadth of courses offered at Sebford, Lewis argued, widened the available options for those students for whom non-university provision was the only possible higher education option. Where these students A Higher National Diploma is a sub-bachelor degree qualification at Level 5 in the UK qualifications framework. See Chapter 7 for a further discussion of its relationship to undergraduate degree qualifications.

3

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were fixed in place, unable to follow traditional patterns of undergraduate mobility, the college’s higher education offer defined the limits of what was possible to imagine as degree study. Describing typical degree students on his course, Tony offered a counternarrative to the construction of the local student as fixed in place by circumstance: It’s more viable for them to stay at home. They don’t have to pay for rent, they don’t have to make that big leap into the adult world, so they can stay at home and have all the luxuries of home.

This description positioned local students as advantaged by their resistance to traditional patterns of student mobility. They were comfortable and protected by the opportunity to study without ‘hav[ing] to’ take the accompanying steps towards independence (Holdsworth, 2006). However, the narrative also reinforced the connection between the traditionally mobile student and progression towards adulthood and did not allow for the multiple ways in which the ‘local’ student might have already achieved other markers of independence. Though Tony’s typical local student remained in place by choice, the student was firmly situated in the ‘home’, reinforcing the association between local study and immobility. Tony’s description of the ‘big leap into the adult world’ associated with leaving home to study highlights the perpetual presence of traditional undergraduate education as a reference point even in a locality where traditional higher education had never been established. Where the university was drawn on elsewhere in these data, the comparison was not always so positive. For example, Linda, Sebford’s College’s higher education director, described one of the key challenges for recruitment to degree courses at the college. Reporting a typical conversation with further education tutors at the college, she explained why not all further education students progressed to higher education at Sebford: Many of the students that you would think would actually come to Sebford for higher education don’t. We’re told, ‘Oh well, it’s because they’ve seen the bright lights of [nearby university], and what have you, so why should we, you know . . .’ [Breaks off] They don’t use the word ‘condemn’ them to life in Sebford because that’s not the way it is, but at the same time . . . .

Spatial stories of place and mobility were intertwined here. While Linda saw the college’s higher education provision as offering opportunity in a locality where it was previously lacking, the further education tutors promoted the best opportunities as being located outside of the local area. Sebford College was

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therefore constituted as the kind of opportunity that students who have the freedom to do so should leave behind. By implication, the opportunities offered by higher education in Sebford were offered to those who were tied, or as Linda put it, ‘condemn[ed]’ to place. In this spatial story, the ‘bright lights’ offered by universities were absent from non-university higher education in Sebford, so that the spaces of the institution and the narrative of the town were defined against the absence of a university. For Lewis, this absence extended to the social spaces of the town, which he saw as a fundamental barrier to the recruitment of non-local students: It’s [Sebford is] a bit of a cultural backwater. There isn’t a sort of big student union, and there’s no gigs, and most of the pubs in the town are shut down. It’s not a great student town, so we can’t really attract students very effectively.

Lewis highlighted the expected extension of higher education spaces beyond those of teaching and accommodation in a national context of undergraduate mobility. His references to culture, music, student union and pubs suggested that a historically established higher education institution is visible throughout a local area, and that Sebford lacked these markers of degree-level study. In both Linda’s and Lewis’s spatial stories of Sebford, the historical absence of a university in the town was both an important reason for and a possible threat to the existence of non-university higher education. Sebford College, according to these accounts, was situated within a complex local past and present that combines narratives of deprivation, industrial loss and immigration with a historical absence of higher education. Sometimes cast as a solution to and sometimes as threatened by these combined local factors, the data here show how the college’s higher education provision was both characteristic of a type of town and specific to its particular locality.

Conclusion This chapter has explored accounts of non-university higher education provision in England as spatial stories which draw on definitions of locality and the local, and which bring together discourses of place, student mobilities and institutional spaces in higher education. Constructing the ‘local’ as made up of spatial stories de-naturalizes it as a signifier and enables an analysis of how locality shifts in definition and scale across the data. The stories of the local in this chapter operate cyclically, with non-university provision defined by its association with the local,

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and the needs of the locality in turn defining what is required of the provision in each locality. In the first section of the chapter, data from interviews with national figures in further education associations demonstrated the multiple and complex ways in which the definitional cycle of non-university higher education and locality works at a national level. Through these accounts, non-university higher education can be seen as providing for local employers and bolstering the needs of the community according to an agenda of skills education. At the same time, the needs of local people are seen as defined by placed narratives of ‘local’ educational deprivation and underachievement, leading to a definition of nonuniversity higher education according to a WP agenda. In negotiating between definitions of local need, non-university higher education is also competing in a stratified national higher education marketplace that requires careful investment in types of higher education that bring economic return and therefore enable institutions’ survival. In the national-level and case college data, the figure of the ‘non-university higher education student is repeatedly drawn upon as requiring, relying upon and benefitting from this particular type of higher education provision. Unable to travel or relocate in order to study, intimidated by the traditional university, restricted by family, employment or previous educational achievement, this construction of the typical non-university higher education student is consistent across the data in this chapter. The typical student therefore does important work in justifying the continued provision of non-university higher education and in defining its priorities at local levels. The construction is also far from unique to the English context, being visible wherever there is stratification of provision, and particularly where there is higher education provision outside of universities. However, the striking similarities in the ways that the typical student is imagined across these data suggest a highly homogenized definition of the student as educational subject. Like the relationship between non-university higher education and locality, the ‘local’ non-university higher education student cyclically defines and is defined by the type of provision they are seen to require. The following chapters focus in detail on student narratives in order to complicate and question this homogenized construction.

4

Being Local Place, ‘Local’ Higher Education and Educational Subjectivities

Introduction To try to say what a place is, where it begins and ends, what makes it distinct from another place, becomes more complicated when more thought is given to the attempt. Doreen Massey wrote that her ‘most painful times as a geographer’ were spent ‘struggling to think how someone could draw a boundary around somewhere like the East Midlands’ (2012, p. 64). Massey’s words highlight the ways that a boundary is both arbitrary and enduring; to name a place is to say that it is not another place, and to begin to ascribe it with specific qualities. It is a definitional process that masquerades as simply representing what is already there. At the same time, this kind of definition is also something that happens in everyday conversation, in passing, as the contextual background of an anecdote or as part of informing someone about how to navigate a place. In this chapter, the narratives that define places are the central focus. As I will go on to explain, they are responses to interview questions about place, as well as my own first responses to arriving in and navigating the locations of the case college sites for this project. They are a combination of first impressions and long-held, deeply embedded experiences. When seen together, they also highlight the complex processes through which a place acquires definitional legacies and through which boundaries are drawn around and within a locality. Because places are at different times either difficult or easy to describe, they are also complicated and confusing to research. The first time I asked a student participant in the project what she thought of where she lived, the student answered:

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(Aisha, Sebford College) Another student said, with a kind of helplessness, ‘It’s a small town, I suppose. I don’t know what you want me to say.’ Is place more or less significant to your experience if you have never had cause to describe it before? Is an absence of articulated definition the same as an absence of felt definition? These questions were, in the end, fundamental to this research project, but there were no easy answers. A further difficulty came in expressing the spatial terms of my own question. When asking about Tobston, for example, did I mean the particular part of it that the college was located in? Did I mean the street or village that the students lived in, which was often some way from the location of the college? Did I mean the town as some kind of illusory whole? The different interpretations of the question helped to form a shifting and often fragmented sense of what the ‘whole’ place was. This chapter therefore builds up definitions of Tobston and Sebford – the towns (and surrounding villages) in which the colleges in the research project were situated, as places, while simultaneously pointing out that a single definition of any place is impossible. As well as being made up of my own observations of the localities, the definitions are those of students at each college. They therefore capture not only how these places are defined but also how higher education is defined as part of place, and how place is defined as part of higher education. There are two important spatial factors that make these definitional processes particularly illuminating to current higher education contexts. The first is that both Tobston and Sebford are, as set out in Chapter 3, large towns without universities and therefore without visible histories of higher education provision. The interaction between higher education and localities from which it has been absent is happening throughout countries in which higher education is becoming a massified system, where there are expectations of access to higher education from more places than ever before. The second factor is that Tobston and Sebford offer non-university higher education that is defined in general terms, across multiple international contexts, as ‘local’ higher education, and they offer this to ‘local’ students. If the provision is defined through its relationship to locality, then it is all the more important to explore the ways that locality and higher education intertwine in definitional narratives. Using the conceptual framing of the spatial story means that these narratives are seen as capturing where each student sees their locality as beginning and

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ending, and what characteristics they see as particular to the place within the boundary. The narratives also position the student in relation to the locality. Like the original Lacanian moment in which the subject identifies themselves as being in a particular place (de Certeau, 1984), the narratives are part of a perpetual process of self-location. By expressing an affinity with or dislike for a place, for example, the student also narrates themselves as belonging or not to the place, as similar or different to the narratives that define it and the other people that occupy it. As discussed in the previous chapters, these narratives are often laden with depictions of multiple kinds of inequality, signifying placespecific legacies of economic deprivation or immigration through oblique references to social class and ethnicity. Of particular interest to the enquiry of this book is how possibilities and impossibilities are part of narratives of place; are there aspects of higher education that are understood as more or less possible within the multiple boundaries of Tobston and Sebford? This analysis combines the spatial story with the possible selves concept (Markus and Nurius, 1986), as set out in Chapter 2, in order to think through whether the futures associated with higher education are seen as possible in these towns. The following sections introduce first Tobston and then Sebford as places, and then as places of higher education. Each section begins with an introduction through my own experiences of navigating the places for the first time, and subsequently draws on interviews with students, exploring the ways that their spatial stories position them as educational subjects. Students are described using their own narratives of where they live and have lived, in keeping with the chapter’s focus on the spatial story.

Tobston Strange familiarity Like many larger post-industrial towns in England, Tobston was formed of an urban centre with many surrounding villages; the shift in feeling from urban to rural between town and village was sudden and rapid. During the time of this project, Tobston College’s higher education site was separate from the main college campus – a five-mile bus or car journey from Tobston town centre. This was highly unusual in the context of college-based higher education, which rarely recruits the student numbers to justify maintaining a separate site. Indeed, the site was closed in the year following this research, and the provision relocated to the main

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college campus. My experience of the separate higher education site was that it was a strange and confusing place to visit. To arrive in Tobston was to be confronted with the urban; the two exits from the train station opened onto either a dual carriageway or a large shopping centre. By contrast, the higher education site was so embedded in the rural surroundings of Tobston that, no matter how many times I made the journey, I never lost the anxiety that I would miss the bus stop. It was almost impossible to see the site from the road, or to distinguish one rolling hillside from another in the approach. The bus journey therefore represented a disorientating shift from urban to rural that, for me, began in the bus station. The station was accessed through the shopping centre, which meant that the distance from train platform to bus stop was covered without seeing daylight. That the bus station was underneath a dual carriageway tunnel only compounded this unnerving lack of natural light; in my fieldnotes, I described the bus station as ‘a terrible place’ and ‘dark in a timeless way’. At the beginning of each bus journey, before leaving the town centre, the bus would pass the contemporary glass and chrome building of the main college site – a reminder of how different my study might have been had the sites been combined earlier. The feeling of disorientation remained throughout the project. I noted with irritation in my fieldnotes, for example, that I somehow always missed the pedestrian entrance to the site. The entrance was part concealed behind the surrounding hedge, and I therefore always entered over a patch of damp grass between the pedestrian and the vehicle entrances. Similarly, despite the maps positioned at various points around the site, I found it hard to learn its institutional geography, and often entered the wrong building several times before finding the correct one. This feeling of strangeness extended to my interviews with students, as they interpreted questions about Tobston as a place to mean, variously, either of the two college sites, the village or small town in which they lived, the urban town centre, or all of these combined. What came across in interviews was therefore an intertwining of students’ relationships to their homes, to the place of the higher education site and to Tobston as a town. Any of these places could be seen as a locality. The importance of and differences between each of these three relationships therefore demonstrates the complexity of what is signified by the term ‘local’.

‘A Love for the Area’ The complexity of the relationships that students had to the Tobston area was shown by Rebecca, who lived with her husband and children in a village two

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miles from the college’s higher education site, and seven miles from Tobston town centre. When asked how she felt about Tobston as a place, Rebecca responded: In terms of where we are now, this is more your kind of rural bit, and I’m in the next village. So it’s nice and quiet, whereas obviously there’s a lot more kind of built up areas that are not as good.

Rebecca’s spatial story drew boundaries within the larger area of Tobston and its surrounding towns and villages. This account complicates the more homogenized definition of the whole area as having ‘its problems’ by Liza, the graphic design tutor in the previous chapter. Rebecca’s characterization of the urban areas as ‘not as good’ was also characteristic of other students’ answers to this question, showing some reticence and hedging in describing the negative qualities of a place, particularly to me as an outsider to it. Just as in Benson and Jackson’s (2013) study of middle-class place-making in Peckham (a gentrifying area in London), these descriptions were weighted with euphemistic signifiers of social class; ‘nice and quiet’, in Rebecca’s words, signalled an association between a rural area and middle-class identities. A more detailed account of the multiple places signified by ‘Tobston’ was given by Ryan, who described himself as living ‘at home with my parents still’, in the house he grew up in. The house was situated in a small town five miles from the higher education site and ten miles from Tobston town centre. Before speaking to Ryan, I would have understood each of the three places of his home town, the college higher education site and Tobston town centre as being part of the same local area. For him, however, there were important differences between them. Here, he described the town in which he has always lived: I mean, when I was younger, I loved [home town], but it’s not the same place it was like 10 years ago. I mean, we went out this weekend, drinking, me and a friend, and we had a couple of drinks in [home town] and compared to what it was like when I was nineteen, it’s like a ghost town. It’s lost everything that was any good about it, so at the minute I suppose it’s just where my house is.

For Ryan, this narrative of loss and disengagement with his home town over time was contrasted by his impressions of the area around the college higher education site: I have built up a love for this area, for [area around higher education site] and things like, they’ve got some stunning houses and things like that. So I mean at one point a couple of us looked at maybe renting a house, and the first place we looked at was like [area around higher education site]. I think that’s just because

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There were multiple facets to this spatial story, which positioned Ryan and his imagined future in relation to shared narratives of loss, change and social class. Ryan’s representation of the towns around Tobston as losing business, becoming ‘ghost towns’ or ‘d[ying] out’ resonated with the understandings I had gained of the area from interviews with college staff. In those interviews, the Tobston area had been described as having a history of sadness, and as having ‘its problems’. In Leyshon and Bull’s (2011) study of narratives of place in a rural British town, young people drew on shared narratives of place in order to narrate their own subject positions. Here, Ryan drew on narratives of forgotten or dying places in order to position himself as having moved on from them. In a similar way to Rebecca, earlier, his account of the ‘smaller communities’ in ‘pretty’ areas that he had grown to love differentiated between areas along class lines, so that he narrated himself as having greater affinity with more desirable, middle-class areas. Having had a possibility of moving away to this more desirable area meant that he could narrate a spatial story of being in the process of moving on and up. As these accounts show, Tobston can be characterized as a single area, but also as a collection of distinct and contrasting localities. My own disorientation was compounded by the variety and multiplicity of students’ accounts of relationships to place, and by the place becoming more, rather than less, complex to understand the more time I spent there. Despite the impossibility of familiarity with the area, I knew of Tobston and had come to research it initially because it was characterized as a ‘cold spot’ in the geography of English higher education; it was a large town without a university. As difficult as it was to know the area, it was still more difficult to understand it without this characterization, reinforced by the descriptions given by college staff. At two points between the train station and the room I had rented to stay in, the walls of the shopping centre and the boards of a building site were covered with art projects designed to focus attention on futures. In the first project, full-length portrait photographs were accompanied by a one-sentence response to the question, ‘What do you wish for?’ In the second, photographs of school-aged children sitting next to an adult were combined with the career choice of the adult and the imagined career of the child. In the one-mile distance between these two projects, the largest job centre1 I have ever seen stretched almost the entire length of a single street. In the UK, job centres are intended to provide support for people out of work.

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These descriptions coalesce in my memories and in my fieldnotes as evidence of a collective focus on the possible future that was more important in an area associated with unemployment and loss of industry. As the following section shows, student participants in the project also expressed a conflict between education, the future and the area of Tobston.

‘Uneducated People’ Where education came into students’ spatial stories, the associations were often similar to those of the staff members in Chapter 3 in their identification of ‘problems’ in the area. The blurring across factors of place, people and education to create a cohesive characterization is described by Stich (2014) as ‘reputational affect’ – a pervasive sense of places, people and education that becomes engrained and embodied. For some students, it was important to highlight that this relationship between place and education could change, and in fact was in the process of changing. Jane lived in Tobston with her husband and children. She had lived in Tobston all her life, sometimes in towns on the outskirts, but now ‘slap bang in the centre, you know, in the hustle and bustle’. Jane began her higher education study at Tobston College with a Higher National Diploma at the age of eighteen and had returned to ‘top-up’ to a BA degree over twenty years later after learning through a friend that it was possible to do so. She depicted changing attitudes to higher education in the town: It has always been quite closed-minded with regards to it being quite a little close-knit community and it not being city status, so there have been negatives in that respect and it has been quite closed-minded too, for an art student I’d say. I remember when I used to, I would get, years ago, sort of flack for being a student, an art student, from older, closed-minded, uneducated people, you know, although there is that sense of humour – people do like to have a sense of humour – but they’d say, ‘Oh, are you at university? Oh, are you brainy?’ You know, there used to be that sort of joke going on.

Despite their ‘humour’, the questions Jane described represent an unanswerable interrogation of her educational subjectivity that she saw as specific to the history of the town. Jane’s description brought euphemistic representations of class, such as ‘uneducated’ and ‘closed-minded’, together with the history of the town as a higher education cold spot, a place unused to student subjectivities. The coherence of her educational subjectivity as ‘art student’ relied upon a distinction between her and the ‘older, uneducated people’ from whom her

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­articipation  in  education made her different. The incomprehension she p reported having experienced emphasized the divisions between her and the typical inhabitant of the town. Despite her spatial position ‘in the hustle and bustle’ of the town centre, she showed that her education had marked her as an outsider to it. The spatial story was also temporally inflected, showing the disjuncture between place and higher education to be temporally fixed in the past. In this way, a narration of her difference from other people in Tobston also saw her as representative of the possibility of positive change in the town. Like Benson and Jackson’s (2013) analysis of narratives of improvement in Peckham, Jane was invested in imagining a progressive relationship from acknowledgement of past difficulty to a more positive imagined future, twenty years on. The narrative’s performative depiction of linear progression away from ‘closed-minded[ness]’ implied a possible future, in which ‘that sort of joke’ would be consigned to the past. Although Jane was careful to fix more negative representations of Tobston in the past, other students described ongoing struggles with occupying educational subjectivities in the town. Ben lived at home with his parents around twelve miles from the higher education site, in the nearest large town to Tobston, where he had lived for the whole of his life. He frequently described himself as having taken a risk in coming as far as Tobston for higher education, and, because of the separate higher education site of Tobston College, had almost never been into Tobston town centre. His accounts of place were therefore situated in his home town and described the complexities of occupying a student subjectivity in an area without a history of higher education: Ever since starting my degree, everybody says, ‘Oh, you’re too intelligent for me.’ It’s like I have a slightly, if you’ve noticed, if you speak to anybody from [home town], my accent’s slightly more, less [home town]-ified than most people. And my vocabulary, in places, does get a bit archaic. I get a bit cocky with my language sometimes.

Scholarship focusing on placed attitudes to higher education, such as Sage, Smith and Hubbard’s (2012a), are often based in university cities, such as Brighton, and address the effects of full-time students living away from the family home. They describe ‘studentification’, or homogenous groups of students whose occupation of particular geographical areas of the city creates divisions in living conditions and social practices between student areas and residential areas, with each area retaining and reinforcing its difference from the other. Where students are understood as privileged, mobile and middle class (Sage, Smith and Hubbard, 2012a; Smith and Hubbard, 2014)

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often in contrast to pre-existing residents of the city, this literature argues that the homogenized, enclosed nature of student living practices means that students rarely encounter these residents, or ‘people not like us’ (Sage, Smith and Hubbard, 2012a). In contrast, students like Jane and Ben, who were ‘local’ or ‘commuter’ students, narrated themselves as lone students amongst non-students, in places unused to higher education. They were therefore surrounded not by the universal place-making practices of studentification, but by the place and the ‘everybody’ they had always known. Whereas the insular practices of ‘studentification’ mean that students are often unaware of the differences between themselves and long-term residents of the town, Jane and Ben were only too aware of their divisions from ‘everybody’ around them. Jane’s educational subjectivity was made more recognizable through a narrative of the town’s collective progression towards understandings of higher education. On the other hand, Ben’s spatial story showed him becoming more recognizable as an educational subject and simultaneously less recognizable as belonging to his home town. The geographical distance between the Tobston higher education site and his home town was symbolic of the larger distances created by studying a degree from a town without university provision. Again, in this spatial story, the split subjectivity Ben described contained oblique references to social-class positions. His narrative was one in which attachment to place and effects of learning competed on his tongue, so that vocabulary and accent came to stand for much more. His awareness of the conflict between place and education was first voiced, like Jane’s, in the words others had said to him. Towards the end of his account, however, the descriptors became his own – ‘I get a bit cocky with my language sometimes’. The conflict became an internalized one, and the possibility of a coherent, placed educational subjectivity seemed further away. While the college’s higher education director argued that an important part of the work of the college was reminding students ‘where they come from’, creating a cohesive narrative between past and imagined future through education, Ben experienced this progression in a more complex way; his account suggested a sense of pride in the development of his more academic language and his difference from others in his locality. For another student, Anna, the signifier ‘uneducated’ was closely linked to her strong negative feelings about Tobston as a place. Anna grew up in Tobston, and returned to live there with her mum in the year before beginning her degree, following a relationship breakdown and financial hardship. She had lived and worked in nearby larger cities since leaving home, and her perceptions of Tobston throughout her interview transcripts were strongly inflected with

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comparisons to these other places. When asked what she thought of Tobston, Anna responded: I think Tobston is a bit of a shit hole. There’s not many prospects for anyone, plus the people are uneducated. They’re rude, like there’s a lot of hate crime and stuff. Drugs, drugs are rife. Someone got stabbed in, again on the street this weekend. It’s just things are getting worse. Someone murdered her husband. I’ve just heard so many horror stories. I just don’t think there’s much here for anyone.

Anna’s subject position in this spatial story relied upon a disengagement from Tobston and all that she associated with it, even while she lived and completed her undergraduate education in the town. She engaged with a series of narratives of place, describing ‘horror stories’ of crime and violence as connected both with the ‘uneducated’ people in Tobston and with the absence of a possible self ‘for anyone’ in Tobston. While Jane positioned the problem of ‘uneducated people’ firmly in the past, it was very much in the present and future for Anna, who saw it as ‘getting worse’. Her depiction of the lack of ‘prospects’ for people in Tobston in many ways reinforced the perceptions of the college staff, who described Tobston as needing a university, and as struggling to emerge from a history of sadness and loss. However, at the same time, Anna’s words highlighted the paradox within which higher education works in such a place. While the implied narrative of educational subjectivity is one of progression, of the creation of and movement towards future possibility, how are educational subjectivities formed in places where futures are also unimaginable? In cases such as Anna’s, does a coherent educational subjectivity require an imagined move away from the place, in order that the future towards which educational subjectivity is oriented become more imaginable? If so, this is further complicated by non-university higher education’s narrative of provision precisely for those who are unable or unlikely to move. These accounts of Tobston, including my own, highlight the multiplicity of placed narratives across the data. There were differences in these narratives, between the place that was understood as home, or as Tobston, and there were contrasts between expressions of fondness for and rejection of the town as a whole, as well as specific areas within or around it. At times, too, a depiction of the ‘people’ of the town was intermingled with signifiers of social class that were indivisible from the town’s historical absence of higher education. As the latter three spatial stories in particular show, an educational subject position that embraces higher education works against the historical educational narratives of the town and the familiar subject position that rejects education.

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Sebford ‘A Very Split Town’ Unlike Tobston College, Sebford College’s higher education provision was based at their main further education campus. The campus, made up of multiple contemporary institutional buildings, was perhaps two minutes’ walk from the main shopping streets, and a further five minutes from the train station. The contrast between the urban centre and rural outskirts that I noted in Tobston was, if anything, more visible in Sebford. The surrounding hills were visible from almost any point in the town centre, and this visible contrast shaped my perception of the town as a whole as a place of multiple contradictions. A single road divided the recently landscaped central cathedral square and its surroundings of new retail buildings from a shopping mall of discount stores. The shopping mall opened onto further streets of shops, some located in Victorian public buildings that acted as reminders of past industrial prosperity. Underneath a ramped entrance to the mall’s first floor, a mural depicted a timeline that began with the founding of Sebford and continued to the present, marked by key moments in the town’s history. The sheltered nature of this space meant that it was often a temporary camp for the homeless, creating a visual juxtaposition with the public narrative of historical pride. Around the shopping centre, between it and the college buildings, there were large fenced building sites that progressed little over the months between my fieldwork visits. Visually, the town was layered with successive narratives, each with its own temporal markers, of industrial success, industrial loss and regeneration. As in Bright’s (2011, p. 67) description of the contrast between ‘rural idyll’ and the ‘scars’ of the coalfields in Derbyshire,2 such visual conflict is both typical of a national post-industrial landscape (see also Nayak, 2006) and specific to each place and its particular industrial history. The college’s central position in the town gave the impression that institution and town blurred easily together. This impression was reinforced by the numbers of passers-by in the shopping streets who were wearing Sebford College’s institutional lanyards with college identification cards attached. Where my sense of place was destabilized by Tobston’s separate higher education site, here I felt secure in understanding Sebford town and Sebford College together. I was surprised, therefore, when students in Sebford described relationships to place Derbyshire is a county in England that is known both for its pretty rural towns and for its industrial losses during the collapse of the coal-mining industry

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in a similarly complex way to those in Tobston. Their relationship to Sebford was often set against their relationship to the smaller place that they considered to be home. As in Tobston, then, I was faced with the complexity of knowing or familiarizing myself with the place as it was understood by the students I was interviewing. In Sebford, though, this impossibility worked in direct contradiction to the cohesiveness of place and institution as I first understood it. The sense of conflict and contradiction that I experienced as part of visiting Sebford was echoed in students’ accounts of place. These accounts often focused on the ‘split’ nature of the town. Anne described herself as having ‘lived round here’ since the age of four – her dad’s bankruptcy having necessitated a move from ‘a lovely house to a council estate’ in her teenage years. As an adult, she lived with her husband and child on the outskirts of Sebford, working for a national company until taking the voluntary redundancy that allowed her to begin her undergraduate study. She depicted Sebford as a town ‘split’ along both economic and racial grounds: A multicultural town, that’s how I’d describe it. Quite a lot of poverty in Sebford. There’s two extremes, there’s a lot of poverty and there’s a lot of wealth, especially just on the outskirts of Sebford, and I think there’s more – well, I suppose, no, I think it’s the same now in London. You can see it, that it’s multicultural, and I think this is becoming more and more so as we can see other nationalities [coming] in, the Polish in, the Romanians. I see it as a very split town, in terms of the culture.

In this spatial story, Anne narrated the boundaries of the town in two interrelated ways. First, the urban centre of the town was economically divided from the ‘outskirts’ along lines of wealth and poverty. Secondly, there were boundaries that allowed a view of populations coming ‘in’ to the town. These boundaries were temporally inflected, with a sense that Anne was part of the original occupancy of the town that had seen one group after another move into the town over time. Anne’s belonging to the town was therefore paradoxical; it was her longstanding relationship to the place that allowed her to narrate the place as changing and as difficult to belong to in a collective or cohesive way. This spatial story can be seen in terms of McKittrick’s (2006) account of the silencing and displacement of narrative relationships to place for minority ethnic groups with histories of migration; inevitably, the control of the collective narrative remains with the majority group. Both the ‘splits’ Anne described suggested that any single account of Sebford as a place was also an account of the inequality of experience on either side of an economic or a racial division.

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The spatial story of racial division in Anne’s account was echoed by other students. Stephanie had always lived with her parents and siblings in Sebford, describing her family as having ‘always been on the outskirts’ of the town. In her interview, Stephanie was careful to distinguish between her positive views of Sebford College and her more mixed feelings about the town, which she described herself as being ‘a bit sick of ’. Stephanie described hostility in the town as being caused by racial divisions and a lack of integration between communities of different races. I don’t know, it’s mixed opinions about Sebford just because I – I don’t know. You just feel, it’s weird. I’m not trying to be racist, and it’s a religion, so you don’t see lots of White folks hanging out with that lot. Like they’re very split and there’s just no integration or anything, we’re just split and it’s very hostile. You feel a bit hostile.

Like Anne, Stephanie used the term ‘split’, and similarly struggled to negotiate the discourses of race, religion and difference, which for her defined Sebford as a place. While drawing on familiar discourses of the failure of integration in multicultural Britain (Parekh, 2005), Stephanie also defined the experience of place as one of opposition and hostility. Oppositions between ‘White folks’ and ‘that lot’, as well as ‘they’ and ‘we’ suggested that competing claims to belonging had become a key part of the way that belonging to the place was narrated and negotiated; to belong to the town was to feel frustration that belonging had been made more complicated by the presence of other groups. As was clear in Anne’s narrative, the subject positions made possible in Sebford were described as differentiated along racial lines, with (in Stephanie’s view) two racial groups occupying place separately and differently. While Stephanie’s account of Sebford as a place focused immediately and strongly on the problems she saw with race in the area, another student drew out the economic divisions in more detail. Andrew had lived in a small village ten miles from Sebford all his life – first with his parents and siblings, and at the time of the interview with his girlfriend. He described the village as ‘one of the most expensive places to live in the area’ and contrasted it to Sebford: It’s weird, you come to Sebford and it is a very working-class town and you go immediately out of it and some of the wealthiest people in the country live here. So this sort of area is really strange. It’s like you see the flip side of society dead close, because you got a very working-class population and you’ve got a lot of very, very, very wealthy people who live round here.

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Andrew described a segregation between the permanent and static groups of ‘very wealthy’ and ‘working-class’ that is similar to Stephanie’s description of racial division. This spatial story positioned him as observing the ‘strangeness’ of the division, able to ‘see the flip side’ without being drawn into the distinction himself. Over the course of Andrew’s two interviews, Andrew referred to his past experiences of multiple re-locations within his home village, and the financial hardship that had led to these re-locations. These accounts suggest that his own experience of place did not fit easily within the spatial binary he described, in that he lived on the outskirts of Sebford, where the ‘very wealthy’ live, but differentiated himself from that economic group. Nevertheless, his depiction echoed Anne’s and Stephanie’s narratives of the town as ‘split’, again showing that occupying a coherent subject position in relation to the town required a narration of the town itself as divided, an emphasis upon its inequalities. The following narratives further draw out some of this complexity, focusing particularly on contrasting temporal accounts of Sebford. These depictions see the available futures in the town as irreversibly linked to its history and serve to question the role of college higher education in the town as required by, and made impossible by, this history.

‘Just One of Those Towns’ Several students referred to Sebford’s history of deprivation, with some accounts extending beyond Sebford and into surrounding towns. Susan described herself as living ‘four towns away’, with her husband and children, where both she and her husband grew up. Although Susan found it easy to describe the ‘lovely countryside’ in which the town was situated, and which she saw as ‘quite different from Sebford’, she struggled more with a depiction of the people she associated with her home town: There are certain types of people there, you know. There are people that have not really had the best opportunities, you know. But there are people that have, like anywhere really, you know. So you do see a lot of that sometimes if you go up to the town, but there are opportunities everywhere for those people, you know. I think it is getting better and better for them. It is a nice little town, really.

For Susan, the euphemistic description of ‘certain types of people’ was connected to a past lack of opportunity in her home town, though she was quick to point out that this lack of opportunity is not specific to the town – ‘like anywhere really’. Although Susan expressed a clear sense of belonging to the town,

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stating ‘I don’t think I’d live anywhere else’, this sense of belonging relied upon a separation between her and ‘them’ – the people for whom there has been a lack of opportunity. This separation represents a departure from the findings of studies such as Leyshon and Bull’s (2011), in which young people use shared negative discourses of their home town in order to position themselves as having a future away from the town. For Susan, drawing on common discourses of the town’s negative reputation was not incompatible with an imagined future of further commitment to the town. Just as in the descriptions of people in and around Tobston, there were echoes in Susan’s separation from ‘them’ of the kind of division that is found to exist between homogenous groups of students and local residents in literature on ‘studentification’ (Smith and Hubbard, 2014). As discussed earlier, however, such a separation is more complex in this case, when as a local resident herself, Susan had arguably been subject to the same lack of opportunity as those around her. Important to the coherence of Susan’s spatial story of commitment to her home town despite a history of negativity was the narrative of ongoing change. In this narrative, ‘it is getting better and better for them’. Through a discourse of ‘opportunity’, Susan suggested that what was changing, in the present, was the availability of the imagined future. The discourse of improvements to Sebford and the surrounding area was also taken up by another student, Richard. Richard had always lived in a nearby town, first with his parents and at the time of the study with his girlfriend, around five miles from Sebford. His job with a double-glazing firm in the same town had remained stable since he left school, and he had continued to work there throughout his undergraduate study. In his narrative of Sebford, there were important changes taking place: I think there’s a mindset of people round here that’s not a good thing. But I think it’s somewhere that’s – they’re trying to make a lot of changes now in Sebford, just like a lot of big, like new buildings being built and stuff like that. I just think they’re trying to change the image of what it used to be about. Like, it used to be [dominant local industry], and obviously that’s gone. So there’s been a lot of jobs lost there, but I think they’re just trying to make it, make it a lot better.

The town in this spatial story emerges as a complex combination of job loss, collective mindset, image and architecture. It is marked particularly by the decline and closure of the cotton mills, which at the beginning of the twentieth century had accounted for around 50 per cent of the town’s employment. This process of industrial loss began in the first decade of the twentieth century and continued until the 1970s. In Richard’s account, the present was informed both

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by past industrial loss and by a future driven towards change. This distinction suggested that the racial and economic ‘splits’ in the preceding accounts of the town are accompanied by a temporal split, between a difficult past and a ‘better’, perhaps more cohesive, imagined future. As Taylor’s (2012) study of responses to regeneration in post-mining areas of north-east England highlights, the paradox of regeneration efforts is that they are necessitated by a past they seek to erase. As discussed in the previous chapter, this paradox is also evident in narratives of non-university higher education that position provision as a response to local ‘need’, and therefore rely upon that need for self-definition. In both instances of this paradox, the present became a contradictory moment of transition in which the past was erased in order to enable a more positive imagined future. This present moment was exemplified by Richard’s position in the narrative, as aware of but not implicated in a past that is ‘gone’, and observing the process of ‘mak[ing] it a lot better’ without a clear articulation of what ‘better’ might be. If educational subjectivity in itself requires that the present be seen as a perpetual moment of transition, this requirement was exaggerated in the spatial stories of Sebford, in which the past was perpetually divided from the ongoing making of the future. Both of these descriptions of Sebford were, at least in part, narratives of hope that endorsed the possibility of change. For some students, however, it was not possible to divide Sebford’s past from its present or imagined future. Robert lived with his mum in a town ten miles from Sebford. He had moved to an adjacent town at the age of ‘five or six’ and had moved house a few times since, always staying, as he puts it, ‘in the same sort of fifteen minute area’. Robert’s descriptions of place were the liveliest of all the participants in this study, because he knowingly and exaggeratedly engaged with familiar characterizations of place. For example, at one point he described Sebford as ‘my Vietnam’, in a reference to Hollywood film depictions of war. In making this reference, he depicted himself as both haunted and yet defined by the experience of living in, and attempting to escape from, Sebford as a source of trauma. He was similarly humorous in the following description: Sebford’s always going to struggle, always going to struggle, because it’s just one of those towns that – there’s always that shit town that you kind of just go to through necessity, not actually nostalgia. You don’t ever really want to go there but it’s like, ‘Oh, I need to go and pick that up’, or, ‘I need to go and do that.’ There’s always one of those towns. Everybody has one that you don’t ever really want to go to, but you do, just every so often. And they are trying to rectify that. They are trying to sort of get away from that image, because they’ve opened

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up a Nando’s, a Turtle Bay.3 They’ve opened up that stupid fucking hotel, that nobody’s ever going to use, because nobody’s ever said, ‘Let’s have a romantic weekend away in Sebford.’ And, you know, the shops are opening and closing faster than they can make money out of them.

In contrast to Richard, Robert’s narrative portrayed Sebford as having an end­ uring negative quality that was unchangeable despite all efforts at regeneration. Like Richard, he was aware of the building work currently underway in the town as an attempt to change the ‘image’. The international restaurant chains that were symbolic of attempts to shift Sebford’s reputation could also be seen to reduce the town’s distinctiveness and to bring in a feeling of the place-less – these restaurants could be anywhere and can also therefore be nowhere in particular. That Robert drew on these examples to demonstrate attempted change in Sebford suggests that, to him, positive change involved the town becoming easier to align with other places. Although he recognized these efforts, Robert’s characterization of the town used a shared sense of ‘those towns’ that resist attempts at redefinition. His argument that the newly built hotel would remain unused suggests that regenerative initiatives are powerless in the face of the universal, timeless and inevitable response to the place as a whole. The success of the hotel, in his view, relied upon fundamental changes to the way the town is viewed. He could not imagine a future in which visits to the town would be made through choice, rather than necessity, and in which relationships to the place would allow for the ‘romantic’ rather than the functional. The space of the hotel therefore symbolized, in his account, the intractable reputational affect (Stich, 2014) of the place. The negative characterization of Sebford in others’ narratives was integral to its future as something better or different, and to the role of higher education provision in the town. For Robert, this future was made impossible precisely by the reasons that it was seen by others as necessary. The description of a town without opportunity with no possibility of future change created an implied contradiction with the future-oriented narrative of higher education. While Robert occupied an educational subjectivity structured through understandings of progression, he also positioned himself firmly within discourses that denied the possibility of a positive future in Sebford. In Cahill’s (2007) study of longterm residents’ responses to regeneration in their local area, her participants were torn between subject positions of investment in and departure from the Nando’s and Turtle Bay are restaurant chains in the UK, both of which had recently opened branches in Sebford at the time of this project.

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area. While Robert’s residence in the area throughout his life, and including his undergraduate study, suggested a commitment to it, this commitment was contradicted by his vocal disengagement from the area. The incompatibility of these subject positions is once again representative of the complexity of higher education, where provision is required by and reliant upon a history of need and lack. Understanding the kinds of futures that are imagined through higher education in Sebford requires a recognition of the inequalities that shape the area. It is these inequalities, described earlier as ‘splits’, that make it impossible to characterize the place in a single or simple way, and that suggest discrepancies between what is possible to imagine, particularly along lines of social class and race. As these later narratives have shown, however, the area is also split in a temporal way. These narratives suggest a particular temporal moment in which a past ‘image’ of the place was undergoing a process of re-writing with future hopes. As figures in that process of reinscription, students evidenced varying degrees of hope for the future. For some, it was possible to imagine changes to the kinds of opportunities that were available. For others, the enduring character of place over-wrote the very possibilities that college-based higher education sets out to create.

Conclusion This chapter has situated the case colleges in this study within wider spatial stories of place, arguing that these narratives are intertwined with ways in which educational subjectivities are imagined and experienced. In particular, the chapter has shown that the higher education provision in each place cannot be divided from the multiple and enduring perceptions of higher education as absent from the towns’ histories. While the non-university higher education provision in Tobston and Sebford can be seen as a response to this absence, these accounts demonstrate that the provision was also defined through previous absence of educational opportunity, and educational subjectivities were complicated by these narratives. Across the accounts in this chapter, students have shown different levels of investment in the possibilities of positive change in their home towns or local areas. For students such as Jenny in Tobston, and Richard and Susan in Sebford, a narrative of improvement allowed for the imagining of increased opportunities in the future, set against a past lack of opportunity. For those who saw such change as impossible, such as Anna

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in Tobston, or Robert in Sebford, the enduring negative character of the place directly limited the availability of imagined futures and opportunities. Such limitation creates a complex position for higher education provision, which sets out possible progression towards previously unimaginable futures, but which does so from within a geography of impossibility, where educational futures are unimaginable. Seen in this way, the futures offered through college-based higher education are impossible possibilities – the possibilities they offer made all the more important by surrounding narratives of impossibility. While there are clear connections between the placed narratives of both towns, this chapter has also explored the specificity of place and the complexities involved in drawing boundaries around or across geographical areas in order to define the ‘local’. Students’ accounts of the area around Tobston, for example, demonstrated classed designations between neighbouring and nearby villages, showing the clear division between the urban town centre and the higher education site that carried the name of the town, but was set in rural surroundings some miles away from it. In Sebford, class differences were evoked in the distinction between the poverty of the town centre and the wealth of its rural surrounds, and these were far from the only divisions between and amongst the plural localities that might easily be designated as a single locale. To describe a higher education institution, type of provision or student as ‘local’ should be to begin to understand the multiple ways in which place can be understood to structure higher education in that locality, of which these narratives of Tobston and Sebford are examples.

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Staying Local The Multiple Mobilities of ‘Local’ Educational Subjects

Introduction The language of education is heavily weighted with geographical concepts, and with mobility in particular (Gulson and Symes, 2017). The phrase ‘going to’ (as in ‘going to school’ or ‘going to college’) is used to describe the physical movements into and out of educational buildings, but also signifies a kind of progression to a particular form or level of education. The phrase ‘moving up’ is often applied to temporal progression from one level or year to the next, while ‘staying behind’ similarly denotes educational stasis or delay, where progression was expected but not realized. The everyday language of education, then, often signals physical movement or materiality alongside a number of other associations. In terms of higher education specifically, associations between education and mobility are even more multifaceted. ‘Going to’ a higher education institution in any context carries the signification of progression, as well as a movement to a particular kind of institution, but in many international contexts is also synonymous with movement away from the family home at the age of eighteen. Where this geographical relocation is traditionally linked to degree-level study, the movement to university is then also associated with a transition to adult life and independence (Holdsworth, 2009b). A further connection between the language of mobility and higher education is the association in policy and popular discourses between degree study and social mobility, which has been fundamental to the shift to massified higher education systems (Brown et al., 2008). Although social and geographical mobility refer to different kinds of movements, they are also not easily separated in the context of higher education; where a geographical movement to attend university has also enabled a shift in social-class identity, the two forms of mobility are closely intertwined.

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This chapter explores and problematizes these associations between higher education and mobility and does so from the perspective of ‘local’ students who have not followed the English tradition of relocating for undergraduate education. This perspective is useful in two ways. First, the perspective enables a discussion of modes of higher education attendance that often go unseen, particularly in popular imagination, in contexts where undergraduate mobility is the default mode. As a result of this discussion, the geographical assumptions that go along with higher education mobility are thrown into sharp relief. Is leaving the familial home to move into student accommodation necessarily synonymous with independence? Can a single geographical movement from home to student accommodation necessarily be described as mobility or as the only possible form of student mobility? Secondly, the perspective of students who have not relocated for degree study demonstrates how much the dominant, traditional mode of undergraduate mobility extends into these students’ understandings of what should happen upon ‘going to’ higher education. Although ‘local’ students might be seen to have rejected or resisted the undergraduate mobility imperative, does the imperative still have an impact on the ways they narrate their choices and experiences? The accounts of mobility from students in this chapter are part of the same spatial stories that establish the students’ relationships to the places in which they live and study. They are accounts of what is seen to be possible within those places, where the boundaries of the place and its possibilities are, and what might be possible outside of them. The accounts must also therefore be understood according to the specific collective narratives of Tobston and Sebford, which were explored in Chapters 3 and 4. It is within these shared narratives that the students narrated their spatial stories, positioning themselves as subjects in relation to narratives of the local area. As discussed in Chapter 3, Tobston’s and Sebford’s locations as large towns without university provision in post-industrial areas of England mean both that studying at a university requires leaving the area and that students are less likely to leave the area in order to do so. Spatial stories of remaining in the area are therefore also accounts of subject positions that are difficult to align – gaining a degree in an area in which there is little history or expectation of doing so, and remaining in that place to study a degree when undergraduates are traditionally expected to be mobile. Much of the following discussion stems from narratives of a seemingly linear and binary choice, in which the mobility implied in ‘going to’ higher education is limited by the decision to do so as a ‘local’ student. In these spatial stories, however, there are in fact multiple temporalities, future possibilities and geographies.

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Seen together, they confound the definition of student mobility as a single geographical movement, as well as the linearity of the progression associated with that movement.

Higher education in Tobston ‘I Wanted to Stay’ Where relocation for degree study is the default or traditional pattern of undergraduate mobility, it is easy to fall into a deficit discourse in which students who have stayed ‘local’ are viewed as limited or constrained. The assumption behind this discourse is that those students who are able to do so make the choice to relocate; those who do not, by definition, simply do not have the option. However, relationships to place and educational subjectivities are far more complex than this discourse allows, often balancing positive and enduring investment in the locality with accounts of economic and social inequality. The students participating in this study were very aware that they had not followed the expected pattern of student mobility and often explained their choices in ways that confounded single or simple perceptions of disadvantage or limitation. Ben’s spatial story of his decision to study at Tobston College exemplifies the ways in which students themselves show awareness of discourses of expected student mobility and work to resist or reject them. As discussed in the previous chapter, Ben had lived in a large town around seventeen miles from Tobston all his life. He viewed his decision to study at Tobston College, rather than at the college in his home town, as evidence of his seeking ‘a new start’. At the same time, he referred several times throughout the interviews to his fear of getting lost in new places and cited this fear as one of the reasons that he rarely joined the rest of his degree cohort on nights out in Tobston. I wanted to commute [from home town]. Mainly because I’m not ready to be an adult yet, but I wanted to stay. Everything that I do is in [home town]. I work at a theatre, and that’s in [home town]. I also used to volunteer at a library, and that’s in [home town], so if I were to move away I’d have stopped, and all my family’s in [home town]. Nobody’s ever moved out.

This spatial story touched on different discourses of student mobilities in contrasting ways. Ben’s description of his positive engagements in local culture reinforced findings by Christie (2007) and Holton (2015), which question

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the over-simplified characterization of ‘local’ students as disadvantaged by their ‘local’ status. On the contrary, these studies argue, such students often have a wealth of place-based knowledge and resources on which to draw. Ben acknowledged the familiar narrative association between leaving home for undergraduate study and gaining ‘adult’ independence (Holdsworth, 2009b), but continued to narrate himself as invested in place, above all – ‘I wanted to stay’. At the same time however, Ben’s account underscored the limitations of a lack of valued mobility capital (Corbett, 2007b) in his statement ‘nobody’s ever moved out’. In this spatial story, an imagined future away from Ben’s home town was made impossible through an absence of other examples or experiences of mobility. The idea of sustaining positive ties to the locality was reinforced by the unimaginable nature of unfamiliar mobility. These two future narratives showed the complexity of Ben’s relationship to mobility in which Tobston College was both a promising new start and an ongoing source of fear. On the one hand, Ben appeared to accord with depictions of student immobility that associate mobility with classed privilege; the absence of examples or experience of mobility meant that even a nearby town was represented as unfamiliar and a source of anxiety. On the other hand, Ben’s narratives of his ‘new start’, and the local capital signalled by his positive ties to place, were difficult to reduce to a single understanding of deficit, or to explain using a binary opposition between mobility and immobility. Importantly, although Ben would be classified as a ‘local’ or commuter student, he saw himself as having been mobile by choosing to attend a college outside of his home town. These divergent definitions of student mobility highlight the difficulty of using it as a binary distinction. According to such definitions, a student who has relocated to university accommodation in order to study is seen as mobile, while a student who has not done so is immobile. The experience of Gemma, one of the student participants in the project, highlights the limitations of these definitions, as well as the ways in which they mask exclusionary spatial practices. Gemma lived with her husband and children in the house she grew up in, in a town she described as ‘run down’, fifteen minutes’ drive from the higher education site and a further five miles from Tobston centre. Gemma initially accepted an offer from one of the universities in the nearest city, in part because ‘my brother went there’, but transferred to Tobston College after four weeks: I felt a lot older [at the university] than everybody else, and I felt really on my own, you know, because a lot of young ones, they move to university, and obviously I couldn’t move there. I’d got two kids at home, my husband, and it just didn’t work. And everyone was going out drinking in between lectures,

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because there was a couple of hours, and it wasn’t worth me going home because I was going on the train, whereas everyone else was going back to their rooms or doing whatever they needed to do. So I was just singled out from the word go.

Gemma’s spatial story captured the contradictions of traditional undergraduate student mobility, described by the higher education policy adviser in Chapter 3 as the ‘ritual culture’ of English higher education. As Holton and Finn (2018) point out, the everyday mobilities required of ‘commuting’ students are often more intricate and varied than those of traditionally mobile students. In Gemma’s depiction, the ‘young’ students who had ‘move[d] to university’ had less far to travel in order to go home between lectures than she did. Their ease of movement from the student accommodation spaces to teaching spaces (Smith and Hubbard, 2014) was contrasted with the more extended mobility required of Gemma if she were to commute to lectures from her home. Paradoxically, the distance Gemma had to travel in order to attend a day of lectures also fixed her in that place for the day, whereas her peers’ reduced daily mobility requirements allowed them flexibility of movement. For Gemma, the ‘singled out’ position of working against these common flows of student mobility was impossible to sustain. Like Ben, Gemma described herself as unable to ‘move to’ university. However, it was not the fact that she ‘couldn’t move there’ that meant that university ‘didn’t work’. Instead, what made for an impossible future subjectivity at university was her confrontation with the traditional student relationship to mobility from which she was excluded. Importantly, although higher education directors and tutors in the previous chapters depicted their students as having rejected traditional models of student experience, Gemma’s narrative suggests that she was in fact rejected by traditional student mobility. She sought out non-traditional higher education provision because there was no available or imaginable subjectivity for her in the traditional provision.

‘Be[ing] the Underdog’ Ben’s and Gemma’s spatial stories show the nuances of student mobilities, and the ways in which students established subject positions of investment in and loyalty to place. Students also constructed possible future selves through their spatial stories, identifying themselves with or differentiating themselves from the possibilities available in their locality. As discussed in relation to the ‘uneducated people’ in Anna’s and Jenny’s accounts of Tobston in Chapter 4, the construction of an educational subjectivity in Tobston could be seen as

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working in opposition to its history and associations. At the same time, the ties to place that kept students in place for their degree study persisted in their imagined futures. As a result, many students’ accounts of the future required them to align their educational subjectivity with their ties to a place in which such a subjectivity was unusual or dissonant. In the following excerpt, Jack performed just such a negotiation. Jack moved to a town around twenty miles from the higher education site as a child, and returned to live there with his parents after a brief time living with a partner in a neighbouring town. He described himself as a ‘home-oriented person’, and although he had ambitions to live and work in New Zealand, he still planned to ‘move back and set up somewhere here’ afterwards. He saw his degree subject of illustration and animation as particularly important to bring to the area precisely because it represented a contrast with the town’s reputation: I think staying round here would be a lot easier, and it’d be cool as well. Say if we ever made like a really successful animation for somebody, we could go and hobnob with people in Hollywood or wherever they hang out, and it’s like, ‘Oh, so where are you from?’ ‘Tobston’. ‘Where?’ That’d be good. It’s always good to be the underdog.

Jack imagined a future in which Tobston’s position as the ‘underdog’ in reputation would make success both more important and more remarkable. His deliberately humorous contrast between Hollywood and Tobston drew upon an implied shared understanding of their different reputations. Anna’s and Jenny’s narratives of ‘uneducated people’ in Tobston in Chapter 4 made it difficult to conceive of available coherent educational subjectivities. However, Jack created coherence in this spatial story by both reinforcing a similar narrative and imagining a possible future that relies upon and refutes this narrative. This contrasts with the narratives in Bright’s (2011) study of young people in former coal-mining towns, whose self-positioning as loyal to place relies upon a collective identification with the area’s narrative of loss; their staying is an act of defiance and a doubling-down in the face of this loss. Jack’s imagined future in place was reliant instead upon his participation in the re-writing of Tobston’s placed narratives, in which he was globally mobile and acted as a representative of the place he came from. While being self-consciously tongue-in-cheek, Jack’s statement, ‘it’s always good to be the underdog’ echoed the logic of non-university higher education as responsive to local need, as set out in the previous chapter. In this logic, provision in places seen as having particular need for higher education is cyclically defined by and seeking to redress that need.

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In contrast to Jack, Anna’s imagined future abroad did not include her returning to the area. Anna had lived in cities near to Tobston, and in my first interview with her she stated with certainty, ‘I won’t be here this time next year’. She imagined that she would return to one of the cities she had lived in previously, or go to London, ‘if I’m not in another country’. As discussed in Chapter 4, Anna had strong feelings of disengagement with Tobston and removed herself from the place in her descriptions of it. By the time of my second interview with her five months later, however, Anna had reconsidered the urgency of leaving Tobston. Instead, she was considering remaining at the college in order to take a place on their master’s course, explaining, ‘I did want to go travelling, but I don’t feel like I’ve finished studying yet.’ Despite the alienation from Tobston expressed in her first interview, she had developed further ties to the area: Well, my boyfriend’s just put a deposit down on a rented place just round the corner from my mum’s, so he’s moving within the next month. I’ve told him that I’ll want to move in once all my university work is done and everything. He’s got that basically because he knows that’s what we wanted to do. He wants to stay in his job for another year, and if we do end up going travelling, it’ll probably be after a year once we’ve got some money together and got sorted.

In her first interview, Anna’s description of Tobston had suggested an incompatibility between education and place. This incompatibility was made coherent in her subject position as someone who was in Tobston only temporarily, planning an imminent move away. From the second interview, it would be easy to suggest that her ambitions for mobility away from Tobston had simply been put off as the time to realize them had grown closer, and as Anna became more, rather than less, invested in place through her relationship with her boyfriend. Even if this explanation holds true, it was complicated by Anna’s plans to continue her education to master’s level. In this imagined future, she was both more educated and less mobile, so that, by her own description of Tobston, she was becoming more alienated from place the longer she spent there. Cahill’s (2007) study of long-term residents of the lower east side of Manhattan draws out the residents’ contradictory relationships to the place, arguing that they struggle to align their loyalty to the area with their understanding that success is represented by leaving the area. Anna’s ties to Tobston were through her relationships rather than her loyalty, but she occupied a similarly unresolvable subject position in her spatial story. She associated the possibility of ‘prospects’ with moving away, and at the same time continued to invest in the education that increased her alienation from place, and also in her commitments to the place itself.

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Place and movement within and from place intersect in multiple ways across these spatial stories, which highlight the value-laden everyday language of mobility and education as well as its unseen exclusionary practices. Students in Tobston also negotiated complex subject positions between investment in and alienation from place. Embedded in both of these positions is the understanding of Tobston as a place in which both studying at degree level and remaining in place is unusual. An imagined future of remaining in place having studied higher education, as in Jack’s and Anna’s interviews, required a narrative re-imagining either of place or of a subjective relationship to it.

Higher education in Sebford ‘Because I Get Travel-Sick’ In Sebford, as in Tobston, the proximity of the college to home proved to be the most common reason given for studying at Sebford College. Meera lived in what she describes as an ‘Asian-based community’ on the outskirts of the town centre. It was Meera who gave the response with which this book opens, and which captured so much of the book’s focus on place, mobility and inequality. Meera lived with her extended family of parents, siblings and siblings’ partners and children, and stated that, having lived in Sebford all her life, ‘I am a town [rather than city] girl’: Holly: Why did you decide to do your degree here? Meera: I get travel-sick.

I still remember the surprise I felt upon receiving this response, both because the response appeared at first to be unrelated to the question and because it did not seem to cite any of the more familiar discourses of higher education choice (Reay, David and Ball, 2005). When I asked her to say more, Meera explained that the nearest university to Sebford was more than thirty miles away, and that this length of commute would be impossible due to her travel sickness. In both the brevity and nature of her response, Meera refused traditional narratives of undergraduate mobility. Implied in her brief answer was that she would necessarily be commuting from the familial home, rather than moving closer to a university campus. Any higher education provision was therefore seen in terms of the length of the journey from home. As the interview continued, Meera maintained a focus on the practicality of transport to and from the college:

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I think, over here, I am doing better because I’m not worried about commuting. Two people in our class are always taking the train. They’re either late or they just don’t come because the trains have got delayed and they won’t be on time.

Meera’s responses represented a combination of practical factors that enable mobility such as transport and the more nebulous emotional responses to place and movement that also structure mobility decisions (Bright, 2011; Corbett, 2007b). Her positive descriptions of Sebford focused on the fact that ‘everything is pretty much in walking distance’. These two factors, of transport and mobility capital, were brought together in her spatial story, in which anxieties about travel make mobility impossible to imagine. Meera was unusual amongst the students who participated in this study, in that she did not refer to traditional expectations of undergraduate mobility in England, even to position herself against that traditional narrative. Instead, she described the kinds of daily mobility that were possible or impossible from her family home. In contrast, other students often knowingly referred to having rejected an imagined future of geographical relocation and all that accompanies it. Andrew was an example of a student who, like Ben in Tobston, explicitly referred to and resisted the expected discourses of educational subjectivity. He could be seen as either, or both, fixed in place and perpetually mobile (Jackson, 2012), having moved multiple times within the same village. Despite this fixity, he cited contradictory plans to move to Canada or New Zealand, while also referring to himself as ‘established’ in place: I applied to come here because obviously I’ve got my house, I’ve got my girlfriend, I’ve already established myself with a life, so it’s not like, I didn’t want to be going off like down to [city in south of England], say. So yeah, I decided to come here. I didn’t want to move away from home, I wanted to because it’s ideal for me. I didn’t want the university experience. I wanted to go and be able to get a university education without having to deal with all the other stuff that comes with it.

In this spatial story, Andrew created a clear distinction between what he did and didn’t ‘want’, suggesting a decision made between two imagined versions of student subjectivity. In articulating what he didn’t want, the act of ‘going off ’ to university was associated with ‘all the other stuff ’, so that undergraduate mobility signified much more than geographical movement. As in Holdsworth’s (2009b) study, there are associations here between ‘going away’ and gaining adult independence. While Ben’s description of himself as ‘not ready to be an adult yet’ suggested one kind of resistance to this association, Andrew resisted

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in another way. His narration of himself as having ‘already established myself with a life’ deliberately divided the ‘education’ of university from its associated experiences, which he felt were irrelevant or unnecessary to him. While actively refusing the common understandings of higher education, however, Andrew also demonstrated their power in popular imagination. This power was displayed in the confidence with which he was able to refer to a shared understanding of the singular ‘university experience’, as well as in the strong subject position he took in opposition to it. Andrew’s narrative of staying in place for higher education study was therefore also a narrative of not having moved, in which the imagined movement was as important as the realized fixity.

‘Who’s Going to View It?’ For many of the students from Sebford College, the kinds of ties to place represented by Meera and Andrew were strong factors in their imagined future after graduation. For some, however, these ties to place conflicted with their narratives of Sebford as a place. Two students who were planning to teach in secondary (high) schools explained their anxieties about the reputation of schools in Sebford. Kate lived in a village she chose not to name, but that she described as ‘not far from here’. She lived in the house she grew up in, now with her husband and children. Kate had always ‘stayed within ten miles of where I am now’, and could not imagine moving, because she lived in her childhood home mortgage free. As she imagined her future teaching career, she said: I’d like it to be as close to me as possible, but I’d really like a nice school. I’m not saying it has to be like a grammar school or something, but just, like, one that’s not really bad.

In Kate’s words, the possibility of a working in school close to her home is opposed to the possibility of working in a ‘nice school’. Aisha, who lived with her parents and siblings in Sebford, and had lived there ‘all my life’, was considering the possibility of moving away to render her future as a teacher more imaginable: I’d like to have, to work in a more, a better-off school, if that’s what you want to say, where it’s not so much of a challenge. A grammar school or something with more disciplined children. Here, it’s mostly state-funded schools. I think it’s harder to find private, well-disciplined schools in Sebford.

In their descriptions of schools as ‘really bad’ or ‘better-off ’, Kate and Aisha demonstrated the ‘reputational affect’ (Stich, 2014) that cyclically defines

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perceptions of educational institutions through perceptions of their localities. Aisha’s spatial story in particular was weighted with associations between social class and behavioural problems; in her understanding, students who attend state-funded schools are less likely to be disciplined, and the school in turn becomes defined by its students’ lack of discipline. That both Kate and Aisha struggled to imagine a ‘nice’ school in their local area reinforced the descriptions in Chapters 3 and 4, of the Sebford area as ‘not ha[ving] the best opportunities’. It is precisely this history that was cited by the college’s higher education director as important for higher education provision in Sebford to redress. However, as identified by Robert’s description, in Chapter 4, of Sebford as ‘just one of those towns’, it is difficult to shift a collective and enduring narrative of place. This difficulty was represented in the ways that Kate’s and Aisha’s spatial stories of themselves as future educated, professional subjects relied upon dividing themselves from the negative reputation of the area. In contrast to Jack’s (above) determination to change perceptions of Tobston, they reinforced a sense of Sebford as unchanging or unchangeable. As a consequence of this permanence, both students saw their ties to place as shifting in order to enable an imagined future that would escape associations with social class and ‘bad’ schooling. The role of higher education provision is complex here, in that while its enabling of undergraduate futures is particularly premised on the needs of its locality, these very needs made a graduate future in the same locality difficult to imagine for these students. For students on the photography degree course at Sebford, an imagined future as a working artist often divided their loyalties to place. Brian lived in a town around fifteen miles from Sebford, where he had taken on the running of his father’s photographic supplies shop. Other than a year spent on an art foundation course at Glasgow’s School of Art, he had never lived anywhere else, but said he would move ‘if I had to’. Discussing his ambition to open a gallery in the future, he said: It’s quite difficult really, because, who’s going to view it, you know? If you exhibit in [nearby cities], obviously you’ve got the tourism, people just walking past who’ve got a bit of spare cash and just might want to spend a little bit of money on a little keepsake and take it back to wherever they’re from. So I am aware that if I do set a gallery up it would have to be in [nearby city] or, or somewhere viable to get to, if you’re going to [nearby city], or somewhere where there’s already a hub of stuff. There’s no point in going on the Sebford market and just trying to sell a few on a Saturday afternoon.

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Brian’s description of other places where ‘you’ve got the tourism’ recalls Robert’s statement in Chapter 4, that Sebford’s new hotel would never attract trade because ‘no-one’s ever said, “Let’s have a romantic weekend in Sebford”.’ Both spatial stories highlighted place-related impossibilities of attracting large numbers of people to the town. As Brian articulated, this impossibility was cyclical, as artists are drawn to places ‘where there’s already a hub’, further reinforcing both the existing hub and its corresponding lack in Sebford. Throughout Brian’s interviews, his expressions of love for the local landscape and the local people clashed with his growing frustration as a photographer; as a photographer, his feared imagined future was selling photographs at the local market stall, which he saw as pointless. Just as in Kate and Aisha’s spatial stories, non-university provision occupied a contradictory position here, as a response to the kinds of placed reputations and impossibilities Brian described, and as addressing them by necessitating movement from, rather than change within, place. This complexity was further deepened by the relationships to place described by the majority of these students. These relationships meant that non-university higher education in the town was their preferred option for higher education in an area without university provision, and it was important to each of them that this option existed. At the same time, their completion of degree-level study also made it difficult for them to imagine staying in place. Though strongly rooted in place and locality, mobility is also a temporal concept, particularly in educational terms. Leaving home for degree level study is necessarily preceded by preparing for and planning this movement, as well as ‘moving up’ through an educational system that equates mobility with progression. As part of the discourse of deficit surrounding students who do not make this move in contexts where it is expected, these ‘local’ students are also seen as having been being unable to imagine undergraduate mobility (Corbett, 2007b). This lack of imagined mobility in the past is cast as fundamental to present and future educational stasis. A surprising part of the student interviews for this project, therefore, was the frequency and detail with which students referred to the mobility they had in fact imagined. The following section explores this imagined mobility in more detail.

Tobston, Sebford and imagined other lives ‘A Different Experience’ The importance of ‘other’ or ‘might-have-been’ lives emerged as a common narrative across the data. For many students in both case colleges, their

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narratives of undergraduate educational experience were defined relationally, against a narrative of another experience they might have had. This other experience was always imagined as a mobile experience, in which the student would have left home at a traditional age and followed traditional English patterns of undergraduate mobility. The consistency of this imagined experience demonstrates that students who stay in place cannot be characterized either as having limited knowledge of (Corbett, 2007b) or as resistant to (Bright, 2011) collectively expected narratives of educational progression. Instead, these students must be seen as forming educational subjectivities in a dialectical and difficult relationship to the dominant understanding of undergraduate mobility. The relationship between their lived trajectory to higher education and the imagined, more traditional trajectory can be seen in terms of Ricoeur’s (1980; 1992) narrative temporality (see Chapter 3 for a full discussion of this theorization). According to Ricoeur, the events in a narrative are told in such a way as to seem inevitable, so that the conclusion of the narrative cannot be questioned. For many of these students, the impossibility of the imagined but unrealized future of traditional student mobility was used to confirm their current trajectory: because the first had proved impossible, the second was inevitable. The effect of this narrative work was that, across the interviews for this project, the traditional university and its expected patterns of mobility loomed large. It was a defining feature of the project, as well as a definitional narrative against which the students told their spatial stories. Through varying representations of choice and circumstance, the following narratives echo findings from studies on race, social class, social and cultural capital, and higher education decisionmaking (see, for example, Reay, David and Ball, 2005). While the focus of this literature is on processes and discourses of choice-making, I use the following data to focus instead upon the enduring presence of higher education choices that have not been made, but which remain inherent to present and future educational subjectivities. In this section I combine excerpts from interviews with students at both case colleges, because of the similarities in these particular spatial stories. Gemma’s narrative of an alternative student past was informed by her brother’s experience of university: If I was 19, and I had no commitments, I think it’d have been a big institute for me. But I think you get a different experience. I think being a mature student you come out knowing a lot more. Like my brother finished with, I think it was, was

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it a third, or a 2:21? Whatever it is, and he just didn’t do anything. But it does his head in that I’m doing my assignments, and I’m getting higher than him. He’s like, ‘What are you going to finish with?’ And I think well, when you’re 19, you go to university just to go to university. There’s a lot of pressure, and you don’t want to go to work yet, and it’s just easier to slack off. You’re away from your parents and stuff.

For Gemma, the traditional move ‘away from your parents’ was associated with a series of factors that she narrates as integral to attending university at the expected age. Her narrative can be seen as an example of Holdsworth’s findings (2006) that traditional student mobility is more than spatial, coming to signify independence as well as a particular set of social experiences that are understood as related to undergraduate life (see also Chapman and Hockey, 1999; Christie, 2007). These experiences were condensed in Gemma’s account into the signifying phrase ‘go[ing] to university’, which is both spatial and heavily weighted with the symbolism of a shared societal narrative. The generic ‘you’ figure in Gemma’s spatial story lived a parallel but unrecognizable past existence, struggling with the pressures of delaying employment and living away from home at an age when Gemma had in fact been working for several years, and become pregnant for the first time. Although Gemma acknowledged the impossibility of this parallel experience for her, it provided the definitional outline for her current educational subjectivity. She narrated her educational success as produced through a non-traditional undergraduate trajectory and against the limitations of the traditional experience, of ‘just going to’ university. Anna similarly saw the success of her degree education as reliant upon a rejection of another imagined future as an undergraduate in a different place. She saw her previous experiences of living in nearby cities, before returning to Tobston to live with her mum, as having conformed enough to expectations of student life: I feel like I did the whole student socializing aspect of it when I was living there with friends. That’s another reason why I wanted to come here, because I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be dragged in to going out every night partying. I wanted to knuckle down. That’s why I moved back in with my mum, because she keeps me on the straight and narrow. I wanted to avoid that, and I thought, if I go down to Brighton, or anywhere by myself, as a fresher, it’s just myself. If I stay

In the English system, average marks of between 40 and 50 per cent result in an overall grade of ‘third’, and average marks of 50 and 60 per cent gain the grade ‘lower-second’ or ‘2.2’.

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here, I’m close to home, I’ve got my friends and family to support me. I didn’t want to be sucked into like the nightlife culture of it all.

Like Gemma, Anna created a division between the purely educational aspect of undergraduate life and the associated social rites of passage. These were temporally divided in Anna’s spatial story, so that she had experienced undergraduate socializing before beginning her degree and currently studied without the ‘socializing aspect of it’. Anna’s past imagined future at a university away from home was accompanied by popular understandings of being ‘a fresher’2 (Edgerton, 2005; Reynolds, 2014). She represented the ‘fresher’ experience that might have been as an irresistible pull, against which she would have been powerless without the stability of home. This experience was therefore both a possible and an impossible past future, its presence in popular discourse making it always having been possible while its dangers make it important to have resisted. Important to both Gemma’s and Anna’s narratives of imagined other lives was the sense that these had been rejected in favour of a different, more productive or more serious educational subjectivity. Their accounts therefore accorded with the descriptions given by tutors in both case colleges, which suggest that their students ‘don’t want that life’. In this description, just as in the preceding data excerpts, ‘that life’ of traditional student mobility and its accompanying experiences was the powerful counter-narrative against which the non-university student experience was defined.

‘I Wish I’d Done It Properly’ Richard, like Anna and Gemma, represented the impracticality of the expected undergraduate experience as an important justification for his decision to stay in place: I didn’t want to be the type of student that just goes away and earns enough money just to get by. I wanted to spend and save at the same time, because I’m 25. I didn’t want to just finish university and then not have any money at all.

Seen in this way, Richard’s decision to stay in the town he had always lived in so that he could continue in his employment could be understood alongside

A ‘fresher’ is a first-year student, or ‘freshman’ in US terms. The term is associated in British popular discourse with a move away from the familial home and its structures and boundaries, and therefore towards increased and often alcohol-fuelled socializing.

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Sebford College’s higher education director’s argument that more students are remaining in place for financial reasons. His focus on the financial risks of higher education study also marked him as a ‘contingent chooser’ for whom ‘finance is a key concern and constraint’ in the language of Reay, David and Ball (2005, p. 337), and therefore as working from a less privileged position than those for whom finances are not a consideration. Richard saw himself as having rejected a ‘type of student’ narrative in which studying and saving money were antithetical. Later in the same interview, however, Richard articulated another imagined past student future: If I were going to go to uni, if I were going to move somewhere to uni, I’d have gone. I’d have gone somewhere far away, just to, to make the most of it, like, to create a distance and not be somewhere that you can just get home in ten or fifteen minutes. If I had moved away, I would have moved a distance that you can’t just travel too closely. I would have wanted the space and stuff like that.

There was a stark opposition between this other possible future and Richard’s current experience, living ‘only a stone’s throw’ from Sebford College. It was clear from this spatial story that, for Richard, ‘to go to university’ was to make a break with place that creates ‘distance’ and ‘space’ in both their literal and figurative senses. When I asked Richard if this imagined other past was something he felt he had missed out on, he replied that, as a mature student, ‘I don’t think it would benefit me’. In this understanding of undergraduate mobility, the spatial move is strongly connected to the traditional age at which it is made. Richard saw such a move as impossible because ‘when I was eighteen I didn’t move away’. Rather than describing a rejection of the normative mobility trajectory of the traditional undergraduate, Richard instead narrated this possible future as unrealized in the moment at which it could have become possible. In Richard’s account, his current educational subjectivity was constructed in binary opposition to, and as a consequence of, the unrealized mobility of the traditional young undergraduate. While Richard resisted my suggestion that he might feel that he had missed out on the other future he imagined, Kate made it clear that she saw the expected narrative as the correct one, and that she wished she had followed it. She discussed the decision not to stay on for a second year at sixth form,3 seeing

‘Sixth form’ describes the final two years of secondary education in England, usually undertaken between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

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this as the moment in which the inevitable future of university after A Levels4 became unrealized: I wish I’d have stayed. I wish I’d have done it properly, gone to university at the right time, because I wouldn’t have come here. I’d have gone to a different university probably. Not that this is a bad university, but, you know what I mean. I’d have gone away and I’d have done it properly.

Like Richard, Kate’s imagined mobility for university sat in contrast to her ties to place; when I asked whether she would move in the future, she replied that she and her husband and children ‘might as well stay where we are, I think’. It is interesting to note that Kate’s only undergraduate experience was in nonuniversity provision, where her status as a ‘local’ student was by far the most common. Her description of the association between going away and doing ‘it properly’ therefore shows the dominant nature of this shared societal spatial story, which stretched beyond Kate’s immediate experience. Both Richard and Kate understood undergraduate mobility according to a powerful accepted narrative in which moving for university study is a necessary precursor to a mobile life after graduation in England (Goodhart, 2017; Smith and Holt, 2007). For both students, having missed the temporal moment on which this narrative relied meant constructing an educational subjectivity against that narrative. As can be seen in both accounts, this non-traditional educational subjectivity blurs into their long-term relationships to place and to future mobility. Rather than being cut off at the moment in which they became impossible, these other imagined futures were sustained as definitional narratives, acting as dominant discourse through which the past could be seen as causally connected to the present. Seen in this way, ‘that life’ which is seen as not wanted by students of non-university provision is also constantly connected to their current lives through spatial stories in which it is the impossible other possibility. While the preceding narratives of ‘other lives’ demonstrate the enduring and powerful effect of the English national narrative of undergraduate mobility, they also serve to de-naturalize that narrative. They reveal the accepted narrative as one in which the privileges of ease of movement and coherence of placed, educated subjectivities are taken as a given. For the students in this study, the complexity of their classed and racialized relationships to place, and their town’s position in the geography of English higher education, results in a disruption of the widespread assumption that higher education means attending university, A (advanced) Levels are the most traditional academic pre-university qualifications in England, taken over the two-year period of sixth form.

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and that attending university means leaving the familial home and locality. Represented by these students as either consciously rejected or accidentally missed, the traditional student trajectory is shown to be both dominant in the imagination and easily disrupted in practice by anything other than a normative and privileged educational trajectory.

Conclusion Taken as a whole, the arguments in this chapter offer a response to the common binary distinctions between mobile and immobile subjects, and local and ‘traditional’ higher education students. There are several facets to this response. For students such as Ben at Tobston College and Andrew at Sebford College, it was important to reject the dominant narrative that associates the ‘traditional’ mode of HE study with growing up and gaining independence (Holdsworth, 2006). ­Gemma’s experience of beginning her degree at a university before transferring to non-university higher education is useful in de-naturalizing this ‘traditional’ mode of study, showing residential student mobility practices to be both particular and exclusionary. These students also emphasized their positive and stable relationships with place, and the important role of non-university higher education in allowing them to sustain these relationships. At the same time, as explored in the previous chapter, these relationships to place are further complicated by placed histories of deprivation and lack of educational and employment opportunity. As shown by Jack’s characterization of Tobston as the ‘underdog’, Anna’s deliberation over whether to stay in the town, and Kate’s, Aisha’s and Brian’s accounts of the need to move away in order to build upon their undergraduate education, non-university higher education continues to occupy a contradictory position. The fact that higher education is now accessible in these towns allows students to maintain the specificity and strength of their ties to place, but the future as a graduate-level educated subject in these places is hard for students to imagine. Most of the students in this project engaged explicitly with commonly accepted discourses of mobility, narrating themselves as having decided against or having missed the opportunity to participate in the experiences these discourses describe. These narratives therefore demonstrate that, far from being divided from a ‘traditional’ experience by their status as ‘immobile’ or ‘local’ students, these ‘local’ students in fact share in the collective imaginary of that experience. The association between undergraduate study and leaving the familial home acts

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as a past possible future, against which present experience is defined. Discussions of students’ mobility trajectories should therefore begin from an understanding that narratives of both mobility and fixity, and of past foreclosed and presently realized possibilities, coexist in multiple, non-linear ways that cannot be divided from a larger societal narrative of ‘going to university’.

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Living Local The Part and the Whole of ‘Local’ Higher Education Spaces

Introduction In discussions of widening access to higher education, the metaphor of students ‘getting through the door’ often occurs (Gallacher et al., 2002). What factors make the act of ‘getting through the door’ easier or more difficult for social groups that are historically under-represented in higher education? In common with much of the spatial terminology associated with education (see Chapter 5), the phrase has both literal and figurative meanings. The words refer to the act of moving into a building or space of higher education, with the implication that this act signifies something more permanent or repeated. The student, in ‘getting through the door’, makes the shift from the outside to the inside of higher education. The building is both a place in which higher education happens and a representation of what higher education is, and students and staff moving through it materially enact what it is to do higher education. Neither the buildings nor their occupants are without pre-existing perceptions of what degree education is in material form, however, even before they have been ‘through the door’. In England, the enduring association of higher education with the iconic buildings of Oxford and Cambridge means that historical buildings and elite education are difficult to disentangle in popular imagination (Baker and Brown, 2007). In this context, both technological innovation and the widening access agenda mean that institutional spaces of higher education seek to signal their state-of-the-art facilities as well as their provision of support services, without losing their claim to a more deeply embedded architectural history that unites ancient buildings with educational excellence.

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The institutional spaces of higher education were especially complicated for the colleges involved in the project on which this book is based, for several reasons. The first is that both colleges were in towns without a history of higher education provision, and higher education buildings were therefore largely absent from the architecture of the towns. In contrast to many other cities and large towns in England, it was possible to walk around the town centres without being aware of higher education and its architectural presence. A further complication for these colleges was that their student populations, as established in previous chapters in this book, were largely ‘local’. In contrast to the accommodation and social spaces that often occupy towns and cities with large populations of students who have relocated in order to study at degree level, relatively few spaces were seen to be required for this unusual student body. As shown in Chapters 3 and 5 particularly, these students were adding undergraduate study to lives that were already spatially split between home, work and caring commitments, and they did not rely upon multiple spaces associated with higher education. A final and perhaps contradictory complication for the case colleges in this study was that the presence of a designated higher education space in the town was especially important. As one part of a college that provided a range of levels and types of qualification for a range of age groups, the higher education space in each case had considerable work to do in signifying undergraduate study as something distinct, particular and of high status. This signifying work was all the more important in towns without a history of higher education, and where students might not have followed the traditional pattern of relocating for degree study. In this context, visible institutional spaces of higher education may be all the more important for students who have not always associated the possibility with the place in which they live, and who have carved out time in complex lives in order to undertake degree study because that study matters to them. In short, the higher education spaces in these colleges were all the more important because they also ran the risk of being unlikely and unimportant for the students occupying them. This chapter explores the institutional spaces of the higher education sites of each case college, seeing these as implicated in and shaping of the spatial stories of place and student im/mobilities that have been set out in the previous chapters. In order to capture the material and metaphorical significances of higher education spaces, the chapter uses de Certeau’s (1984, pp. 101–2) spatial adaptation of the rhetorical figure of synecdoche, the form of metonymy in which a part stands in for the whole. The figure relies upon a shift in understanding that becomes so commonplace as to be unnoticeable. It is this

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shift that enables a use, for example, of the word ‘crown’ to signify the monarchy, or ‘the pen’ to signify the written word. In using space, de Certeau argues, we select particular possibilities (part) from a range or ‘ensemble’ of possibilities (whole), and quickly that part becomes understood as the whole. For example, the walk across a park replaces, in our understanding, the multiple possibilities of the space of the park as a whole. The way a subject habitually uses a space such as a campus or building therefore becomes their spatial story of the space. Through this way of understanding uses of space, the chapter explores the ways that students saw their occupation of spaces as partial in two ways. First, they measured their use of space as a part against the whole of the ways that the space might be used. They often saw themselves, for example, as ‘only’ or ‘just’ using the spaces necessary for their attendance at classes, and wished that a more total or complete occupation of the spaces offered by the college were possible for them. Secondly, students measured the spaces in the college against an imagined whole of a more traditional university space, again signalling the dominance of the university in collective imagination, even and especially where the university is absent. As well as discussing higher education spaces with students in interviews, this project sought to consider space in other ways. My own perceptions of moving through the spaces were an important resource, and I draw on these perceptions throughout this chapter. I occupied a strange position in these spaces. I was an outsider to the spaces themselves, never having occupied them as a student, and always knowing that my occupation of them was transient. At the same time, I have occupied educational spaces for almost the whole of my life, and therefore am never wholly an outsider to them. In the descriptions of the spaces in the following sections , I try to make use of this liminal position as insider-outsider to the spaces, in order to destabilize habitual uses of spaces that render their physicality ‘implicit’ (Gieryn, 2002, p. 61). The description therefore sits between an encounter with the spaces for the first time and an observation of their habitual use, both of which seek to de-naturalize the ways in which the spaces produce and are produced by educational subjects. I focus particular attention upon material objects that quickly blend into the background once a space has become familiar, such as chairs, doorways and written signs. I also focus especially on the shared social spaces in each higher education site, arguing that the uses of space in these communal areas extend beyond the boundaries of the spaces themselves. Throughout the chapter, I also draw on mobile interviews with students, in which I asked the students to move with me through the college spaces and to point out areas of particular significance to them. Contrary to my

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expectations that this interviewing method would spark dynamic conversations about the space and students’ favoured uses of it (Brown and Durrheim, 2009; Wiederhold, 2015), the most common response was that there was no point in moving around, because they did not use any other spaces than the one we were speaking in. Some students remained seated despite my explanation of what the mobile interview involved, and listed the buildings they regularly entered, sometimes pointing to them from their seat. Seeing this response as an important part of a students’ spatial story, the chapter offers unusual insights into role of space in higher education from the perspective of students who, amongst other things, narrated spatial stories of the spaces as unused and themselves as not using them.

Tobston College ‘Not Anywhere’ As explained in Chapter 4, Tobston College’s higher education provision was, at the time of the study, located on a rural site on the outskirts of a village five miles from Tobston town centre. Students and staff referred to the site by the name of the village it is closest to, so that although the site acted as the college’s separate higher education campus, it was almost never referred to as such. Travelling to the site involved getting off the bus at the only stop in the nearest village. Again, this stop was named for the village rather than for the college or for the higher education site, despite the fact that the entrance to the site was directly opposite the bus stop. It was therefore impossible to get a bus that explicitly went ‘to’ the higher education site. This impossibility was evidence of the material absence of higher education from the spatial language of the Tobston area. The result was that finding the higher education site required a previous knowledge of it being there, a purposeful journey towards it rather than a chance happening. Those who knew and used the site knew it in part for its invisibility. Gemma, who emphasized the practicality of the site, including its ease of access from her home, transferred in the first weeks of her degree to Tobston College from a nearby university. When I ask if she liked the higher education site, she responded: Yeah, because nobody knows it’s here. They’re like, ‘where?’ and it’s impossible to describe as well because it’s not anywhere. You can’t say, ‘Well it’s near this’, because it’s not. It’s not near anything. It’s literally here on its own.

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Although Gemma couched her response to my question in positive terms, the absence of the higher education site from popular understanding was similar to Anna’s and Jenny’s descriptions, in Chapter 4, of the absence or impossibility of undergraduate subjectivities in popular placed narratives of the town. In Gemma’s account, the site was not only unknown but was also impossible to situate in understandings of the area that would position it as ‘near this’. By extension, the student subjects attending the college were similarly invisible, so that an already contradictory degree-level educational subjectivity was further complicated by the absence of degree-associated spaces from public view. This description directly contrasts perceptions, in university towns and cities, of undergraduate students populating whole spatial areas with spaces associated with living, learning or socializing at higher education level (Brookfield, 2019; Garmendia, Coronado and Ureña, 2012). In such places, higher education study is instinctively understood as a material lived experience. In Tobston, this experience was absent from public view.

Unused seats in social spaces My experience of being in the higher education site at Tobston College can be understood as an extension of my navigation to it. The site, like the route to it, demanded a certain amount of prior knowledge. Its buildings, arranged in something close to a circle around a central, steeply sloping green, did not clearly correspond to the maps positioned at various points around the site. The building closest to the entrance, confusingly, was not part of the higher education provision, but was instead a restaurant and hotel complex, with a reception desk catering for enquiries related both to the college and to the hotel and restaurant. By my second visit to the site, I knew to walk further along the path to the next building in the circle, which housed the canteen and coffee shop, along with a number of classrooms and offices. My fieldnotes, often written in the social space in this building, detailed the ways in which the spaces appeared to offer contradictory uses. In particular, I found myself focusing on the unused seats in these spaces. The coffee shop, a space that has wider societal associations with socializing that exceed the transaction of buying coffee (Turner and Manderson, 2007), had the most obviously comfortable seating. In this space, wide leather sofas appeared to invite students and staff to settle into the space. This invitation was contradicted by the notice on the shop’s door, detailing first that the shop closed at 3.30 pm, before the end of the day’s classes, and secondly that a beverage must

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be purchased by anyone sitting in the shop. Having been asked to leave the coffee shop on two occasions, once as it closed earlier than the advertised time, and once again as I had finished my coffee, I found these conditions of entry were tightly adhered to by the shop’s staff. The sofas were therefore almost always unused, and the coffee shop was, in contrast to wider popular understanding, most often a space used for the purchasing and taking away of coffee. Here, the ‘ensemble of possibilities’ became a site of competing social signifiers, each of which shaped a particular use of the space – the sofas shaped a site of social interaction and the written signs shaped a space of transaction. The resulting common use of the coffee shop – according to the second possible use, a space of transaction – extended my overriding sense of the higher education site as a series of spaces best negotiated by purposeful movement. After finding, rather than chancing upon, the site and after finding, rather than being led to, the site’s central building, I encountered the coffee shop as a largely functional space that both offered and discouraged other possible uses. I spent more time in the site’s canteen, which was explicitly set up as a functional space. Its plastic, upright chairs were positioned around tables. A water fountain and till were positioned in the middle of the room, and in each corner was a cart into which empty trays should be put when their user has finished eating, along with bins and recycling points. This punctuation of space with the practices of acquiring, paying for and disposing of food, along with the discomfort of the plastic chairs, shaped the canteen’s use as a brief temporal and spatial break between classes. Around midday, almost all chairs were occupied and the noise level was high, as were levels of movement. No one sat still in this space, instead moving to buy and consume food, and then to leave the space. When afternoon classes began, the space was completely silent and unused. While the possibilities available did not dictate that the room should be used only at particular times, and the canteen was not subject to such strict policies regarding its use as the coffee shop was, the materials of the space somehow shaped a similarly transactional use. During mobile interviews, students were keen to emphasize their use of the space as functional and practical, driven by the requirements of their course and shared with the demands of their lives beyond the college. Paul, whose use of space was split between the small studio he rented, the camper van he lived in and the college, gave the following account as we walked past the canteen: I’ve been there sometimes but my timetable’s quite fragmented, because I help a lot of people out. I do – because I’ve got the van – I do so much for other people that I’m not here all the time, so I eat while I’m out [away from the college]. And

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then when I’m here, I just get on with my work. The one thing I use this place [the higher education site] for, mainly, is meetings with tutors to discuss how I’m getting on with my work.

In Paul’s spatial story, the canteen was strongly associated with its explicit function of eating; because he was not often on site for mealtimes, he rarely used it. The spaces of the site were, for Paul, designated for higher education work. Paul’s description of ‘just’ getting on with his work and work as the ‘one thing’ he used the site for suggested both an awareness and a denial of the other possibilities offered by the space – he identified his use as a part, against a larger whole. At the same time, Paul also measured his occupation of college space against the demands of his life as a whole, narrating an educational subjectivity that was split spatially, ‘fragmented’ between the demands of a degree timetable and other people in his life. This spatial story created a strong contrast with the coherence of ‘traditional’ spatial subjectivities in ‘studentified’ city spaces, as discussed earlier. Seen in this way, the material functionality I noticed in my fieldnotes was shaped by student needs, reflecting the everyday mobility practices (Finn and Holton, 2019) of the ‘local’ student who does not occupy social space even when it is offered as a possibility. For other students, the spaces of the site represented a more marked and more negative contrast to imagined university spaces. Ryan’s strong feelings that the site did not offer a ‘whole’ undergraduate experience were clear as he guided me around the site, his descriptions of buildings and facilities relying upon a denial of their use. He pointed to the bar (in a building adjacent to the building housing the canteen and coffee shop) with the accompanying statement that it was ‘always empty’. Here, the (lack of) use of the spaces was haunted by the ever-present possibility of their use, and the sense that a more ‘whole’ use of the space would require the bar to be full. Ryan also made a comparison to a nearby university, explaining: The buildings here are so old. They need a lot of work to them. The equipment’s not brilliant. I think we do lack decent equipment and decent facilities. At [university] I think they’re, like, it’s all bang up to date. New buildings, everything brand new, decent technology, equipment, and a decent library that’s open 24 hours.

Ryan’s mobile interview revealed him to be conscious of an imagined ‘whole’ occupation of institutional space that was deemed appropriate to higher education, and that was lacking both in his use of the site and in the available possibilities of the site. In reinforcing this lack through a comparison to the

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material conditions of university study, Ryan offered a different understanding of space to Paul’s. In this spatial story, Ryan’s partial use of the site’s spaces was dictated by the spaces themselves, shaped by what was lacking from them. In turn, the whole of the space was narrated as partial to the larger and more complete higher education experience offered by the university. As is clear from these accounts, the functional spaces of the college can be seen in contrasting ways. On the one hand, the spaces enabled heterogeneous mobility practices that extended beyond those of the traditional undergraduate and which destabilized higher education provision as the central spatial orientation of the educational subject. On the other hand, the Tobston College higher education site spaces were defined and delimited by the language of necessity on which the provision itself is premised and experienced by the students in contrast to a dominant spatial imaginary of university provision. In either view, just as the spaces of the college cannot be divided from the larger narratives of place, education and mobilities, they were also implicated in the dominant narratives of higher education that persisted both because of and despite their historical absence from the town. These narratives were felt in the unused chairs of the site, which acted as a perpetual signal that another educational subject, another possible self, was imagined as sitting on them. At the same time, the empty chairs also signalled that Tobston’s student subjects were sitting elsewhere, at home or on their way to or from the site.

Green space, benches and a path The explicit functionality of the social spaces seemed to me at first to be contradicted by the external characteristics of the site. Each building was situated on the edge of a green so large and sloping as to make it impossible to see all the buildings that made up the site from any point within it. Here, too, the space was marked by unused seating. Picnic benches were clustered at a variety of flatter points on the green. These appeared to encourage those using the site to stop, to face each other and to communicate in a space that was away from, literally outside, their classroom environment. The green was also divided, however, by a path that led from the building at the lowest point in the slope to the building at the highest point. It was the path that was used, far more often than the benches, as students and staff moved as quickly as possible from one side of the site to the other. The openness of the green, reinforced by the collegiality of the picnic tables, was contradicted by this path, so that the green became primarily a space to be traversed.

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This second perception of the green was reinforced in mobile interviews. For many students, the green space between buildings extended the time and effort taken to move around the site. Gemma, for instance, was glad that her cohort’s classes in their final year took place in a different building than those in her first two years because the more recent room was ‘closer to the car park’. Similarly, Anna described her use of the site’s space as so dominated by practicality that a change in the buildings in which her classes took place had meant that ‘we don’t really come up here [pointing to the social spaces of the canteen and coffee shop] any more’. As Rebecca put it: If I’m a bit early I might get a coffee in there [the coffee shop] but not so much now because we’ve got most of our classes down in that building. So we’re a bit kind of out of it now.

Here, the spaces of the site were divided both spatially and temporally by the incidentals of timetabling and room allocation, with occupation of some spaces becoming impossible through this division. In their focus on considerations of time and transport, Gemma, Anna and Rebecca emphasized the non-university ‘local’ educational subject as balancing multiple demands and occupations, with these demands shaping use of institutional space. At the same time, however, these accounts show how the space itself acted to shape and is shaped by educational subjectivities. In Rebecca’s spatial story, even the functional or practical use of the social spaces had become a past, impossible – rather than a present, possible – occupation of institutional space. Rebecca narrated herself and her cohort as spatially positioned on the outskirts of the site’s possible uses, ‘out of ’ an ‘it’ that might offer different spatial possibilities. Taken together, the possibilities in these shared spaces worked to produce an ideal possible educational subject who would move about the site with a purpose firmly linked to the external commitments that defined them as ‘local’ students. The subject would enter and leave the spaces of the site needed, with the particular function of each space in mind. This educational subjectivity works in contradiction to the ‘traditional’ undergraduate in ‘studentification’ literature (Smith and Hubbard, 2014). In this literature, undergraduate study is spatially all-encompassing, defining and defined by the ways in which the subject socializes, sleeps in and comes to ‘know’ a place (Holton, 2015; Holton, 2016a). In turn, the places of ‘studentification’ come to be known by seemingly generic spatial practices of the traditional undergraduate educational subject. In Tobston, where there was no history of university provision, and where student mobilities were ‘local’ in all the complexities of that term, these spatial

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practices were de-naturalized, invisible in the spatial language of the town and disassociated from the lived experience of undergraduate study.

‘Having Your Own Little Country Estate’ The anticipated closure of the separate higher education site at Tobston College, announced just before my second visit there, resulted in a heightened reflexivity from students about their relationship to the site. Materially, the move represented a shift in the language of higher education, from a rural site to a town centre site, and from historic buildings to contemporary, purpose-built educational architecture. In these accounts, uses of the older spaces were measured against those of an immediate future of integration into the contemporary architecture of the main further education site, as well as those of the impossible past/ future of imagined university spaces. In the second of these comparisons, as seen earlier, what was seen to be lacking in the spaces was measured against an imagined university space, a spatial and temporal ‘whole’ in which learning needs were met by equipment and ease of access. When I spoke to him for the second time, Ryan told me about the planned closure of the higher education site and deployed similar language to acknowledge that a move to the central further education site would increase access to the learning facilities he saw as important: They’ve got better facilities there. They’ve got better computers, better technology, better equipment. It’s just in the centre of town though, which is not as nice as having your own little country estate to learn in.

Contradicting his earlier representation of the disparate, unoccupied spaces of the higher education site, Ryan encapsulated them here into a coherent, whole ‘estate’ that brought with it a sense of ownership and belonging (Thomas, 2015) as well as the reputational affect (Stich, 2014) of more elite higher education architecture (Baker and Brown, 2007). Anna’s response to the site and to the intended move also demonstrated competing spatial definitions of higher education. In addition to a largely negative account of the site, Anna’s ‘love’ for the beauty of the campus offered another, different view of her relationship to the spaces there, and this view was reiterated in her second interview, as she discussed the planned site closure: It’s just a bit sad for us, do you know? Because we’ve all grown up here together and I think, you just think that they’d want to keep it. But apparently they’re in loads of debt so they want to combine it all together and staff cuts, funding cuts,

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they just haven’t got the money, which is one of the things you’ve got to expect coming to a small university. You wouldn’t have these problems if you were at one of the red bricks.1

In this spatial story, the spaces of the higher education site contained a complete temporal experience of ‘grow[ing] up here’ that contradicted the divided and closed spaces which Anna described in her habitual use of the site. This ‘whole’ experience was seen as partial when compared to the more elite and wealthy ‘red brick’ universities, against which Tobston’s non-university provision was ‘small’. Both Ryan and Anna’s conflicting accounts of spatial division and lack as well as coherent wholeness highlighted the ways in which higher education spaces are shaped through but also exceed their habitual use. In the part as well as in the whole of these narratives are competing claims for what undergraduate spaces might and should offer possible educational subjectivities. While some of these claims are informed by the presence of empty or imminently abandoned spaces, the spaces themselves are also productive of possible other and possibly unrealized narratives of degree study. As Ryan and Anna demonstrated, nonuniversity spaces in Tobston College were negotiated through complex narratives of subjectivities made possible by these, rather than other spaces, at the same time as they were defined against these other im/possible spaces.

Sebford College Swipe card access only As discussed in Chapter 4, there was a marked contrast between the higher education spaces at Tobston College and Sebford College. In the marketing materials for Sebford College, much was made of the institution’s newly built campus facilities, which had been part of a significant and ongoing programme of investment. The college’s higher education provision was located in a separate building as part of a campus made up of nine buildings grouped together, within easy walking distance of the town centre. As also noted in Chapter 4, the further education college was a visible presence in the town. Street signs directed visitors to the college from the train station, and only a busy road divided the last of the main shopping streets from the first of the campus buildings. Students and staff, ‘Red brick’ refers to a group of nine universities established in the major industrial cities of England. In the contemporary higher education system, they are part of the elite Russell Group of universities.

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recognizable by their distinctive college lanyards, moved to and from the further education campus and the town centre throughout the day. Further education therefore made its presence felt throughout the town centre, both architecturally and in the marking of bodies as educational subjects. Despite, or as well as, this visibility of educational subjects and spaces in Sebford’s centre, higher education was largely absent. The college buildings, spread around the open urban spaces of a car park and bus stops, were distant enough from one another that it was not easy to read the name of any one building from its nearest neighbour. This meant that it was possible to attend classes in one building without either entering the other buildings or knowing which levels or disciplines they catered for. The majority of the buildings were named for the specialist technical education they offered – a sports and leisure building, an automative technology building and a construction centre, for example. The central further education building used a metaphor for light and guidance as its name and was therefore marked out as both a general and a central building. The buildings shared architectural features common to the Building Colleges for the Future (BCF) funding initiative launched in England in 2008 as a way of injecting money into the sector and bringing its buildings up to contemporary standards (Smith, 2017). The emphasis upon steel, chrome and glass in this new style of educational architecture made the buildings, though spatially distant, not easy to distinguish from one another. The consequence of this visual blending of any one building amongst the others, was that the higher education building occupied a contradictory position as part of the larger further education campus. It was separate, and this separation both created and implied a separation between the levels of further and higher education. Its staff worked entirely in this building, rarely crossing the car park to any other building on the campus. At the same time, because of the homogeneity of the buildings, it was also possible to understand higher education as another form of specialist technical education, not distinct from further education but another instance of it. It was equally possible, just as with the very differently positioned higher education site at Tobston, not to know that the higher education building existed at all. Moreover, access to the higher education building was organized at the reception of the general further education building, as the higher education building itself had no reception. This administrative centralization meant that it was impossible to enter the higher education building without first enquiring and gaining permission elsewhere, so that entry had to be purposeful and pre-arranged. As in Tobston, the absence of higher education from the history of the town of Sebford was reflected in a lack of spatial recognition of higher education and

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of undergraduate students. Where university sites and spaces are often clearly demarcated in university towns, in Sebford the higher education spaces and students were difficult to discern from those attached to further education. In part because the mode of higher education study was almost exclusively ‘local’, the spatial markers of social and residential ‘studentified’ places were absent from the town, and the material evidence of lived undergraduate experience was absent from public understandings of possible educational futures. At the same time, students’ descriptions of the town as fractious and split along class and racial lines (see Chapter 4) extended visually into the educational spaces in the form of controlled entrances and security guards that appeared both to anticipate and to respond to violence, conflict or intrusion. The sequence of two sets of transparent double doors at the entrance of the higher education building, each requiring a swipe card, created a contradictory sense of visual accessibility and material impossibility, both inviting and impeding movement into higher education and complicating the metaphor of ‘getting through the door’. In order for me to gain access to the building for the time of the project, a member higher education staff had to walk across the car park to the further education building to provide a signature of approval. This requirement acted as a reminder of the complex relationship between the two types of provision; they were administratively separate enough that no one in the further education building could provide the appropriate approval, but entwined enough that access to one building was organized through another. The physical difficulty of accessing the building therefore became a complex configuration of protection from and mediation of the historical narratives of place and poverty that extended into the institution from the town, and the ongoing intertwined sector identities of the dual-sector institution. Despite the distinct architectural and spatial differences between the Tobston and Sebford higher education sites, they shared a requirement that higher education provision must be known about in order to be accessed, and a lack of embeddedness in the public spaces of the town that, in turn, made the provision less visible and less likely to be known. The transparent double doors of the higher education building at Sebford College gave way to an atrium of the kind that, like the exterior of the building, was typical of BCF structures (Smith, 2017). It was a contradictory space; on one side, further transparent doors opened (with swipe card access) into the canteen and coffee shop, and directly ahead were flights of stairs and lifts to the five floors of teaching rooms and offices and the entrance to the library. Entering the building propelled further purposeful movement towards the practicalities of eating or learning. Opposite the doors to the canteen, however, were two different sets of

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seating. The first was a narrow oval sofa, brightly coloured and positioned just before and to the side of the lifts. The second set of seating was a series of single tables, each with two chairs, and each separated from the others by a small screen, placed against a glazed exterior wall. Both sets of seats were almost entirely unused, perhaps because the space was otherwise configured to promote progression through, rather than staying within. At times, students stood around the oval sofa, clearly waiting for other students, but occupying the space so temporarily that they did not need to sit down. No one used the tables and chairs, perhaps because their arrangement suggested either study or private, professional conversation, both of which were at odds with the atrium’s position as the building’s entrance and main thoroughfare. In a building whose spaces were tightly organized and structured around their practical purpose, this space stood out as indeterminate, hovering somewhere between movement and stasis in its ‘ensemble’ of possible uses.

‘Just Com[ing] and Go[ing]’ There was a single social space in the building, which blended together the spaces of common room, coffee shop and canteen. The space was structured as a semicircle that curved around the building’s central staircase, with access either side. To move through the space was to progress sequentially through its functions. A pool table, surrounded by sofas, was followed by a coffee shop with upright chairs and tables, and further on, a canteen with hot food, vending machines, and more chairs and tables. Again, the space was contradictory in that the seating suggested stopping, while the sequential functions of leisure, snacking and meal times worked to first define the spaces according to practicality, and then to draw movement along and through each function, through the semicircle and out of the other side. This sense of sequential movement was particularly clear in mobile interviews with students. Students responded to the suggestion of the mobile interview by guiding me through the canteen space, listing its sequential functions without stopping. Jack, who reported making the most of the building’s spaces in order to justify the cost of travel from a neighbouring village, gave the following description: We’ll all go down – we’ll finish a lecture, go down for lunch, but then we’ll either go for a fag, but I’ve given up smoking, so we’ll all go to the library, do a bit of work, and then we’ll all go back.

Jack’s spatial story revealed how the building could be occupied through a series of repeated collective, time-determined movements that were both enabled and

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structured by the sequence of spaces that led from the building’s atrium. Jack was unusual in that his narration suggested a sense of a complete or whole use of the space that was not defined against other possible uses, or other possible spaces. Kate, who expressed her use of the building as defined by her status as a student parent (Brooks, 2015), was more typical of other students in making it clear during her mobile interview that her movement between the spaces was partial, privileging efficiency above all else: I just come and go really. I might come in early and go to the library, or stay later and go to the library, but I don’t want to be talking. I want to get on. I’ve got a limited amount of time – you have to use it.

Like Jack, Kate described a habitual sequence in which she ‘come[s] and go[es]’, but unlike Jack, she gestured towards the social spaces as she spoke to me, without entering them, defining them as closed to her through the ‘limitations’ of her time. The ‘just’ of her movement in and out of the building, stopping only to go to the library, meant that her spatial story was narrated against other, more complete possibilities of the space that another person might take up. At the same time, however, a more whole occupation of student space was seen to represent a threat to the Kate’s time management. Holding the possibilities of something other than the immediate practicalities of study, the social space of the building had to be negotiated in particular ways in order to sustain a coherent educational subjectivity alongside the other pressures in her life. The building was as such managed and divided into the possible and impossible, by students whose educational subjectivities were always experienced through demands external to education itself. A similar sense of institutional space as potentially challenging to educational subjectivity was conveyed by Lucy, who lived within walking distance of the college. In her mobile interview, she did not move beyond the corridor on which the photography department was based, describing the pull of home as a constant temptation: I just spend my time on this floor, because I know if I walk somewhere else I’ll just want to go home. So if I just stay where I’m meant to be, at least on this floor anyway, I can just crack on with it. Then I’m not going to get distracted by anything else. If I go downstairs I’ll see something and I’ll be like – ooh – or I’ll see a person who’ll be like, ‘Oh I’m going home now’, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh I’m coming with you.’ I just need to try and stick it out a bit.

In Lucy’s spatial story, the spaces of the building represented a site of struggle between the impulse to leave and the obligation to stay, so that guarding against

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the possibility of leaving required partial occupation of space. Like Kate, Lucy worked to sustain this partial, and fragile, use of space even while she saw it as lacking that which would make it more whole. The ‘downstairs’ social space was depicted here as a space to be managed; where Kate saw the space as potentially impeding her movement in and out of the building, Lucy described herself as fighting against its tendency to move her on and away from study. For both students, the building at once housed and threatened their educational subjectivities, offering possibilities that had to be balanced against the demands of their experiences outside of the building. As the only higher education space in the town, the building could be seen as alternately insignificant and important in these accounts of ‘local’ students’ spatial practice. Rather than being embedded within a spatial language of ‘studentification’, the building was used alongside and amongst the spaces of everyday life and everyday mobility (Finn, 2017). At the same time, the building held the possibilities of both more and less than this use, and both possibilities threatened the imagined future coherence of alreadyfragile educational subjectivities. In turn, these subjectivities were only first imaginable because the spaces offered precisely the partial, rather than whole, occupation of student space that also rendered both subjectivity and space fragile.

‘A Lot More Support’ Just as in Tobston, many Sebford students described their use of space not only in the context of the whole of the possibilities it offered but also in terms of a wider, imagined whole of undergraduate experience at university. Rachel, who described the higher education building as her ‘home from home’, was keen to emphasize the available facilities in the library and the canteen. During her mobile interview, she guided me around the college, demonstrating the library’s resources and making an explicit comparison to imagined university spaces: You have a lot more support because, in a big university you’d have a big lecture room and you wouldn’t get that, that one-to-one time where you can just go and ask your tutor, ‘Oh can I just have a word with you?’ When you’ve got 100 people in a room, listening to one lecturer, then how are you going to do that? It’s just impossible.

As Rachel described the ‘part’ that the college represented in relation to her imagined ‘whole’ of university-based degree study, she also saw this ‘part’ as the only possible higher education space for her to occupy. Depicting the space

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of the ‘big lecture room’ as ‘impossible’, she contrasted this with the enabling and supportive spaces offered by the college’s non-university higher education building. In Rachel’s spatial story, these spaces shaped the kinds of interaction that made her educational subjectivity imaginable and liveable, defined against the imagined impossibility of the university. Jack, like Rachel, was keen across both interviews to emphasize the resources on offer at the college, as well as his frustration with other students’ complaints about what is lacking. As he put it: Some of the students get a bit disillusioned, like, ‘Why don’t we have this? They have this at other universities’, like, ‘Yeah, but you’ve come to Sebford College University Centre. It’s not a university. You can’t really be expecting the world.’

Jack resisted the other students’ comparisons with ‘other universities’, defining the college as offering a ‘part’ that was defined against and distinct from the whole ‘world’ of university-based higher education. Like Rachel, and like Anna and Ryan in their sadness at the loss of the Tobston higher education site, Jack also constituted the college higher education spaces as a ‘whole’ in themselves, offering something coherent and complete against the more expansive threat of the university lecture hall space: I remember when I was at [sixth-form] college, we went for an open day around [university], and I remember walking into one of the lecture halls, and I thought, if I’m here I’m just going to be messing about. I’m just going to be sat at the back on my laptop just googling what I’m going to buy for Christmas. Whereas here, you can’t have that. You’ve got to be here, you’ve got to be listening.

For Jack the spaces of the higher education building worked to shape an educational subjectivity that was purposeful and attentive, closed against the possible threat of disappearance or erasure within the larger imagined space. Again here, as in Kate’s and Lucy’s accounts earlier, there was the sense that the spaces of non-university higher education themselves hold together otherwise fragile educational subjectivities. Like the placed narratives through which the provision of degree education is seen as both incongruous to place and essential because of its incongruity, non-university higher education spaces seen in this way both catered for and reinforced student vulnerability; they were at once the only possible spaces in which educational subjectivities could be imagined and lived, and the spaces that defined the other, university spaces as impossible. This contradictory nature of non-university higher education spaces as both enabling and limiting of possible student futures was captured by Kate,

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whose account of her use of college spaces reinforced practicality above all else. Although she described herself as ‘just com[ing] and go[ing]’ from the higher education building, Kate also positioned the building as a part in a larger imaginary of university space: I’ve never been to another university. I don’t know what they’re like. In my head, they’re massive places and people just come in and sit wherever they want and leave whenever they want. It’s very strict here. If you’re late, people get mad at you, if you don’t attend. So that’s very much like school to me, as opposed to what I think university would be like. And there’s no pub or anything. There is on Hollyoaks2, isn’t there? Do you know what I mean? There’s nowhere to meet, apart from there [gestures to the social space] which again is just like school, isn’t it?

In Kate’s spatial story, the social and teaching spaces of the higher education building were defined as partial against a ‘massive’ whole of university spaces in imagined and popular culture (Edgerton, 2005; Reynolds, 2014). Like Jack, who saw the spatial requirements to be present and attentive as usefully constraining an otherwise vulnerable and wayward educational subjectivity, Kate saw these requirements as clearly differentiating non-university space from imagined university spaces. Her narrative went further than Jack’s in that her likening of the building’s spaces and spatial practices to school positioned the higher education building outside of degree-level study altogether, instead occupying a ‘part’ of educational experience that was defined and limited by age and compulsory participation. Whereas Jack’s and Rachel’s spatial stories support the argument that the building’s spaces are shaped according to student need, Kate suggested instead that the spaces and spatial practices dictated possible student subjectivities. This suggestion, seen in the context of her earlier description of purely practical engagement with the higher education spaces, sees her practical engagement as shaped or prompted by the space itself, and by what is lacking or missing from the space that would enable, if present, a more ‘whole’ higher education experience. Kate’s contradictory position in her spatial story, first guarding against the temptations of the existing social space in the higher education building, then seeing this space as lacking against the imagined spaces of the university, was representative of the contradictory demands placed upon non-university higher education spaces. The spaces of the Sebford higher education building met the Hollyoaks is a soap opera produced in the UK by Channel 4, located in a fictional university town of the same name.

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demands of the complex everyday mobilities of the college’s majority of local students through their organization around a logic of movement and purposeful progression. At the same time, the seating areas in the atrium and canteen offered a different possible occupation of space that gestured towards but did not meet shared imaginings of university higher education spaces. For some students, the ‘part’ of undergraduate experience offered by the college’s higher education space was a complete whole even as it was defined against universitybased higher education. It was seen as complete because it was the only possible, defined against the impossible. For others, it was this containing of the possible that both enabled and limited the spatial practices of higher education in the college. Despite the marked differences between the contemporary spaces of Sebford’s higher education building and the separate higher education campus at Tobston College, there were similarities in the students’ spatial stories. Perhaps the strongest of these similarities was in students’ rejections of the college spaces, particularly expressed in their insistence that there was no point in their participating in mobile interviews. In many ways, however, this dominant impression was contradicted by other more complex relationships to the spaces, as seen in Rebecca’s and Anna’s sadness at the closure of the Tobston site as well as in Kate’s and Lucy’s sense that their academic performance relied upon them limiting their engagement with social spaces in the college. Both Ryan’s frustration with the outdated facilities at the older Tobston site and Kate’s frustration with the limitations of the social space in Sebford’s higher education building made comparisons with other imagined versions of higher education. For Jack and Rachel, on the other hand, the distinction between university and non-university higher education spaces was important in their accounts of themselves as particularly suited to non-university higher education. These examples demonstrate the shared narrative of an illusory whole or real higher education space, sometimes drawn from popular culture as in Kate’s reference to Hollyoaks earlier, that acted as powerfully as the narrative of undergraduate mobility in defining students’ spatial experiences.

Conclusion The spaces associated with higher education are layered with competing meanings that span the material and metaphorical, the historical and the immediate lived experience. Using the concept of spatial synecdoche (de Certeau, 1984, pp.

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101–2) within the larger frameworks of spatial story and possible selves captures and unpacks these layers, discerning how a habitual occupation of a given space is enacted against the imagined possibilities or impossibilities of other spaces and other spatial practices. It is important that this analysis builds upon spatial stories of place and mobility that position any higher education institution within its specific constellation of narratives. In the towns in which both case colleges involved in this project were located, the relative invisibility of higher education from public spaces and therefore public imaginaries means that the ‘ensemble of possibilities’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 101) was already structured through the narratives of placed inequality that define the towns. Similarly, the majority population of ‘local’ students for each of the case colleges meant that social and residential undergraduate spaces, common to university towns and cities, were not part of the towns’ architecture. Higher education student subjectivities are therefore unseen in the material practices of each town, even in the case of Sebford where further education formed a visible part of the geography of the town centre. As a result, higher education spaces in these towns did not permeate the collective spatial understandings of educational spaces and subjectivities. The ensemble of possibilities must therefore also take into account the spatial practices that are a result of student im/mobilities, themselves in part a consequence of placed educational possibilities. Although architecturally very different, and occupying contrasting spatial positions in relation to the further education colleges, the higher education sites at Tobston and Sebford bore some similarities. Both were structured around a spatial logic of movement; the material features of these spaces appeared to respond to the demands of students with heterogeneous mobility practices and to enable an engagement with higher education that did not require the all-consuming spatial experience of residential and social student life. Students narrated their negotiation of institutional space as both a response to and a demand for this functional practicality. De Certeau’s concept of spatial synecdoche leads to an interpretation of these narratives as emphasizing partial engagement with space against the whole of unused possibility, in which that whole is lost or unrealized. At the same time, most particularly visible in the anticipation of the loss of Tobston’s separate higher education site, this partial engagement also represents a whole that is the ‘only possible’. ‘Only’ in this context signifies both that something has been made possible that otherwise would not be and that it is a smaller-than-usual possibility. Non-university higher education has made higher education possible where it might otherwise not have been and is also a smaller possibility than university higher education

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might have been. These dual definitional possibilities of non-university higher education, experienced as the ‘part’ synecdoche of spatial practices at the higher education sites, were measured against the imagined whole of university-based higher education, sometimes as freedom from, sometimes as less than and often as both at once.

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Placed Possible Selves Spatial Stories of Im/Possibility

Introduction Place, and the sense of belonging to it, directly influences a student’s decision about whether to leave or remain in that place for higher education. In turn, educational spaces in any one place are produced and experienced according to the way that education is understood in that place, as well as according to how mobile the students using the spaces are perceived to be. Chapters 4 to 6 have layered these three aspects of the spatial story – place, mobility and space – one over the other, and have also shown how one affects the other. This chapter builds on that analysis further by asking what more can be understood about educational experience if place, mobility and space are used together as part of an analytical framework. Can a student’s educational trajectory be seen as inflected by all three of these factors at once? As set out in Chapter 3, discussing educational trajectory means that temporality, as well as the spatial, is involved, however implicitly, in the analysis. This chapter uses the possible selves concept to make the temporality of higher education experience explicit, while still holding steady the framework of the spatial. These conceptual layers, taken together, inform the kinds of placed possible self that are imaginable to, or have once been imagined by, the student. As discussed in Chapter 2, the phrase ‘placed possible self ’ makes explicit the role of the spatial in what is imaginable, unimaginable or once-imagined in an educational context. Where the phrase is used in this chapter, it emphasizes what should be taken as a given in this book; namely that possibilities are spatially located, and the spatial is temporally inflected. This narrative framework enables analysis of spatial stories as narratives of what is possible, impossible or once-possible from a specific location in place, taking into account relationships to mobility

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and use of material space. In practice, using such a multifaceted framework and exploring the questions it prompts requires time and space in itself. This chapter therefore takes that time and space, focusing in detail on four students from the study. In each of the four sections of this chapter, there is a focus on the spatial stories of a single student who participated in the study that forms the basis of this book. Each of the smaller moments of narration in the interview setting that have been used in the previous chapters are their own spatial story; they narratively locate the subject in a place and amongst the discourses that constitute that place. In this chapter, the smaller ‘fragmented’ spatial stories that are specific to four particular students are layered into larger narratives that allow a detailed exploration of the interactions of the spatial and the temporal. While working through these spatial stories, the chapter positions the students within the wider context of a stratified higher education system, and specifically in the lower-status, non-university institution at which they were studying for their undergraduate degree. Looking at what is possible from their location in place, the chapter also asks what has been made impossible by the structures of a fundamentally unequal system. The four participants whose narratives are drawn out in this chapter have been chosen because they can be classed as ‘outlier’ cases within the larger case that is each college site (Thomas, 2011; Yin, 2014). As ‘outlier’ cases, they are unusual in the context of other cases, and yet they exaggerate characteristics that are common to but perhaps not as obvious in the other cases. In discussing each of the four participants, this chapter builds up a representation of them from their interview data. The risk in this approach is that the representation appears ‘complete’, seeming to capture each participant or their experience in its entirety. This ‘wholeness’ could individualize the issues and inequalities that the analysis seeks to highlight, so that the reader asks more questions of the individual’s experience than they do of the structures illuminated by that experience. This risk is particularly present in representations of forms of ‘second chance’ education such as further education in England. There is the danger, when representing sectors such as these, that a focus on structural disadvantages reinforces discourses of individual resilience triumphing against deficit, and the important role further education plays in supporting this resilience (see, for example, UCU’s ‘Transforming Lives’, 2017). In opposition to these discourses, the chapter signals how structural inequality is best evidenced in its impact on individual lives but is always also working at systemic and often unseen levels in education.

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Ball, Maguire and Macrae (2000) emphasize the incomplete nature of any set of interview data: We have only glimpses into complex lives: they [the participants] select, revise and re-order their experiences in interviews and then we select, re-order and interpret these experiences in our analytic work. (p. 19)

Like Ball, Maguire and Macrae, I emphasize that the presentation of each student in this chapter is a re-presentation of their own re-presentation of their experiences in the interview context. It is drawn from interview data that is partial, a ‘glimpse’ rather than anything more solid or complete. Additionally, I am aware that my interview questions often served to reproduce the imperative, inherent to educational contexts, for my participants to construct coherent narratives of their educational trajectories and their imagined futures. As discussed in Chapter 2, not to have done so would have been to ignore the importance of this imperative in their educational experience, or to assume that it is possible to subvert that imperative in a single research encounter. With these complexities in mind, the analysis in this chapter highlights the fragility of narrative coherence, where possible showing the work done by the student in creating a causally robust account of past decisions and future implications (Ricoeur, 1980; 1992). The chapter also situates the narratives within the social conditions outlined in the previous analysis chapters. In this way, although the narratives themselves are the production of a fleeting moment within a single research encounter, they can also be seen as shaped by and evocative of the enduring and the shifting structures of higher education in England.

Leon: Impossible possibilities Leon had lived in villages around Tobston all his life, and at the time of our interview lived ‘about two bus rides away’ from Tobston College’s higher education site, with his mother, his siblings and his mother’s partner. His relationship to place was complicated by his family’s downward social mobility, caused by his mother’s sudden unemployment during his early teenage years. This change in circumstances took the family from being ‘nice and well off ’ to ‘legally homeless’ within a short time. As a result, the family had lived on a council estate1 for several years at the time of my visits to Tobston: The term ‘council estate’ refers to social housing in the UK.

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I hate the place I live. It’s a council estate. I can’t stand it. I live with my mum, my brother and my sister, and my mum has a boyfriend now, but let’s just say I’m different. I like to think I’m the black sheep.

The experience of living in social housing can produce contradictory feelings of both negativity and loyalty, as Reay and Lucey (2000) found in children’s accounts of living on a council estate. Leon had a far more unequivocal response, seeing the council estate in which he lived as a consequence of downward social mobility, and therefore as a representation of negative changes in his life. Leon resisted being defined by the place of the council estate and its class associations by seeing himself as ‘the black sheep’ and strongly arguing that there was a dissonance between him and the place. While the figure of the ‘black sheep’ usually signifies a negative experience of alienation and difference, Leon saw the ‘black sheep’ as a desired possible self. This unusual use of the figure highlights the strength of his disengagement from the locality; alienation and otherness from this place was vital to the way that he experienced his present and imagined his future as a coherent subject. Leon’s spatial story of his difference from the estate, however, was contradicted by his sense of the impossibility of leaving: ‘If I had a way out, I’d take it.’ Here, he both created and rejected a possible self that was able to leave his surroundings. This process of an imagined-rejected future was repeated as he described his initial decision to remain at home for degree study. He recounted his application decision-making process as one in which better options in different places were progressively ruled out. For the first of these options (Oxford University), he had not made an application, and he was rejected from the second (Staffordshire University): When I looked on the UCAS2 website, when I was 19, for comic art courses, there were only about two or three. I can remember two. One of them was in Oxford, which I didn’t go for because I’m not an A* student, and one of them was in Staffordshire which I didn’t go to. But I came from a modern art course, so my portfolio was built with modern art, and that didn’t look very nice to them. So things didn’t go very well, so I came here because, well, it’s easier for me because I live closer, so financial wise, it’s simpler.

In this spatial story, mobile student possible selves in Oxford and Staffordshire were narrated as having been made impossible by Leon’s educational past. In UCAS is the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, through which all applications to universities, and some applications to further education colleges, are made in England.

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this past, he was not ‘an A* student’, and, in his art foundation year at Tobston’s further education site, he had not built up the kind of art portfolio that is valued at the other institutions he applied to. Staff in both Tobston and Sebford’s higher education provision discussed their frustration that colleagues teaching in further education in the same institution often encouraged their students to apply to high-status university courses, rather than guiding them to progress to higher education at the college. This is a consequence of the stratification that characterizes the English higher education system, within which dual-sector or non-university higher education occupies a low position in terms of reputation, ranking and status. Even where a further education college offers higher education as part of their provision, tutors working in that college were likely to advise students to aim towards the more highly ranked universities. By default, non-university higher education is reinforced as the fallback option in the application process, thereby perpetuating the cycle through which institutional reputations are understood, reaffirmed and consolidated. The opposite of the process described earlier appears to have happened in Leon’s case. That Leon was apparently not directly encouraged or assisted to apply to more highly ranked higher education institutions is suggestive of a subtle ‘cooling out’ process (Alexander, Bozick and Entwistle, 2008; Clark, 1960) in which ‘weakly prepared students’ (Alexander, Bozick and Entwhistle 2008, p. 373) are ‘channelled away’ from seemingly more ambitious places of study. Bathmaker and Thomas (2009) highlight the workings of institutional processes of ‘positioning’ in colleges providing both further and higher education; within these institutions, higher education provision occupies a position as higher education for ‘certain sorts of students’ (p. 122), where these ‘sorts’ contrast with those suited to elite higher education. Institutional advice and guidance processes therefore recognize and prepare these students to enter higher education through this ‘particular route’ (ibid.). Through this process, students such as Leon can be understood as already excluded from elite forms of undergraduate study prior to the application stage. This exclusion takes the form of an explicit channelling away from, or simply a lack of encouragement towards, high-status higher education options during this stage. Leon continued to experience this exclusion in a material way throughout his degree study, in his perpetual awareness of the impossible self studying at Staffordshire University. When I asked about the institutional spaces of Tobston College, Leon first described the spaces he might have occupied in Staffordshire: The Staffordshire one, I’ll not lie, that looked gorgeous, and I was ashamed. I was very, very ashamed that I didn’t get in, because everything was set up like for

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proper comic artists. Everyone had their own work stations, that they didn’t pay for. It [the work station] was given to them through the university.

The ongoing presence of the Staffordshire institutional space, which to Leon offered the shaping of a ‘proper comic artist’ subjectivity, was also an enduring reminder, to Leon, of his failure and his shame at that failure. As Alexander, Bozick and Entwhistle write in their study of ‘cooling out’ processes, structural barriers are presented and internalized as personal failure: ‘If the rules of the competition are perceived as fair, the losers have no one to blame but themselves’ (2008, p. 373). In his occupation of Tobston’s institutional spaces, therefore, Leon lived alongside the student possible self he saw himself as having failed to realize. At the end of a day at the college, he then returned to the estate he ‘can’t stand’, so that the materialities of his daily life became repetitions of impossibility, even as he continued to progress through the linear, future-oriented degree course. It is important to see geographies as structuring these impossibilities for Leon; alongside the more familiar analyses of Bourdieusian social and cultural capital that are relevant to his position in the higher education system, a geographical lens locates Leon’s spatial story within the distribution of social and educational inequality in England as well amongst the materiality of downward social mobility and institutional stratification. Constructing a narrative of successful progression through education was challenging for Leon, whose depiction of the past failures that kept him in Tobston was sustained into his imagined future. When I asked about whether he saw himself staying in Tobston in the future, he responded: Leon:  Hopefully not. No, no, no, no, hopefully not. I’d hate – let’s just say I would be depressed if I stayed here for the rest of my life. I would be depressed. Holly: 

Why’s that?

Leon:  Because I hate it. I hate this, I hate Tobston. When we went to London [on a course field trip] I loved it, purely because it was like a new, sort of like, you’re reinventing yourself. No one knows you. You could be anyone, so wiping the slate clean so you have a new life and a new place. But no, I can’t stand Tobston, where I am right now. I’d like to leave. I’d like to become marginally successful and live in a nice area but, like I said I get distracted too many times. Something will distract me where I won’t work as hard as I should be doing.

There are a series of impossibilities in this spatial story, each contradicting the other. In the first, Leon both imagined and denied the possibility of remaining

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in place, creating a placed possible self that ‘would be depressed’ if this were to happen. At the same time, both of the possibilities he imagined away from Tobston were, to some degree, represented as impossible. He drew on his recent visit to London in order to create a placed possible self in which the place he was in did not reflect his past, instead offering something ‘new’. However, he represented this as a fleeting moment of enjoyment, situated in the past, further informing his disengagement from Tobston in the present, but not fully informing a clear plan to leave. A further possible self as ‘marginally successful’ was associated with the ability to live in a ‘nice’ area, with the implications of social class that Rebecca, in Chapter 4, also used to distinguish between the ‘nice, and quiet’ areas around Tobston and those that are ‘not as good’. This possible self was represented as both resting on and made impossible by Leon’s educational subjectivity. The possibility of ‘success’ he spoke of, which may have enabled a move away from the area he hated, was success in his degree course and his subsequent career, and Leon saw this as made impossible by his perceived failings as an educational subject. In producing this spatial story of educational progression that was also place-based progression, Leon pinpointed the risks of such narratives; for those who struggle to complete undergraduate education in such localities, the loss of a possible graduate future is also the loss of a possible geographically and socially mobile future, an imagined future made all the more important by the locality itself. Leon described his progression through degree study and his development of educational subjectivity as structured through an interplay between the imagining and the denial of a placed possible self. His choice of comic art as a degree subject was prompted by his discovery of manga: As soon as I read it, and saw what it was, I was mesmerized. It felt like something, straight away. I thought, ‘I wish I’d have done my own’.

Leon’s discovery of manga was immediately followed by his imagining of a possible self as a manga artist. The past tense of this possible self represents the impossibility that Leon had come up against as he had read and learnt more about manga: I’d still love to do my own, it’s just after looking in depth into it, especially when it comes from Japan, and I’m not Japanese, I don’t speak Japanese.

Arguably, the very place-specific Japanese possible self that had drawn Leon to study for a degree was also what threatened it. The more elaborated the possible future in manga art became, the more it revealed itself as impossible,

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in direct contradiction to educational narratives of progression, as well as to literature on possible selves that suggests a more elaborated possible self is more likely to be realized (Oyserman and Fryberg, 2006) Leon reported having ‘nearly given up’ the degree course in his second year, and when I asked why, he answered that ‘I think I got a bit down, because I want to be a manga guy’. In contrast to the participants in Pizzolato’s (2007) study of university students whose career paths seem impossible, Leon had not revised or shifted his career possible self in response to its seeming (placed) impossibility. Instead, despite the fact that the impossibility of ‘want[ing]’ to be a ‘manga guy’ was the cause of his having been ‘down’, he sustained this desire as a present and ongoing possible future self. The enduring narratives of place and the intertwined impossibilities of past, present and future mobilities for Leon were powerfully present in his everyday material experience of undergraduate study. When I met Leon and interviewed him in the college’s illustration and graphic design rooms, I was struck by his unusual occupation of space. He and his closest friend on the course worked at two desks in one corner of the room, and had decorated the corkboards behind the desks with a corporate-style logo featuring both of their names, along with copies of their ongoing illustrations. In contrast, the other desks in the space were unmarked, clearly used by students as and when they were required. Leon’s almost-exaggerated commitment to the space and to a future-oriented subjectivity could be read as an attempt to replicate the dedicated space he imagined occupying at Staffordshire. There was clearly a powerful relationship, for Leon, between the materiality of a dedicated working space and the taking up of an educational subjectivity with a future, career-focused narrative. At the same time, I saw Leon’s visible and performative occupation of work space as an almost-exaggerated commitment to sustaining an educational subjectivity he himself described as fragile. This exaggeration was replicated in his account of the time he spent in the room: Me and [student] are in all the time, all the time. We’re pretty much in every day. We come in here we’re pretty much 9 till 8, so we leave at like 8pm. We’re always  the last ones here. I mean you can ask [tutors], me and [student] are always the last ones here, and we try and do as much work as we can here, and we go home purely to have some tea, go to sleep, wake up in the morning, time for round two.

Leon represented himself in this spatial story as driven and determined, contradicting his earlier suggestion that he was easily distracted. However,

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when I returned to the college four months after Leon’s interview, to conduct the second round of interviews, Leon no longer attended the college. His name and self-fashioned logo were absent from the materiality of the room, and even the memory of them seemed outlandish in the context of the other anonymous desks and work stations. I was informed by the course tutors that Leon had not formally left the course. Instead, he had stopped attending or communicating so completely that the college was left with no choice but to post a letter to his address, informing him that he was no longer a student on the course. They had received no response. The silence reported by his tutors was repeated in my contact with him; although I tried to contact Leon by phone and by email several times, I did not hear from him again. Leon’s physical, written and verbal absences from the final term of his undergraduate study served as an erasure of his previous presence. In this context, it is difficult not to read his previous occupation of space, outlasting other students and stopping only for the necessities of eating and sleeping, as an attempted resistance to the encroaching feared possible selves that threatened and ultimately overwhelmed Leon’s educational subjectivity. Leon’s spatial stories, as presented here, show a crowding of impossibilities, in which the incongruity between Leon’s educational subjectivity and his relationship to place was compounded by the structural limitations that kept him in place even as they offered a ‘way out’. There were stark spatial disparities between the place Leon felt he should live in and the place of the council estate that he hated; the spaces he imagined studying in at Staffordshire and the spaces of Tobston College; the place in which his imagined career would have been made possible; and the place in which it was understood as impossible. Importantly, the causal connections of failure that Leon drew to explain his current experience and previous decisions as ‘acceptable after all’ (Ricoeur, 1980; 1992) served to minimize and therefore to reinscribe the structural barriers he had already experienced. The coherence in his narrative of educational subjectivity came from the repeated impossibilities he described, and therefore, unusually, what became ‘unspeakable’ and unimaginable for Leon was the very narrative of progression and possibility that is expected of educational subjects. Leon’s experience also highlights the precarious potential of non-university higher education in contexts such as Tobston. The possible self offered to Leon at Tobston College was all the more important because of the multiple placed impossible selves in his place and from his past. At the same time, the loss of this possibility was all the more exaggerated when that possibility was the only one.

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Rebecca: The proximity of impossibility Rebecca’s journey through her degree course had been smoother than Leon’s, and in many ways her narratives of relationships to place and space highlight the importance and the success of dual-sector higher education. In Rebecca’s experience, non-university provision had offered a possible future that might have been unimaginable had the provision not been available. Equally, there were intricacies and complexities in these narratives that can only be seen when place, mobilities and space are considered together. Rebecca described herself as having lived ‘locally to here’ throughout her life, though she had moved between villages in the area surrounding Tobston several times. At the time of the project, she lived in the village closest to Tobston’s higher education site with her husband and children. Both her own and her husband’s parents and siblings lived in the same village, and she said with pride that her children attended the same school as their cousins on both sides of the family. Like Ryan in Chapter 4, Rebecca’s descriptions of the area highlight the local differences in what might be considered to be a single geographical area. When I asked what she thought of the area, she responded: It’s alright. There’s certain parts I wouldn’t want to live in. I love where I live now.

When I asked her to say more about the places she wouldn’t want to live in, Rebecca focused on the urban centre of Tobston itself: It’s the people. It’s just, yeah, it’s just, well, it’s not got a lot to offer in terms – Tobston town centre’s not got a great deal to offer, compared to, like, [nearest city], in terms of what shops there are. And the people that are there, you know, it’s just, yeah, it’s not great.

Rebecca’s spatial story of Tobston town centre echoes Anna’s, in Chapter 6, of ‘no prospects’ and violent, ‘uneducated’ people, from whom both participants distanced themselves. Although Rebecca was more reluctant than Anna to define exactly what it was about the ‘people’ that made her uncomfortable and situated Tobston’s failure to ‘offer’ a great deal in its range of shops, the discourses were similarly weighted with unspoken associations between social-class and urban centres. Rebecca imagined an impossible self in the place of the urban centre, alongside the ‘people’, which served to confirm her present and possible future subjectivity of belonging to the rural village she now lived in. At first glance, then, Rebecca’s relationship to place can be seen in terms of spatial stories of long-term investment in and loyalty to a locality, similar to

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those in Cahill’s (2007) and Bright’s (2011) research on young adults’ decisions to stay in place. She could also be described as performing an aspiring middleclass identity through her attention to urban and rural differences in the area, akin to participants in Benson and Jackson’s (2013) study of middle-class placemaking in Peckham, London. Importantly, both these studies feature not only relationship to place but also the intertwined relationship to material or imagined mobility. A greater investment in place, particularly in the terms of Cahill’s and Bright’s studies, makes participants in those studies less likely to move away. Rebecca’s relationship to place might therefore also be characterized through Corbett’s (2007b) theorization of mobility capital. Seen in this way, ties to family members who have also remained in place represent a lack of mobility capital that, in turn, made it less likely that Rebecca would have imagined possible selves away from her locality. In turn, that lack of imagined mobility made material or realized mobility even less likely. Given that Rebecca was unlikely to move away from the area to access higher education, and that Tobston is situated in an area of the country without a university, provision of non-university higher education in this area was vital to her accessing undergraduate study. Despite these representations of embeddedness in place, however, Rebecca’s account of her educational trajectory was marked by interruption and mobility. When I asked how she came to be studying at Tobston College, she began by explaining her departure from sixth form education after her AS Levels,3 thirteen years before she started her undergraduate study: At 17, the, the main incentive behind it was that I wanted to move out. I wanted to leave home. So that’s what I did. I got offered a full time job and I got my own flat and wanted to just live alone.

Despite her current material closeness to her own and her husband’s extended family, Rebecca related her educational past through a spatial story in which a placed possible self away from her family became the most important future for her to realize. Rebecca did not explain why this move was so important for her, and though I broached the topic again in both the first and second interviews, she made it clear that she did not want to elaborate further. Rebecca remained in the Tobston area, moving to a village ‘a couple of miles away’. This localized mobility served to achieve the mobile possible self Rebecca had imagined, and ‘AS Level’ stands for ‘Advanced Subsidiary Level’ and is the qualification gained at the end of the first year of the two-year academic preparation for higher education in England. As a standalone qualification, without combination with complete Advanced Levels, it is rarely accepted as entry to university-based higher education.

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she spoke with fondness about the career she established and the city she worked in, that she saw as having offered her ‘a bit of a student life’ because her friends were studying there while she was working. At the same time, she saw her mobility at that point in her life as having worked as a barrier to a possible self in higher education. This placed possible self endured as a narrative of unrealized mobility: If I had my time again and I was back when I was 18, I would have wanted to have gone to a large university. But I think in hindsight, you know, I was desperate to move out. But if I’d have lasted out another year and done my A Levels4 then I could’ve gone wherever I wanted, and I could’ve done my degree, and lived away from home, and had that experience.

Rebecca’s account shows how the accepted undergraduate narrative of leaving the familial home and gaining independence (Christie, 2007; Holdsworth, 2009b) has a very specific temporal moment. If a part of the narrative, such as moving out of home, is enacted at a different moment, the remaining elements of the narrative are made less possible, no matter how elaborated they may be. The barriers to traditional higher education for Rebecca were established as she realized a (locally) mobile possible future at the expense of the educational possible future she had imagined. As Rebecca explained, although the loss of this educational future did not initially stop her ‘progressing’ through her career in business analysis, she became increasingly aware of the importance of degree-level education. When looking for new job opportunities, she described realizing that I’d be able to do everything that they listed, for the same salary that I was on now, but the first thing they’d say is, ‘degree essential’. And I’m like, ‘Well I haven’t got a degree, but I can do this’, you know. And I think that was one of things that made me think, ‘Oh, this is as far as I’m going to get now.’

For Rebecca, the places of past and possible futures intersected in multiple ways. The absence of degree education from her past meant that the possibility of further career progression was limited. At the same time, her decision to study for a degree meant a return to a more distant past. In recounting her decisionmaking process, she recalled reminding herself that teaching was ‘what I always wanted to do anyway’. Rebecca therefore established an important thread of coherence and causality which connected her past to a new possible self and ‘A Level’ stands for ‘Advanced Level’, and is the qualification gained after two years of academic study prior to higher education entry in England.

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which imagined that new possible self as also pre-existing, temporally outlasting the locally mobile and educationally interrupted subjectivities she had otherwise occupied. Despite the coherence of this narrative thread and the singularity of a possible self in teaching that Rebecca traced to early secondary school, the competing placed possible selves of long-term relationship to the locality and unrealized traditional degree study from the intervening years shaped her accounts of engagement with the institutional space of the college. Rebecca was similar to several other participants in describing her interaction with the spaces of the site in terms of convenience. When I asked her to show me the spaces on the site that she used, she responded: I literally come in just before the lecture, and go home afterwards. That’s pretty much what I do.

Here, Rebecca used ‘just’ to characterize her engagement with space, suggesting that the space held a potential for further engagement that was foreclosed to her through her non-traditional, and therefore differently purposed, student status: I didn’t come to socialize as such [. . .] it’s very different to if I’d have gone to university at 18.

Rebecca continued, as discussed in Chapter 6, by pointing to the coffee shop as somewhere she used to go ‘sometimes’, before her classes were timetabled for a different building. This was the extent of the demonstration of space that Rebecca gave during the mobile interview, so that she constructed a subjectivity through a rejection of the site’s spatial possibilities. This spatial story of her use of the spaces of the site accorded with Rebecca’s reasons for having chosen to study at Tobston: The reason I chose here was mainly convenience, because I live in [village] which is the next village on [from higher education site]. So I’m very local. When I first started looking it was a case of, ‘Where is the closest place that I can do this? Because it’ll just make my life a lot easier with childcare.’

As discussed in Chapter 6, Rebecca showed how the spaces of Tobston’s higher education site offered a different kind of engagement with higher education spaces than the total spatial immersion often associated with traditional university study (Hubbard, 2009; Sage, Smith and Hubbard, 2012a). In making the decision to begin her degree study, Rebecca needed to imagine a placed possible educational subjectivity that was necessarily more divided than those of

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a traditional university student; in its proximity to her childcare arrangements, the college site enabled a transactional engagement with institutional space, driven by practicality and by her status as a ‘very local’ student. Despite this practicality and her apparent disengagement from the site, Rebecca, like Ryan and Anna in Chapter 6, expressed real attachment to the site. It formed an important part of her familial history, as she had held her marriage ceremony and reception in the function and event spaces rented out by the college on the same site. As she stated, the decision to close the site ‘wipes out a lot of our history’. Perhaps precisely because the site enabled her to sustain an educational subjectivity alongside her other placed commitments in a way that might not have been possible had she had to travel further, the site gained a lasting significance both through and despite her everyday disengagement from it. Importantly, Rebecca saw the closure of the site as limiting other placed possible futures, as well as removing the past: I’ve got friends that I’ve been working on for the last few years, trying to – they’ve got kids – and trying to get them to come and do the degree. But then I’ve said, ‘Oh, but you’ll have to go to Tobston now for it.’ So, for them, they’ll probably be less interested.

The shift in the way Rebecca represented the degree course as a possible future for others since the decision to move the provision five miles away into the town centre represents the small scales of distance that change what is possible to imagine. Particularly with the additional factor of childcare arrangements, seeing higher education as further from home was also seeing it as impossible to imagine. In imagining a future in which students like her would be ‘less interested’ in studying the degree at Tobston College, Rebecca also highlighted the fragility of her own educational subjectivity, signalling a possible different past in which her present study might have been unimaginable. Just as the coffee shop on the site became erased from her daily experience of higher education through a timetabling change, so the closure of the site as a whole shifted the possible higher education future, in the lives of her friends, towards the status of a dismissed possibility. The seemingly minor causal factor in this shift – a further distance of five miles to travel – highlights the intensified importance of the material conditions of non-university higher education, intensified because the experience of higher education in such places is unexpected, or unusual, or must be fitted in around existing spatial demands. Where dual-sector higher education occupies a more important position, it is therefore also a more frail position, more easily erased by a shift in circumstance.

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Rebecca’s educational subjectivity could be analysed through the individual lenses of place, im/mobility and space, but these were also hard to divide in her spatial stories. Her ties to place, for example, meant that she had not followed a traditional pattern of student mobility. At the same time, the fact that her resistance to staying in place when she was younger had also precluded, in her view, a possible future of university education, highlights the dangers of characterizing the local student as fixed or stuck in place. While non-university higher education acted as a conclusion in Rebecca’s coherent narratives, as the form of higher education made possible by both her ties to place and her movement from and within place, her use of space served to show how reliant on circumstance this conclusion was. In her reliance on, and deeply felt attachment to, the site’s convenience and proximity to home, Rebecca showed how easily her undergraduate education might have made the shift from possible to oncepossible. In a local area without universities, this shift would position nonuniversity higher education alongside the traditional university, imagined only as unimaginable.

Brian: Local possibilities Describing himself as having lived in the same county ‘all his life’, Brian lived in a town ten miles from Sebford. His parents owned a photographic supply shop in another town a further five miles in the same direction from Sebford, and Brian was in the process of inheriting this business from his father, having worked there with his father since leaving Sebford College. He completed a Higher National Diploma (HND)5 in photography at Sebford College after leaving school, ‘back when that was the most you could do’. Without a degree course to progress to in the local area, Brian applied to Glasgow School of Art, and completed a foundation year there before deciding not to continue because he felt the course did not allow enough of a focus on photography. Returning home, he did not take his studies further, but reinforced his ties to Sebford College, so that a rejection of higher education at the time was intertwined with a re-investment in the place he loved. He attended the degree shows at Sebford College at the end of every year and kept in 5

A Higher National Diploma is a higher education qualification offered in a technical subject, almost always at a further education college rather than a university. The diploma is equivalent to the first two years of an undergraduate degree, but progression from an HND to the final year or years of a degree course is often highly complicated. For example, Brian was required to enter the undergraduate degree in Year 2 despite holding a qualification equivalent to the completion of Year 2.

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contact with his HND tutors, who at the time of this project run the degree course. After seeing him again at one of the degree shows, the tutors contacted him to offer him a place in the second year of the degree, and he took up the place the following academic year, fourteen years after completing his HND. His longterm commitment to photography was intertwined with his investment in place, so that ultimately it was this local capital that prompted his decision to return to higher education. Sebford College’s change in undergraduate provision in the fourteen years since Brian’s HND made a graduate future possible for Brian to imagine, where it simply was not before that change. Implied but unspoken within Brian’s narrative was the impossibility of leaving the area again for degree study; this impossibility might be cast as educational immobility, but also speaks to the positive impact of local capital. The change in Sebford College’s provision also meant a change in the placed possible selves available to Brian, so that he balanced a previous possible self for whom degree education was not necessary against a new degree-educated possible self. He expressed ambivalence towards the necessity of this new possible self throughout the two interviews, repeating at several points that ‘I got asked on here [the degree course]. I didn’t plan to do it.’ While Rebecca’s narrative demonstrated the necessity of non-university provision as a ‘second chance’ at degree education, particularly for the instrumental purposes of achieving her career ambitions, Brian resisted any such implication of reliance upon college undergraduate provision. When I asked what it would mean to him to gain his degree, he responded that I mean, I’ll be chuffed to have a degree but it won’t make me think that I’ve gained anything in my style, because since coming here I’ve just photographed in my own style and it’s been accepted.

While other students emphasized the outside commitments, such as parenthood, which they balanced alongside their educational subjectivity, Brian narrated his enduring identity as a photographer as external to and outlasting his more temporary educational subjectivity. In doing so, he sustained the narrative in which the HND, as the ‘most you could do’ was also the most he needed, even as he continued to invest his time and commitment in the final year of his degree study. This contradictory and ambivalent spatial story of educational subjectivity was therefore constructed through the temporal developments of dual-sector provision in a town without a university, where the levels of higher education offered at the local college determine what is possible to imagine in higher education. As can be seen in Brian’s rejection of the necessity of his degree,

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these temporal policy developments, in addition to limiting or enabling material access to degree courses, shape collective, placed narratives of undergraduate education and its purposes. As an educational subject whose degree study had been first limited and then enabled by changes to provision in Sebford, Brian narrated both possible selves simultaneously and in dialogue with each other. Brian’s occupation of the institutional spaces of the college had similar ambivalences. He referred obliquely to the community of practice he has found through the degree course, stating that ‘I’m aware that after college, I’ll be on my own, as I was before’. While emphasizing the stability of his graduate possible self, which was strongly connected to his pre-degree life, Brian also represented the degree experience itself as having offered something transitory but different. Again, this resisted the narrative imperative to connect educational experience to lasting change or progression, instead signalling an educational present that is complete in itself. Similarly, he enthused about the expertise of the tutors on the degree course, and about the facilities offered by the college, talking me carefully through each piece of equipment in the darkroom during our mobile interview. He recounted his experience, as part of his job with his family’s business, of fitting photography equipment for another further education college in the area, which gave him the opportunity to compare the facilities to Sebford’s: Their lenses were all knackered and stuff like that. The sink was the size of a kitchen sink. It was horrible. So seeing this, when I came in here then, and it being this standard, I was like, ‘Oh’ [exclamation].

Again, Brian’s spatial story was situated in his enduring identity and expertise as a photographer, able to distinguish quality of equipment, but this account also described a moment in which new possibilities opened up as he saw the material spaces of the college. As with the reference to being alone after the degree finished, there was an implication that the degree had offered Brian an important physical space to work collectively with tutors and peers. In this space, and drawing on his expertise, Brian narrated the material practice of doing his degree as a previously unimagined positive possible self that was separate from his resistance to the symbolic value of the degree itself. Although Brian saw the well-equipped photography spaces of the college in a positive light, particularly against his experience of those of other colleges, he defined the available social spaces much more negatively: There’s no real, what’s it called, union bar. There’s no student union where you go in and all have a laugh, and the music’s blaring out and there’s drunk 18

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year olds there, and there’s pissed 45 year olds who are in the corner, you know. There’s no, there’s nothing like that. It’s very serious environment. It’s just not the 70s, is it? Not that I was in the 70s, but that’s what you want art school to be like. You want smoke coming out of every room, you know. You want paint everywhere.

Although Brian was clear that he had no previously imagined undergraduate possible self, he experienced the physical spaces of the college alongside and against an ‘art school’. He situated the detail of this imagined space in the temporally impossible 1970s but narrated its absence in the present: ‘that’s what you want’. The mingled social experiences he described as missing from and limited by the ‘serious’ environment of the college seem at odds with his single-minded focus on photography and with his rejection of degree education as formative of artistic identity. At the same time, this spatial story sustained consistent rejection of instrumental aspects of degree education, suggesting that even, or especially, where non-university higher education intervenes to provide education where there has been a lack, that lack is of something more than an opportunity to gain qualifications. In this way, Brian was not dissimilar to other participants in the study in implying that dual-sector higher education spaces often carry multiple significances. Their functional design (Smith, 2017) works to make possible educational subjectivities that have been unimaginable. At the same time, the very functional focus of the spaces evokes the loss of possible selves that are unrealized but closely imagined according to dominant public narratives of student spaces and university experiences (Reynolds, 2014). For Brian, the absent ‘art school’ and union spaces of the college were closely connected to narratives of Sebford as a place. Although he termed his home town, ten miles from Sebford, ‘lovely – a nice place with local folk’, Brian was more negative about Sebford: It’s changed a hell of a lot. I don’t know. I don’t think they know what they want to do with it. I don’t think they can see where it’s going. There’s nowhere to drink now as a student. You can’t go out, and there’s no community.

Like Richard and Robert in Chapter 4, Brian positioned Sebford in a temporal moment of indecision, between its re-shaping as something other than what it has been. In Brian’s account, this indecision stretched into the imagined future, so that what Sebford lacks above all else is a collective sense of purpose or progression. The absence of places to ‘go out’ to as a student and the corresponding lack of community are all categorized as a result of the ‘changed’ town, which, like the

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social spaces of the college, Brian experienced in the present against what had been lost from the past, and therefore also the future that might have been. Brian’s contradictory relationship to place, which saw his commitment to the local area define the undergraduate options available to him while he also described the impossibility of occupying a student subjectivity in the town, also extended to his imagined career future. When I asked about his plans for the future, Brian reiterated his resistance to a narrative of educational progression, depicting his imagined future as unchanged by degree study: My intention is, and it always has been, is to display photographs, have an art gallery.

While making it clear that this ambition was longstanding, Brian also found it difficult to say where he imagined opening an art gallery: I wouldn’t have it in Sebford, I wouldn’t have it in [nearby town], wouldn’t have it in [another nearby town]. I’d have it in [home town], but it’s quite a little town, a really small town place. I wouldn’t go over to [city]. There’s a bit too much there now.

Brian’s placed possible self as gallery-owner occupied an impossible place, between the towns he disliked, the home town he liked for precisely the ‘small town’ feel that would make a gallery difficult to maintain and the city that already had too much competition. The same narratives of place that allowed him to simultaneously dismiss and realize a degree-educated possible self also sustained an ongoing investment in the area alongside an enduring imagined future that was at odds with it. This possible self, which became more elaborated as it became seemingly more impossible, was representative of the complexities of Brian’s spatial stories. Non-university higher education, in this narrative, had offered Brian an educational subjectivity that he saw himself as never having needed but having been glad to find, as well as evoking a newly imagined and newly lost student experience. Brian can be seen as subject to changes in undergraduate provision at this local level, as well as to collective narratives of place into which this provision seeks to intervene and with which it often therefore sits at odds. Maintained throughout his account was a longstanding commitment to place and investment in local capital that had led to a degree future, and been sustained through this future. The multiple placed possible and impossible selves produced through this mingling of residual and changing narratives are evidence of the perpetual re-making of educational subjectivity in a place where higher education is not a given narrative conclusion.

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Meera: Im/possible im/mobilities The introduction to this book began with Meera’s response to my question about her choice of Sebford College for her undergraduate study: ‘I get travel sick.’ Chapter 5 explored this aspect of Meera’s interview in more detail. Here, I build on the analysis in Chapter 5 by creating a more detailed representation of Meera’s educational experience as she explained it to me. Meera was unusual amongst the participants focused on in this chapter, in that she gave an account of a relatively coherent educational subjectivity, with relatively little conflict between the possible selves she imagined. At the same time, however, Meera’s interviews touched on competing discourses that I recognized as typical to those explored in research on access to and progression through higher education. Like the other participants represented in this chapter, Meera was an example of the double geographical and educational disadvantage of higher education ‘cold spots’ in England, in which the small number of available higher education options within the immediate locality is further reinforced by the increased likelihood of remaining in place. However, as these spatial stories show, there are further complexities to be explored for each student, and Meera in particular highlights the ways in which race and religion intersect with the spatial in constructing educational possibilities. Meera lived with her extended family of parents, siblings, siblings-in-law and nieces and nephews, in what she described as an ‘Asian-based area’ on the outskirts of Sebford town centre. She was one of three BAME6 students in the study, and the only participant to describe her home and its immediate locality in terms of its racial population. This description highlighted the racially ‘split’ nature of the town as it was described by students in Chapter 4, as well as showing how often majority-White places and spaces are unmarked as such (Lundström, 2010). Because Meera felt bound to mark her locality in racial terms, her implication in discourses of division in the town was different to that of the White students who spoke of these divisions, and who were able to both describe and distance themselves from racialized discourses. Despite this difference, Meera’s account of her educational trajectory had strong similarities to others discussed in this chapter. In particular, the unspoken impossibility of leaving either her local area or the family home in order to take up degree study showed a relationship to place and mobility that resembled Brian’s: I got into [nearest university]. I got in, and I thought, I’m not travelling. No way. I couldn’t do that, and I was quite surprised here by what they teach because I Black, Asian or minority ethnic

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thought it would just be, just books really. So I’m quite surprised that the second year of this course is mainly about psychology as well. It was actually really interesting. I’d never pick it, but I was glad that I’d done a bit of it because it was really interesting.

Like Brian, Meera represented aspects of her degree study at Sebford College through a discourse of happenstance, or ‘surprise’ in which the seemingly circumstantial details of degree course content were also representative of a larger intertwining of possibility and impossibility in higher education. In this discourse, because the degree at Sebford College is the only possible option, it is also not exactly chosen, or ‘pick[ed]’. The university undergraduate possible self imagined by Meera turned out to be impossible to realize because she could not travel. Meera therefore narrated an educational subjectivity that was open to new possibilities, precisely because the available possibilities were narrowed by place and mobility. As is clear from Meera’s spatial story of the impossibility of travelling to the nearest university, she saw the possibilities of degree study as structured through what was available in Sebford. Both the existence and the content of non-university provision in Sebford therefore determined for Meera, as for Brian, what was ‘the most you can do’. The importance of higher education provision in Sebford was reiterated throughout Meera’s interviews. She described herself as a ‘town girl’ who could not live in a city several times and drew on past visits to her grandmother and sister in large cities to explain her resistance to moving away: My sister, she has to go in the car to go to a corner shop, just to get a packet of crisps. Well, I think, I could never do that. No, no I couldn’t.

As Holton and Finn’s analysis of everyday mobilities (2018) suggests, the placed im/possible self that Meera imagined and dismissed required a different kind of mobility than she was used to, but this dismissal did not make her immobile. Instead it was important to the coherence of her subjectivity as a ‘town girl’ that living in a city would not allow her the same kinds of mobility that the town enabled. In discussing her future career as a teacher, she was similarly concerned with the kinds of mobility that would make this placed possible self impossible: Whilst you’re working in the city, you’ve got to set off like an hour and a half before hand just to not hit traffic and I think that’s so bad. I mean if I was to teach, say if I did my PGCE7 at [local school] and they do give me the job, I can Postgraduate Certificate of Education, a national teaching qualification undertaken after completion of undergraduate study.

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just walk to work. I wouldn’t need to worry about anything like that, or driving, or paying parking, or paying for petrol.

In this elaborated spatial story of her possible self as a trainee teacher, two contrasting mobile futures worked together. In the first feared future, the imagined mobility required by the city involved extended time travelling and the practicalities of managing a car. In the second desired future, Meera was able to maintain her current mobility within and around Sebford, walking between home and work. Both placed possible selves included mobility, so that for Meera, to remain in Sebford to begin her teaching career was not to be immobile or ‘fixed’ in place (Jackson, 2012) but to retain the mobility she currently had. Imagined and lived mobility was crucial to Meera’s understanding of the places she had experienced. When I asked whether she liked living in Sebford, Meera again focused on the possible mobilities she saw as enabled by the size of the town: I think Sebford generally is a good town to live in because you don’t really need a car. Everything’s pretty much in walking distance, which is a good thing.

As Meera’s accounts of place demonstrated, the challenges and complexities of local higher education provision are that distance, locality and mobility are highly subjective. Meera’s decision to attend dual-sector provision rather than the nearest university was based on the kinds of mobility that were possible for her to imagine. Although the difference between her imagining walking or driving to her place of study was based on relative distance, it was not the distance itself that delimited possibility, but the mode of transport required by the distance. Underlying this distinction between possible and impossible mobilities was an attachment to place, in which mobility played an important, but not the only, role. Although Meera’s spatial stories of her relationship to Sebford as a place centred largely on the ease with which she was able to move around it, she also described the strong social ties she had there: I’m really close with my friends. They are on the same level as my family, and I don’t think I could ever get too far away from them. They are like a huge part of my life, so I definitely want to stay in or around Sebford.

Like Rebecca, whose spatial proximity to her extended family signified and sustained her commitment to them, and made moving away was unimaginable, social relationships were fundamental to Meera’s placed possible self and the

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positive local capital associated with it. The ‘close[ness]’ she described here was both relational and geographical, and reinforced by a feared im/possible self in which this relational closeness would be broken by a spatial movement ‘too far away’. This investment in relationships, sustained by a shared commitment to remaining in place, again demonstrated a kind of local capital that is distinct from and contrasts with Corbett’s (2007b) mobility capital. Meera’s ongoing commitment to place can therefore be viewed in positive terms, in possible selves that retained the freedom of mobility she was used to, and that sustained social relationships. As noted earlier, however, Meera was also one of a minority of the study’s participants to identify as BAME, and as Muslim, and she saw these particular identities as also framing her imagined future. As she explained when I asked if beginning her teaching career would also mean leaving the family home: In our culture we live at home till we get married. So no rent, no mortgage, nothing like that yet.

As she did when describing her ‘Asian-based’ local area, Meera saw it as necessary to mark her Muslim culture, showing that she understood this association between marriage and leaving home as different from a dominant or unmarked other ‘culture’. Although, as Bhopal (2010; 2016) and Ahmad (2001) suggest, there is no simple or homogenous relationship between the decisions to attend higher education, leave home, marry or begin a career for Muslim women, Meera was clear that her ‘culture’ was a causal and unquestionable factor in her remaining at home until marriage. Therefore, although Ahmad’s study, for example, cites Muslim female participants for whom undergraduate study has been an opportunity to leave home, for Meera having non-university provision within her home town was fundamental to the possibility of her accessing higher education at all. Given her long-held ambition to teach English at secondary school level, which Meera described as dating back to her own secondary school experience, the existence of this provision in an area of the country without a university became enabling of both a degreeeducated subjectivity and a career possible self. As in the examples of Brian and Rebecca, non-university higher education enabled the sustaining of local capital alongside and in addition to a degree education, where these would otherwise be impossible. In Meera’s description of ‘our culture’, she signalled her awareness of a different, dominant narrative, in which leaving home was not always associated with marriage. This awareness was brought up at other moments in Meera’s interview,

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as she made a connection between progressing through her undergraduate studies and gaining independence: For the first year, [tutor] was always saying, ‘Stop calling me “Miss”.8 You’re an adult.’ And I was like, ‘What on earth?’ But I got off the habit, and I feel that they do teach us to be independent, but I find that quite daunting. Half of these people [the other students on the course] are already living on their own, but I obviously still live with my parents. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, and being independent is a bit, it is harder for me than most, I’d say. So I think in a way they are teaching me independent skills for life, not for just the course.

As Christie (2007) highlighted in her study of undergraduate mobility and ‘local’ students, moving away from a locality and out of a parental home is often associated with gaining skills characterized as ‘independence’. Often, and against this dominant narrative, Christie argues, these skills were more common to ‘local’ students, some of whom were balancing paid and academic work, managing childcare and had long since left the parental home. Meera’s spatial story complicated this distinction further, showing the diversity of these markers of independence even within the category of ‘local student’, particularly in localities of racial and religious diversity. For Meera, the markers of independence included living away from parents and having children, and her difference from some of her peers in this regard was, as she described, due in part to the traditions of her ‘culture’. Her description of a seminar scene in which her tutor repeatedly resisted being named according to the terms of address associated with schooling also recognizes a diversity of ways in which independence is realized. Meera saw the interaction, and the tutor’s naming of her, Meera, as an ‘adult’ as formative of a more abstract form of independence than can be fully captured by such categories as leaving the parental home. This more abstract and more incremental gaining of independence was situated within the institutional spaces of the college’s higher education site, in which the materialities suggested similarity to other educational environments and relationships, but the interaction demanded a different engagement. The process of renaming allowed Meera to create an ‘independent’ placed possible self even as her living and marital situations remained unchanged. Just as Meera saw the interactions within college spaces as defined by her status and experience outside of these spaces, she also gave an account of how the racial divisions in the town were reflected in the classroom. Meera took time ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ are polite forms of address used by students to teachers in schools in the UK.

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away from her degree study in her second year through illness and returned to the course in a different year group to repeat her second year. In the following excerpt, she narrated the moment that she decided to sit with the only other person in this year group that she knew. As her description of the moment suggests, this other student was White: We were quite segregated, so like the Asians on one side and the others on the other side. It was quite segregated. So in this class, the only person I knew, she repeated her year as well. So when I came back I sort of sat on that side, and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, there’s an Asian sat on that side.’

Though several participants described the divided or ‘split’ spatial dynamics of Sebford, Meera alone referred to how these dynamics were felt and lived in the classroom. Again, this sensitivity to racial difference can be seen as at least in part due to her minority ethnic racial identity, which denied her the privilege of not seeing racial dynamics (Bhopal, 2018). From her description, this moment and the responses to it are represented as significant or even emancipatory, as she enacted a previously impossible or unimaginable subject position. She performatively occupied space that was designated as White only and forced a recognition of the previously unspoken racial divide in the room. The almost idealized role of higher education in this moment is in offering the possible spaces for new or once-unimaginable possible selves that challenge what is possible outside of those spaces. While the homogenized spaces of university higher education are seen as reproductive of social divisions in research on student halls (Holton, 2016a) and ‘studentified’ localities (Sage, Smith and Hubbard, 2012a), the smaller scale of dual-sector provision and its specificity to the local area appeared to offer other possibilities. At the same time, however, Meera’s participation in higher education had positioned her in a ‘segregated’ minority, outside her local ‘Asian-based’ area, and the responsibility for moving out of ‘segregat[ion]’, at least in this moment, lay entirely with her. In either reading of this spatial interaction, it is clear that the spaces of Sebford’s higher education site were shaped by and shaping of racialized interactions that both reflected and stemmed from the town’s divisions. The placed possible selves available within these spaces, especially to minority ethnic students, were as necessarily racialized subjects, just as giving an account of the town required invoking a narrative of immigration and division. As discussed at the beginning of this section, Meera gave a coherent account of her educational subjectivity. She was unusual amongst the participants in not voicing conflicting temporal narratives of past and unrealized educational possible selves, and in imagining a clear progression through and beyond her

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undergraduate education. Her unequivocal attachment to the possible mobilities of towns in general and her social embeddedness in Sebford in particular highlight the importance of non-university higher education as the only higher education provision in this cold spot. The impossibility of another option was occasionally voiced but often unspoken, though powerfully obvious, throughout Meera’s interviews. The linear narrative that is conditional of her recognition as an educational subject was therefore itself conditional upon the availability of ‘local’ provision. ‘Local’, in Meera’s terms, was made up of the combined and intertwined factors of possible and impossible mobile selves, distance and narratives of place, all of them difficult to capture and even more complex to quantify. As well as highlighting the specificity of what is meant by ‘local’, Meera’s interviews show how occupying a ‘local’ student subjectivity need not prohibit gaining skills of independence often associated with traditional undergraduate mobility. Rather, Meera’s account insisted upon a diversity of definition both of the understanding of independence and of the ‘local’ student and their life experiences. In Meera’s spatial stories, institutional space in a ‘local’ college emerged as distinct within – but not divided from – the social realities of its immediate locality, so that the category of ‘local’ is expanded and complicated still further. Meera’s spatial stories, like those of each of the four students focused on in this chapter, are specific to her experiences. There are common narrative threads through these diverse stories; however, the clearest of these is that they all offer a challenge to single or simple categorizations of student characteristics. Meera, Brian and Rebecca, for example, had in common strong relationships to their local areas that could be seen as ties keeping them in place and limiting their current and future opportunity. These ties, though, could also be seen in terms of positive connections to family, friends and employment. While none of the four students in this chapter had made a permanent move away from their home locality, Leon, Rebecca and Brian had all been mobile in smaller or less permanent ways that might have gone unnoticed if the normative model of undergraduate mobility was the only lens applied; though they could be defined as ‘local’ students, mobility represented a significant shift in educational trajectory for each of them. All four of these students emphasized the instrumental nature of their engagements with the higher education spaces in Tobston and Sebford colleges, while at the same time developing connections to the spaces that contradicted these accounts. In the cases of Brian and Meera, in particular, these engagements with space also challenged common narratives of non-university students; Brian found the community of practice far more important than the achievement of a degree qualification in contrast to the expected motivations

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of non-university students, and Meera associated a realization of independence with the learning rather than the social spaces of higher education, in contrast to wider societal understandings.

Conclusion The narratives in this chapter demonstrate what can be learnt from combining the factors of place, mobilities and space in order to understand educational subjectivity. Within and across the larger individual narratives, the plurality of spatial stories demonstrates the multiple ways in which aspects of the spatial structure educational experience. Similarly, the seemingly distinct imagined possible selves in career, family or educational life have in common a locatedness in place and amongst space, as well as representing the role played by temporalities of im/possibility in student subjectivities. Taken together, these factors highlight a constellation of spatiotemporalities that combine to constitute the nuances of educational subjectivity, and specifically of the role of dual-sector provision in these educational subjectivities. Throughout these spatial stories, the ‘placed possible selves’ concept highlights how closely possibility and impossibility are related to definitions of locality. When the ‘local’ is understood as a subjective intertwining of ties to place, lived and imagined mobilities and interactions with educational space, its complexity – as well as its vulnerability to broad or national-level shifts in definition – is revealed. To describe Sebford and Tobston colleges as offering the ‘only possible’ local undergraduate provision is also to see them as making higher education an additional possibility in the maintenance of local capital. Non-university higher education is therefore positioned within spatial stories of the local, and the narrative construction of what is locally possible. As this chapter has shown, such analysis requires attention to what is made impossible and lived as impossible alongside past, present and future possibilities. This interaction of the possible and impossible at times highlights the enduring dominance of traditional modes of degree study in England, and in this regard dual-sector higher education offers a rejection of or resistance to these dominant understandings. At other times, seeing non-university provision as the ‘only possible’ higher education for these students risks a discourse of individual or institutional deficit. This chapter, and indeed the book as a whole, argue that the language of deficit is better applied to the geographical inequalities of a stratified higher education system, through which possibility is determined by place in all of its material and narrative complexity.

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Introduction What does it mean to say that place structures student experiences of higher education? How can place, and the related factors of mobilities and educational space, be part of analysing educational inequality? And is it possible to argue that temporality is a necessary part of this analysis too? These are the questions with which this book began, and which it has sought to answer by looking beyond the traditional university, at non-university higher education in England. Because this kind of higher education is ‘on the margins’ (Scott, 2009) of the higher education system, it offers a view of the taken-for-granted assumptions and the endemic inequalities of that system. In particular, for the purposes of this book, the context of non-university higher education de-naturalizes the spatial and temporal conditions of higher education. These conditions were set out in the book’s introduction, and the subsequent chapters have explored each of them in greater analytical detail. Each condition can be captured by an aspect of the word ‘local’, whose multiple significations have been a central focus of this book. ‘Local’ describes an institution’s position in a stratified system, as well as in a geographically unequal distribution of higher education institutions; ‘local’ characterizes a proud tradition in English further education as well as in non-university education in its multiple forms globally (Elsner, Boggs and Irwin 2008), but is more pejorative in university higher education discourse; a ‘local’ student is one who has not relocated in order to study for a degree; the college that is ‘local’ to the ‘local’ student is both near to their home and in some way representative of their local area; a college that caters for a majority of ‘local’ students organizes its social spaces around their instrumental, cursory uses of institutional space; a college in a ‘local’ area of post-industrialization both offers and disrupts ‘local’ narratives of the future. As is clear from this list, which could be considerably longer, the word ‘local’ takes a number of roles in higher education discourses. In some instances, the word is used euphemistically; in others, it is more explicitly pejorative. All

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uses of the word refer to something other than, and something more abstract than, a geographical area. All uses of the word are also useful reminders that higher education happens in places, times and spaces, and that structural inequalities determine the relationships between places, times, spaces and higher education. The multiple uses of the word ‘local’ also highlight the paradoxes of the term. While ‘local’ appears to refer to a specific geographical area, it can also be used to generalize. A ‘local’ student is from the area around the higher education institution in question, and that area has its own specific definition. At the same time, ‘local students’ is a grouping applied to students in countries with traditions of undergraduate mobility. Used in this way, it is often cited in opposition to ‘traditional’ students and could therefore refer to any geographical area. The students in question are defined by their relationship to the ‘local’ college or to an expected pattern of mobility, but the college could in fact be located anywhere and the pattern of mobility is nationally prescribed. This book argues that any instance of the ‘local’ has its own localized specificity, and that exploring specificity can be a productive way of understanding the general. This approach has enabled an expansion of the often-homogenized category of the non-university student; this expansion moves beyond references to the ‘local’ student at the ‘local’ college by identifying the complexities in each of those classifications. The book closes by identifying four key challenges that summarize the work of the book as a whole, and that also reach beyond Non-University Higher Education itself to future research on higher education and inequality. I use the term ‘challenges’ because these arguments do not offer simple solutions and are not intended to represent the end of a discussion. Instead, the arguments agitate at the edges of the ways that higher education is understood, at times suggesting a different way of framing the conversation and at times asking for a different conversation altogether. The first of these considers the conceptual framework used in the book, arguing that this framework could be applied in other ways and to different higher education contexts. The subsequent challenges address in turn: discourses of university-based higher education, student mobilities, and the association between immobility and disadvantage in turn. The overall finding of the book, and one that can be taken forward to policy discussions, is that ‘local’ should be used carefully in planning and providing higher education; the word should be locally defined, rather than externally prescribed, and its definition should lead to nuanced understandings of what makes the difference between the possible and the impossible at a localized level.

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Placed possible selves This aspect of the book sought to answer, rather than proffer, a challenge. This challenge asks whether it is possible to analyse the spatial and the temporal conditions of higher education. And, is it possible to do so in a way that acknowledges specificity but that can be extrapolated beyond the specific? The response to this challenge has been to develop the concept of the ‘placed possible self ’. This concept sees the possible self as a particular type of narrative of educational subjectivity – one that is told through spatial stories. Spatial stories, according to de Certeau’s (1984) theorization, perform two functions. The first is to define places. This process of definition is enacted repeatedly, perpetually, by everyone, in a way that echoes the process of creating national boundaries and claiming territories. It is enacted when a place is described as a particular kind of place, or as offering particular possibilities. It draws boundaries implicitly, by sharing a mutual understanding of where a place begins and ends. It defines through a process of opposition, by defining a place as distinct from another place, as one kind of place because it is not another kind. The second function of the spatial story is to locate the subject in place. In defining a place, the subject also defines themselves in relation to it. ‘I belong in this place because it is this kind of place’, the subject says. Or, ‘Since it has become this kind of place, I am not planning to stay.’ Subject and place are narrated simultaneously through the spatial story, and every subject has many different spatial stories that each positions them differently within their locality. This book complicates the spatial story by arguing that in educational contexts there are three particularly important elements to definitions of place. First, there is place itself – belonging to place, characteristics of place, collective, shared, gendered, sexualized, racialized histories of place. Secondly, there is mobility within or beyond place, which is often based on conflicting relationships of loyalty to or imagined distance from place. Thirdly, there are the educational spaces that are located within a place, and these in turn are shaped by the ways that education is narrated in that place, and by the kinds of movements within and from a place. While each of these aspects of the spatial can be seen separately, they also overlap to collectively form a subject’s spatial stories of their relationship to higher education. The concept of the placed possible self explicitly refers to the possible selves concept (Markus and Nurius, 1986), which I explored in detail in Chapter 2. My approach to possible selves is defined against existing approaches which are  oriented towards psychological rather than sociological analyses.

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For  instance, I am not looking at behaviour and how behaviour might be influenced by feared or hoped for selves. I do not see feared and hoped for selves as consciously knowable or easily delineated. I do not use the language of ‘self ’, with its underlying concepts of self-efficacy and emotional valence. While there is useful research using the possible selves concept defined in this way, there is also risk involved in these definitions of self and temporality. The risk is that the self becomes an individualized problem and the source of the solution, and that this process excludes discussions of power and structural inequality. Nevertheless, this book does use the possible selves concept. The concept provides a powerful way of understanding the ways that subjectivities are shaped and made recognizable in educational contexts. A knowable future, one that is possible to clearly articulate and which is being worked towards, is an expected and prescribed discourse for educational subjects (Oyserman, Terry and Bybee, 2002). This is particularly the case as subjects move from compulsory to postcompulsory educational contexts and must account for their choice to study further (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997; Reay, David and Ball, 2005). Therefore, although my study does not use the concept in the ways outlined earlier, it is about those ways of seeing the self, and about the discursive power of ‘selfhood’ and ‘the future’. Problematizing and interrogating the linear, coherent account of the self and the narrative connections made between present and future, this study also explores that kind of account in detail. Rather than dismiss the possible selves concept, then, this research has acknowledged the way that its logic underpins educational contexts and has de-naturalized this logic. An important part of this process has been to see the possible selves concept as an inherently narrative construct, and therefore to use theories of narrative from Ricoeur (1980; 1992) and Butler (1997) alongside possible selves. These theorists offer a way of understanding the processes involved  in creating and maintaining a narrative of subjectivity, such as establishing causal connections between events in that narrative and narrating what is recognizable in any given context. It is context, and especially the context of place, that is fundamental to the use of the possible selves concept in this book. Narratives of the future are also spatial stories, narrating the subject in relation to a place, and a place in turn as having particular characteristics that mark it out from another place. The placed possible self is a conceptual framework that acknowledges the role of the future in contemporary higher education contexts and asks how futures are imagined differently (and unequally) according to spatial stories of place, mobility and space. As a conceptual framework, it is a response to the challenge of taking account of spatiotemporal conditions in

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higher education; it also offers a challenge to other researchers of higher education and beyond to use or develop the framework further, to explore the structural conditions of higher education in similar ways and in other contexts. Narratives of student mobility, for example, are similar to those in England in a variety of international contexts, but where these intersect with remote geographies in countries such as Canada or Australia, there are different spatial stories to tell. Where there are policy initiatives that incentivize outward international student mobility such as in the Republic of Ireland or China, there are more still.

The dominance of university-based higher education narratives The ubiquitous presence of the university in a project that explicitly looked away from the university was both surprising and sobering. As the title of this book suggests, moving away from the language of university proves very difficult, especially when different dual-sector systems each articulate their relationship to universities slightly differently. This second challenge therefore asks whether it is possible to define or even discuss higher education without reference to the university. The strength of the narratives that constitute normative university-based higher education experiences in England was demonstrated in the imagined ‘other lives’ of the student participants in the study on which this book is based. These ‘other lives’ were not simply degree studies at a university rather than a further education college. Instead, they were spatial stories of traditional undergraduate mobility, often imagined at a distance from the locality in which the student participants had in fact studied for their degree. At a conceptual level, these stories highlight the ways in which the placed possible selves concept can be used to explore complex imagined futures in non-linear temporalities; the narratives were of impossible futures, but sustained into the present as lost or once-possible selves (Stevenson, 2018) against which current educational subjectivities were defined. This conceptual work was important in showing the power and persistence of associations between undergraduate study and perceived mobility. Even where undergraduate mobility had not been experienced, participants saw their trajectories as having deviated or differed from the normative narrative. Given the prevalence of ‘studentification’ discourses in so many national higher education systems from Chile to Canada, it is important to articulate the experiences of students who are excluded from this narrative for any number of reasons, but who continue to live amongst and alongside the narrative nonetheless.

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These narratives of mobility were also intertwined with the local specificity of the higher education ‘cold spot’. In this project, the ‘cold spots’ in question were post-industrial towns, but the question of unequal higher education geographies and their place-specific legacies extends into discussions of remote and rural higher education, as well as into the status associated with rural branches of metropolitan university campuses. These enquiries bring together national contexts as diverse as Kenya, Australia, the United States and the islands of the Scottish Hebrides. In the towns of Tobston and Sebford, where higher education was absent from the architectural landscape and the material experience of place, travelling for undergraduate study was both more necessary and less likely than in the ‘hot spots’ of university cities. The prominence of the university as an imagined material and mobile experience was therefore all the more pronounced in these places, due to its historical absence. The university lecture hall, filled with hundreds of undergraduate students, was frequently called up in contrast to the spaces of nonuniversity higher education in both student and tutor interviews. This imagined space did complex work in these narratives, characterizing a homogenized idea of the university in contrast to non-university higher education, and therefore signifying both the absence of the university and the necessity of dual-sector provision. In this necessity, narratives of place and education combined with the figure of the local student to produce an understanding of the kinds of higher education spaces that were needed by and accessible to the non-university higher education student. While the local non-university higher education student is understood in opposition to the traditionally perceived-as-mobile university student, their occupation of space is similarly difficult to disentangle from understandings of the university and its spaces. The study of higher education ‘on the margins’ (Scott, 2009) both geographically and hierarchically therefore throws into relief dominant and pervasive national narratives of higher education; these narratives operate spatially through the ways that locality, mobility and materiality constitute educational subjectivities, and they dominate the language and the experience of higher education whether at a university or not.

Moving beyond immobility Where there are traditional national patterns of leaving the family home in order to study in countries such as England, the United States, China or South Africa, students who follow this pattern are seen as not just geographically but also educationally mobile. In the binary distinctions which are often drawn between

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traditional and non-traditional students, students who have not followed this pattern are seen as immobile, geographically and educationally. This challenge therefore asks whether it is possible to discuss mobility without invoking a binary opposite of immobility. In addition to its reductive and over-simplifying qualities, the terms of this binary opposition construct a deficit narrative for the ‘local’ student in a national context like England, reinscribing a particular and particularly exclusionary kind of mobility as the only recognized form of educational mobility. The narrative of choice of higher education institution is always a spatial story, one that comes to signify a larger propensity towards movement or fixity on the part of the student, their everyday lives and their educational and career futures. However, like Holton and Finn’s (2018) study of the ‘everyday mobilities’ of local or commuter students, this book has demonstrated that such students are likely to be highly geographically mobile in everyday ways. Their journeys to and from their higher education institutions, as well as their management of often preexisting external commitments such as family or employment, mean that their days often include several different journeys. By contrast, in the ‘studentified’ spaces of the university town or city (Brookfield, 2019), much less day-to-day movement is required in order to travel between living, educational and social spaces. Students who might be characterized as immobile because they have not left their locality in order to study can therefore also be seen as highly locally mobile, a finding which problematizes the binary distinction between mobility and immobility. For the locally mobile student, the social spaces of the higher education institution are de-centralized, because the local student is seen to be already embedded in the local area. This perception of the local student’s spatial practice is particularly important in non-university higher education, where the local student is in the majority, and therefore the defining characteristic of institutional social spaces is that they are unnecessary. In a higher education ‘cold spot’, where the presence of a higher education space is all the more important because it is scarce, the higher education spaces therefore occupy an ambiguous position. On the one hand, they are vital to local students who have not travelled to attend university, and therefore look to the space to signify an educational transition. On the other hand, they are often described as insignificant by the same local students, who have no need of additional social spaces because their additional commitments take them outside the college. The relationship between place and local mobility deepens this already complex position for the dual-sector higher education site. In Tobston, where

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the college’s higher education site five miles from the town centre was closing, the nuances of locality were intertwined with dominant associations between landscape, architecture and elite higher education (Baker and Brown, 2007). The new location of higher education provision in Tobston town centre was seen as offering improved facilities but lacking the (classed) separation between further education and higher education, which had come to be signified by the separation between urban town centre for vocational further education and leafy rural village location for academic higher education. This example, in which the higher education provision itself was locally mobile, reveals how non-university higher education provision in a cold spot must negotiate the nuances of local knowledge and placed narratives on an intricate scale, at the same time as offering institutional spaces that are made both crucial and unnecessary by that locality. In the narrative association between undergraduate study and leaving the familial home that is common to many international contexts, this kind of mobility comes to signify a movement towards adulthood and independence (Holdsworth, 2009b). Students who do not follow this undergraduate pattern of mobility therefore risk being seen not to have achieved the associated independence. As the experiences of students in the study demonstrated, however, this normative understanding of markers of independence belies the complexity and diversity of lived experience. Of the twenty-one student participants in the study, seven were living with their parent/s. The other participants had lived ‘independently’, if housing outside of the parental home is taken as a measure of this, for some time before taking up undergraduate study. Of those who lived with parents, and might therefore be viewed as both immobile and dependent, one was a carer for both parents, inverting the assumed dependence in that relationship. Another had lived in nearby cities for several years before returning to her mother’s home after the breakdown of a relationship. Another explicitly associated her degree study with the gaining of independence, but saw this as related to her increased critical skills and in particular to the development of her dissertation topic. Each of the twenty-one experiences could be re-narrated here in full to counter the common association between degree mobility and independence. Summarized briefly here together, they demonstrate the inadequacy of this often unquestioned narrative association, and they show that where degree study is linked to independence, this connection must be understood as working in multiple and complex ways that are not always or only a product of normative mobility patterns.

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Local capital As the historical association in England between undergraduate education, mobility and the elite suggests, there are strong connections between educational mobility and privilege, and between assumed immobility and disadvantage. Researching student choices in remote coastal Canada, Corbett (2007b) conceptualizes educational mobility as a form of social capital, in which a student’s previous experiences with and awareness of mobility determine their possibility of becoming educationally mobile as undergraduate students. In this conceptualization, mobility as privilege is temporally reproductive, with the privilege of previous mobility enabling the further privilege of imagined and realized mobile futures. By definition, immobility is equally reproduced, so that the absence of opportunities for mobility makes mobility impossible to imagine or enact. Seen in this way, the student who stays in place (even where this is not defined simply as immobility as discussed earlier) is understood as having a deficit of experience and imagination. This final challenge works to counter that simplistic understanding of the local student, by suggesting that for the students concerned, relationships to place cannot be described through a discourse of lack. Instead, these students have local capital through long-term investments in place. In Corbett’s work, the concept of ‘local capital’ is used as opposed to that of mobility capital, to explain the social connections that limit the possibility of future mobility; because someone is well-connected in the locality and builds up a knowledge of, for example the local industry, they are rooted in and unable to move from that locality. My use of this concept of local capital differs by bringing together a range of social and cultural factors, so that the descriptor of ‘local’ signifies more than being fixed in place, and is not just an opposition to the possibility of mobility. Instead, it describes a rich embeddedness in place that opens future possibilities and opportunities in that place. ‘Local’ students’ friendships and family relationships, having not been disrupted by long-distance mobility, are committed and sustained over long periods. They referred in my interviews with them to the volunteering and employment commitments that would have been lost had they realized imagined futures of normative undergraduate mobility. This form of placed capital is enabled by the presence of non-university provision in geographical ‘cold spots’, so that a graduate possible self is also an imagined future of continued investment in the locality. For students such as Meera, who saw herself as teaching in a Sebford school after completing her

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degree and teacher training, and James, who imagined marking Tobston out as an international centre for graphic design, the availability of graduate possible selves in the local area enabled an imagined commitment of newly gained skills to the locality. However, the conceptual framework of placed possible selves also provides insight into the complexities involved in arguing for non-university provision and its relationship to local capital. Where Tobston and Sebford were also characterized by histories of industrial loss, unemployment and poverty, the provision of higher education was seen as a vital interruption of these narratives. At the same time, some students found graduate futures in their locality difficult to imagine precisely because of the history that higher education was seeking to redress. This difficulty created narrative incoherence, in which participants worked towards a qualification even while recognizing the incongruity of that qualification with local discourses of education and opportunity. For these students, remaining in place after their degree course was inevitable, on the one hand, and yet difficult to imagine, on the other hand. Undergraduate study in itself is only part of the required interruption to placed narratives. This final challenge therefore involves a particular and as yet only partially realized kind of local capital. This kind of local capital is one that can be extended into the graduate future as Meera and James imagined, requiring that graduate possible selves and place must be imaginable and realizable together. There are clear policy implications to be taken from this view of local capital; the provision of higher education is not a regenerative project in itself and must be accompanied by graduate opportunities to match the promise that higher education has come to represent. Finally, while this challenge demonstrates the importance of considering local capital in order to counter deficit narratives of educational mobility, it is also important to position local capital and local non-university provision within the stratified national and increasingly internationalized higher education marketplace in England. This stratification both reinforces the dominant narratives of the typical higher education student and necessitates alternatives to that narrative. Within the hierarchies of this system, the local college is positioned in relation to the globally elite university. Similarly, the local capital shown by the student participants in this study must be seen in the context of the mobility capital perpetuated by elite national and international higher education systems. This book therefore occupies a difficult position; on the one hand, it is an exploration of the local college that complicates and undermines homogenized understanding of the university and normative perceptions of the

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nationally and internationally mobile higher education student. On the other hand, it is an acknowledgement of the local college as always and inevitably ‘on the margins’, its marginal position working both to sustain and to threaten its longevity.

Conclusion Whenever a ‘local’ area, college, employer, community or student is referred to, this reference relies upon a spatial story that situates the subject according to narratives of place, mobilities and spaces. Each spatial story is also a narrative of possibility and impossibility, in which distances are too far to be imagined, and spaces symbolic but unused. The book sets these spatial narratives of educational subjectivity within a larger geography of higher education, which positions the local against the global and the elite. In understanding non-university higher education and the subjectivities of its students, then, the local must be seen both as nuanced, granular and specific and as fixed within a hierarchy of higher education provision that is marked by inequality. This book has argued that the ‘local’ student as a category requires further complication and care in its use if it is ever to be defined away from the normative narratives of traditional, perceived-as-mobile undergraduate experience. A key part of this argument is that the binary opposition between mobility and immobility, and the binary associations between these and privilege/ disadvantage work to reinscribe inequality through discourses of deficit. Further, the local student exists in the context of the availability and reputational affect (Stich, 2014) of higher education provision in their local area because local relationships to higher education shape what it means to be a local student. Important to this understanding is that national and international systems of higher education are also recognized to be experienced and lived at a local level. The spaces provided for learning and socializing in institutions that provide for a majority of local students could usefully take this lived experience into account, not closing down or limiting available spatial experience according to homogenized understandings of local student need. Finally, the language of the local should be acknowledged as both subjective and value-laden, positioning both student and institution within stratified higher education systems – it is within these systems that some students, and some higher education providers, are always more ‘local’ than others.

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Index aboriginal territories  29 Advanced Subsidiary Level (AS Levels)  159 Ahmad, F.  171 Alexander, K.  154 Alexander, R.  2 Allen, K.  28 Alzeer, G.  34 Australia  62 Ball, S. J.  151 Bathmaker, A.-M.  55, 67, 153 Benson, M.  21, 91, 94, 159 Bentley, L.  55 Bhopal, K.  171 Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME)  82, 171 Black feminist geographies  22 Black geographies  22 boarding school model  68, 77 ‘boarding school’ students  68–72 Boggs, G. R.  60 boundary-marking processes  48 Bozick, R.  154 Bright, N. G.  97, 112, 159 Brooks, R.  3, 14 Building Colleges for the Future (BCF) funding initiative  138 built spaces  31–5, 45 educational spaces  39–41 higher education  33–6 mobilities  37–9 place and locality  36–7 Bull, J.  27, 92 Butler, J.  51–3, 56, 180 Byford, K.  14 Cahill, C.  26–7, 103, 113, 159 Canada  61 case studies Brian, local possibilities  163–7 Leon, impossible possibilities  151–7

Meera, im/possible im/ mobilities  168–75 Rebecca, proximity of impossibility  158–63 causality  50 Christie, H.  109, 172 cold spots  4–5, 7–8, 16, 92–3, 174, 182–5 college-based higher education  36, 48, 89 consumerism  33 contradictory space  46 Corbett, M. J.  2–3, 29, 159, 171, 185 De Certeau, M.  11, 13–14, 43–8, 128–9, 146, 179 degree-level education  29 degree-level educational subjectivity  131 desk space  32 Disney, T.  32 distance learning  29 Donnelly, M.  4 dual-sector higher education  5–7, 62–3 dual-sector provision  40 Edinburgh  33 educational inequality  177 educational intervention  76 educational mobility  19, 38 educational spaces  20, 70, 166 built spaces  39–41 educational subjectivities  10–12, 41, 43, 49, 51–3, 87–105, 123, 141, 143, 155–7, 162–4, 167, 173, 175 narrative  49–53 spatial and temporal, theorizing  43–57 education policy  16, 62–3, 65, 67–9, 83, 111 elite ‘ritual’ university culture  71 Elsner, P. A.  60 emotional valence  180

202 employment  40 England  2–3, 6–7, 29, 34, 61–2, 70–2, 75, 77, 85, 89, see also Sebford; Tobston English higher education  2–5, 19, see also higher education hierarchies and elitism  34 Entwisle, D.  154 ethnic groups  39 everyday mobilities  169, 183 Excitable Speech (1997)  51–2 feminist geographies  22 Finn, K.  111, 169, 183 founding, narrative  46 Fourth Industrial Revolution  6 further education  5–8, 36–7, 39–40, 61–2, 66–7, 70, 79, 83–4, 136, 138–9, 153 future  7, 12, 35, 44, 53–4, 56–7, 96, 101–4, 112, 117, 122, 155–6, 167, 180 Gamsu, S.  4 gender  15, 20–3, 41, 43 gendered attitudes  31 gendered group norms  34 gender identity  22 variance in  23 gentrification  21 geographical educational inequalities  36 geographical inequalities  43, 175 geographical mobility  28, 107 geographical proximity  29 geographical scholarship  13 geographies  1, 19, 23, 31, 41, 76, 90, 92, 105, 123, 146, 187, see also individual entries feminist  22 of higher education  2–5, 7 of national narratives  5 of non-university higher education  5–8 of school education  36 green spaces  33 Gregson, N.  32 Habel, C.  34 Halford, S.  32

Index Harris, D.  29 higher education  2, 4, 7–8, 24, 40, 59, 62–3, 65–7, 70–3, 77, 86, 128, 153, 182 geographies  2 institutional spaces  128 massification of  3 and mobilities  28–31 place and locality  23–6 policy manager  65, 68 reputational hierarchy of  70 in Sebford  114–18 in Tobston  109–14 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)  4 Higher National Diploma (HND)  163–4 Holdsworth, C.  115, 120 Hollingworth, S.  28 Holton, M.  30, 69, 109, 111, 169, 183 Hong Kong  62 hot spots  4 Hubbard, P.  33, 94 human subjectivity  41 idiosyncrasies  5 imagined other lives  118, 121 immobility  17–18, 26, 28, 30, 32, 38–9, 63–5, 110, 182–5 im/possible im/mobilities  168–75 impossible possibilities  151–7 independence  172 individual-level tripartite spatial story  11 Indonesia  62 industrial work patterns  26 inequalities  1, 4, 9, 15, 18–20, 24, 28–9, 31, 33, 43, 57, 71, 104, see also individual entries institutional spaces  128 interviews  62 Irwin, J. T.  60 Jackson, E.  21, 91, 94, 159 Lacanian moment  47, 89 learning spaces  35 Leyshon, M.  27, 92 lobbying groups  62 local  5, 16–17, 37, 59–61, 63–4, 69, 71, 75, 85, 174, 177–8, 183, 185–7

Index local capital  17–18, 110, 164, 167, 171, 175, 185–7 ‘local’ college, national level local employers and people  63–4 local students and possibilities  64–8 Sebford College  72–3, 79–85 Tobston College  72–9 ‘local’ educational subjects, multiple mobilities  107–25 ‘local’ higher education  87–105 non-university provision  59–86 ‘local’ higher education spaces  127–47 locality  6, 16, 20, 22–3, 36, 63, 66–7, 69, 73, 75–7, 83, 85–6, 88, 168, 185 built spaces and  36–7 ‘local’ non-university students  61 ‘local’ college at national level construction  61–72 local possibilities  163–7 local students  60, 177 understanding  19–41 Lucey, H.  152 McKittrick, K.  98 Macrae, S.  151 Maguire, M.  151 Markus, H.  54 Massey, D. B.  13–14, 21–2, 26, 48, 87 massification of higher education  3, 7, 25, 72 materiality  32, 48, 107, 154, 156–7, 182 micro-geographies  39 middle-class career opportunities  28 middle-class gentrification  21 ‘mini university’  67–8 mobilities  2–4, 19–41, 107–8, 110–11, 115, 118, 159, 170, 181, 183, 185 built spaces  37–9 and higher education  28–31 mobility capital  29, 110, 115, 159, 171, 185–6 Moran, D.  32 Morse, C. E.  27 Mudgett, J.  27 Muslim female participants  171 narrative  11, 27, 30, 37, 44, 46, 48–53, 56, 67–8, 72, 119, 123, 160, 180 narrative educational subjectivity  49–53 national narratives  5

203

neoliberal education  56 Nurius, P.  54 office space  32 organizational spaces  31 Papafilippou, V.  55 patriarchal natures  21 Peckham  21, 91 Pizzolato, J. E.  156 place  11–14, 19–41, 45–8, 51, 53, 56, 87–105, 113, 149, 179 built spaces and  36–7 language of  13–14 and locality  20–6 narratives of  21–2 placed possible selves  43–5, 55–7, 60–1, 149–75, 179–81 place-specific histories  44 possibilities  10–11, 44, 47, 53, 104–5, 108, 129, 132–3, 135, 141–2, 146, 169 possible selves  12, 44, 53–7, 149–75, 179–81, 186 post-industrialization  2, 21, 177 power-geometries  34, 43 Prince, D.  44, 53 Prout Quicke, S.  29 proximity of impossibility  158–63 race/ethnicity  1, 12, 21, 43, 59, 89 racialized discourses  168 racial privilege  22 Reay, D.  152 regeneration  21, 97, 102–3 remote/rural education  2–3, 17, 28, 182 reputational affect  93, 116 responsiveness  60 retrograde necessity  50 Ricoeur, P.  50, 53, 56, 119, 180 ritual culture  77 Rose, G.  22, 32 scholarship  12 school education  3, 36 Sebford different experience  118–21 higher education in  114–18 imagined other lives  118–24

204 just one of those towns  100–4 multicultural town  98 negative characterization of  103 photography degree course  117 positive descriptions  115 very split town  97–100 Sebford College  72–3, 79–85, 137–45, see also Sebford institutional space  141 investment in education  79–81 lot more support  142–5 marketing materials  79–81 reasons to choose  80 single social space  140–1 staff perceptions, higher education  81–5 swipe card access only  137–40 web page  81 Sela, K.  14 self-efficacy  180 self-recognition  48 sense of self  48 sexual orientation  22 skills education  86 Smith, D. P.  94 social class  12, 16, 21, 26, 29, 57, 59, 89, 91–2, 96, 117, 119 social-class identity  107 social embeddedness  174 social housing  152 social inequality  31 social mobility  3, 107, 151–2, 154 social psychology  12 social spaces  39, 134, 177, 183 societal perceptions  30 socioeconomic inequality  28 spaces  13–14, 19–41, 46, 129, 131–5, 140–2, 144–5, 156, 161 language of  13–14 spatial experiences  3 spatial narrative subjectivity  44 spatial practice  39, 70 spatial relationships  26 spatial signals  40 spatial stories  11, 15–16, 43–9, 51, 69, 76–7, 89, 92, 95, 98, 101, 109, 133, 141, 150, 179, 187 Brian, local possibilities  163–7 of educational deprivation  76

Index of im/possibility  149–75 Leon, impossible possibilities  151–7 Meera, im/possible im/ mobilities  168–75 of place and mobility  84 Rebecca, proximity of impossibility  158–63 and subjectivity  47–9 spatial subjectivity  48 spatial synecdoche  145–6, see also synecdoche Stevenson, J.  55 Stich, A. E.  37, 76, 93 stratification of higher education  86, 153, 186 structural inequality  150 student identity  38 studentification  3, 25, 38, 94–5, 101, 135, 142, 181 insular practices of  95 place-making practices of  95 student mobilities  178, 181 England  30 students at local colleges  8–10 student subjectivities  10–12 subjectivation  52 subjectivity  10–11, 15, 41, 44, 47–53, 93, 95–6, 111, 156–7, 164, 167 synecdoche  17, 128, 145–7 Taylor, Y.  102 technical education  7 temporality  11, 13, 44, 50–1, 53–4, 56, 149, 177, 180 Thomas, W.  153 Tobston be[ing] underdog  111–14 different experience  118–21 higher education in  109–14 imagined other lives  118–24 love for the area  90–3 stayed ‘local’, students  109–11 strange familiarity  89–90 uneducated people  93–6 Tobston College  72–9, 130–7, see also Tobston green space, benches and path  134–6 Having Your Own Little Country Estate  136–7

Index located on rural site  130 marketing materials  73–5 non-university higher education and  73–5 staff perceptions, higher education  76–9 unused seats, social spaces  131–4 web page  73, 75 tripartite geographical framing  35 tutors  9 undergraduate mobility  60 United States  34, 61

205

university  36, 38, 40, 61, 63–9, 78–80, 83, 86, 123, 143–4, 182 in United Arab Emirates  34 university-based higher education  66, 68 narratives, dominance  181–2 Whitman, K.  34 widening participation (WP) policies  3 working class  27 working-class African American histories  27 WP mission  7, 64

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