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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | Student carers in higher education |
Subtitle of host publication | Navigating, resisting, and re-inventing academic cultures |
Editors | Genine Hook, Marie-Pierre Moreau, Rachel Brooks |
Place of Publication | London |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Chapter | 3 |
Pages | 28-45 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Edition | 1st |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781003177104 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781032010946 |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |