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

英国历届政府、大学、中学和民间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。本研究探讨了围绕不参与这些话语的基础，可以在新自由主义治理和社会阶层污名化的框架内语境化创建的分类叙事。通过批评话语分析（CDA）的政策文件和议会辩论，以及他们的媒体招待会和高等教育机构的访问计划，该研究特别关注如何“不参与”成为注入了负面的阶级内涵，意味着缺乏抱负和穷人的生活方式选择。通过参与和促进新自由主义高等教育政策和后马克思主义文学的后结构批评，认为高等教育是不平等的复制和治理的理解的网站，研究询问如何通过WP和FA政策创建的叙事借鉴和复制类的假设，污名化非参与者。该研究着眼于高等教育参与的框架，作为一个理性的选择，以“改善”自己和非参与者的同时污名化，引导的主题，而在同一时间，转移责任到他们身上，使那些在贫困中的观念永久化是归咎于他们的情况。在探索通过参与政策创建的主题，研究的目的是作出新的贡献，在高等教育中的持续不平等的理解和再现更广泛的社会不平等的作用。

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.