Discourses of non-participation in Higher Education and the reproduction of class inequalities

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Successive UK governments, universities, secondary schools, and civil society have enthusiastically endorsed Widening Participation (WP) and Fair Access (FA) initiatives aimed at promoting upward social mobility. This research examines the classed narratives created around non-participation underpinning these discourses, that can be contextualised within the framework of neoliberal governmentality and stigmatisation of social class. Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) of policy documents and parliamentary debates as well as their media receptions and HEI Access Plans, the research specifically turns attention to how 'non-participation' becomes infused with negative class connotations implying lacking aspiration and poor lifestyle choices. By engaging with and contributing to poststructural critiques of neoliberal HE policy and post-Marxist literature that consider higher education as a site of inequality reproduction and understandings of governance, the research interrogates how narratives created through WP and FA policy draw on and reproduce classed assumptions that stigmatise non-participants. The research looks at the framing of HE participation as a rational choice made to 'improve' oneself and the simultaneous stigmatisation of nonparticipants that guides the subject whilst, at the same time, transfers responsibility onto them, perpetuating notions that those in poverty are to blame for their circumstances. In exploring the subject created through participation policy, the research aims to make a new contribution to understandings of persistent inequalities in HE and their role in reproducing wider social inequalities.