Categories of class operate not only as an ongoing principle which enable access to and limitations on social movement and interaction, but are also reproduced at the intimate level as a ‘structure of feeling’ in which doubt, anxiety and fear inform the production of subjectivity. (Skeggs, 1997, p. 6) The process of negotiating identities which our students describe can be conceptualised as stemming from the development of new forms of cultural capital associated with a change in class-based habitus (Bourdieu, 1976, 1986, 1994; James, 1995; Skeggs, 1997). Habitus refers not merely to the external markers of social position, such as occupation, education and material wealth, but also to embodied dispositions which generate thought and action (Bouveresse, 1999). A key aspect of this embodied habitus is language which, according to Bourdieu, ‘provides us with a system of transposable mental dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1994, quoted in Charlesworth, 2000, p. 120). Mature students can be seen to be developing new forms of embodied cultural capital, of which language is a key aspect. Taking on a new language of academia engages students in a project of social mobility which may involve a break from their former habitus; ‘Becoming academic is simultaneously an erosion of working-classness’ (Reay, 1996).
Identities are, of course, multiple, and class-based identities interact with gendered and other identities to produce subjectivity. In what follows we analyse how a small group of mature students negotiate their changing identities in two different contexts. First, the context of family and intimate relationships where the new identity of mature student poses challenges to established gender roles and identities. Second, the context of friends and other social relationships where social mobility presents a threat to class identity.
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Solid Rock Cathedral of Faith ChurchYouth Department Archives
May 2021
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