Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education

Abstract

Based on empirical research with participants from working-class backgrounds studying and working in higher education in England, this article examines the lived experience of shame. Building on a feminist Bourdieusian approach to social class analysis, the article contends that ‘struggles for value’ within the field of higher education precipitate classed judgements, which have the potential to generate shame. Through an examination of the ‘affective practice’ of judgement, the article explores the contingencies that precipitate shame and the embodiment of deficiency. The article links the classed and gendered dimensions of shame with valuation, arguing that the fundamental relationality of social class and gender is not only generative of shame, but that shame helps in turn to structure both working-class experience and a view of the working classes as ‘deficient’.

Being-in-motion: the everyday (gendered and classed) embodied mobilities for UK university students who commute

“…home and university marked her out as Other on campus when interacting with peers. AsLoveday (2016) argues (citing Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, 2001) signs of fertility, fecundity and motherhood in education "challenge established boundaries of 'appropriateness', so that the mere presence of a [female] body creates a feeling of disorder within a specific social field" (11). The fact that this is reiterated again and again, through Eve's family-related mobilities on and off campus, is significant here in inscribing upon her an identity as Other and making notions of the flexible, ideal learner out of reach.…”

Diversity and the European higher education student: policy influencers’ narratives of difference

“…While in some cases, this has led to the re-thinking of pedagogical approaches and the orientation of universities, in the extracts above it is primarily students rather than institutions that are subject to critical scrutiny. Here, there are broad parallels with research that has focussed on institutional practices which has argued that working class students are often seen as 'deficient' within universities (Loveday, 2016), and that academic cultures often privilege middle class identities and habituses (Bathmaker et al, 2013;Thomsen, 2012;Reay et al, 2010).…”

Preaching to the Choir: University Diversity Committees as Affective Communities

“…A handful of studies utilize affect theory to explore the emotional aspects of teaching and researching race (Hübinette and Mählck ; Matias and Zembylas ). Others, particularly feminist scholars, have examined the affective dimensions of academic labor (Adsit et al ; Charteris et al ; Gannon et al ; Loveday ). While many of these studies address topics related to diversity—race, class, and gender—only Musser’s () critical autobiographical account explicitly addresses the politics and practice of diversity, examining the emotional labor of performing diversity as a queer black woman.…”