Widening participation and a student “success” assemblage: The materialities and mobilities of university

Abstract

This paper takes an assemblage approach to extend knowledge and understanding of widening participation (WP) in the United Kingdom. We reflect on the identification and experiences of a WP student population-how this population has been marked out, labelled, and considered through policy and intervention, alongside the materialities and mobilities that shape the lived experiences of these students. Using questionnaire findings, narrative interviews, and photo diaries, it draws on a 12-month study at a London university to explore the factors that have enabled final-year undergraduate students from a WP background to stay the course and complete their programme of studies. Our arguments are shaped by the geographical and educational literatures on materialities and mobilities. We bring these together to sketch out a student success assemblage comprising wide-ranging elements that we frame around identity, support, and resources. Assemblage draws attention to the multiplicity of human/non-human relations that shape student experience and students' capacities for success. Assemblage intersects with university precisely through a focus on experience and, as we suggest, takes on a particular inflexion for students from a WP background. This underpinning ontological basis to studying WP enables us to view the university, student experience, and success as being continually produced and reproduced, and coconstituted between the human and non-human. Universities should attend to student assemblages to better understand the experiences of and support needed by underrepresented groups in higher education.

Talking population geographies and a ‘love letter’ to the journal

“…CP : Yeah, I've seen that, where the authors talk about ‘relational population geography’, which of course ties in with all sorts of relational moves that are made elsewhere, as in the recent paper in the journal by Duffy and Stokanovic (2017; also Wainwright et al, 2019), an ‘assemblage’‐thinking piece which is also explicitly calling for a ‘relational population geography’. They don't call it an Einsteinian move as such, but it's this notion that you don't have a pre‐fixed spatial grid upon which these little objects (people), also somehow securely pre‐formed, move around like atoms obeying invariant laws of motion.…”

‘I’m not sure where home is’: narratives of student mobilities into and through higher education

“…The notion of educational mobilities covers a broad spectrum of movements ranging from social mobility (in terms of widening participation in higher education), to the mobilities of international students, and the physical and conceptual mobilities that include initial transitions into higher education and students' ongoing day-to-day movements whilst at university (Wainwright, Chappell, and McHugh 2020) -their everyday mobilities (Finn and Holton 2019).…”