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

历届英国政府、大学、中学和公民社会都积极支持旨在促进社会向上流动的“扩大参与”（WP）和“公平准入”（FA）倡议。本研究考察了围绕支撑这些话语的不参与而产生的分类叙事，这些叙事可以在新自由主义治理和社会阶级污名化的框架内进行背景化。通过对政策文件和议会辩论及其媒体接受和高等教育接入计划的批判性话语分析（CDA），该研究特别关注“不参与”如何被注入消极的阶级内涵，这意味着缺乏抱负和不良的生活方式选择。通过参与并促进对新自由主义高等教育政策和后马克思主义文献的后结构批评，这些文献将高等教育视为不平等再生产和对治理的理解的场所，该研究询问了通过WP和FA政策创建的叙事如何利用和再现对非参与者进行污名化的分类假设。该研究将高等教育参与视为一种“提高”自己的理性选择，同时将非参与者的污名化引导了受试者，同时将责任转移给了他们，使那些贫困的人应该为他们的环境负责的观念永久化。在探索通过参与政策创造的主题时，本研究旨在为理解高等教育中持续存在的不平等及其在再现更广泛的社会不平等中的作用做出新的贡献。

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.