Negotiating embodied aspirations: Exploring the emotional labour of higher education persistence for female caregivers

    Research output: Book chapter/Published conference paperChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

    2 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This chapter examines how women who are also parents, and all first in their families to attend university, managed persistence at university in the context of demanding caring responsibilities. By investigating what Ahmed terms as the ‘emotional geographies’ of higher education participation, the intent is to explore how the spatial and material conditions of university persistence are translated at a deeply embodied level. Drawing upon narrative biographical interviews conducted with 27 female parents in the final stages of their undergraduate degrees, this exploration recognises how negotiating the aspiration to attend university and actually performing the act of persistence are in themselves both complex and embodied. Foregrounding the additional and somewhat hidden work of university attendance for these women enables deeper insights into the ways in which these institutions’ practices remain essentially gendered, with success or failure in this environment tightly bound up in the passionate realms of women’s labour. The narratives of these first in family female students highlight the complex negotiations this persistence required and how for some, their desired functionings or measures of success deviated sharply from the more instrumental and vocational focus valued within the contemporary higher education sector
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationStudent carers in higher education
    Subtitle of host publicationNavigating, resisting, and re-inventing academic cultures
    EditorsGenine Hook, Marie-Pierre Moreau, Rachel Brooks
    Place of PublicationLondon
    PublisherTaylor & Francis
    Chapter3
    Pages28-45
    Number of pages18
    Edition1st
    ISBN (Electronic)9781003177104
    ISBN (Print)9781032010946
    Publication statusPublished - 2022

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Negotiating embodied aspirations: Exploring the emotional labour of higher education persistence for female caregivers'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this