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The landscape of higher education has undergone change and transformation in recent years, partly as a result of diversification and massification. However, persistent patterns of under-representation continue to perplex policy-makers and practitioners, raising questions about current strategies, policies and approaches to widening participation. Presenting a comprehensive review and critique of contemporary widening participation policy and practice, Penny Jane Burke interrogates the underpinning assumptions, values and perspectives shaping current concepts and understandings of widening participation. She draws on a range of perspectives within the field of the sociology of education - including feminist post-structuralism, critical pedagogy and policy sociology - to examine the ways in which wider societal inequalities and misrecognitions, which are related to difference and diversity, present particular challenges for the project to widen participation in higher education. In particular, the book: focuses on the themes of difference and diversity to shed light on the operations of inequalities and the politics of access and participation both in terms of national and institutional policy and at the level of student and practitioner experience. draws on the insights of the sociology of education to consider not only the patterns of under-representation in higher education but also the politics of mis-representation, critiquing key discourses of widening participation. interrogates assumptions behind WP policy and practice, including assumptions about education being an unassailable good provides an analysis of the accounts and perspectives of students, practitioners and policy-makers through in-depth interviews, observations and reflective journal entries. offers insights for future developments in the policy, practice and stra

What does it mean to be pedagogical in a post-truth landscape? How might feminist thought and action work to intervene in this environment? Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism draws together leading feminist scholars of gender and education to explore the current significance of the rise of populist policies and discourses and the challenges it poses to the hard-won battles regarding the rights of women, immigrants, and minorities. Offering the first detailed feminist intervention in this space, the collection explores the significance of populism for feminist pedagogies and practices in relation to gender and education. This exploration has significance for broader and urgent questions of our times regarding knowledge, authority, truth, power and harm and considers the potential for feminist interventions in relation to pedagogies and activisms to speak back and disrupt populist agendas.

Concerns about creating greater equity in education are often projected outside of teaching. Yet the creation by teachers of more equitable and inclusive educational experiences and opportunities can play an important part in wider struggles for social justice. We argue that equity must become a central dimension of teacher education to challenge the complex ways that insidious inequalities are reproduced in and through educational frameworks and practices.

Although previous research has found social class differences in students' academic performance at university, success in higher education is far more multi-faceted. This study surveyed 2,665 undergraduate students from six Australian universities to investigate mediators of class differences in success, where success was operationalised using diverse and comprehensive measures (e.g., academic self-efficacy, cognitive engagement). Importantly, class was operationalised as a continuous variable rather than arbitrary quartiles. Mediation analyses showed consistent relationships between class and sense of success. Economic capital was identified as the main mediator, followed by social connections, cultural expectations, and aspirations. Some criteria - particularly greater interdependent motivation to be a role model for their community and assist their families after university - were more important in success evaluations for students from backgrounds with lower measures of socioeconomic class. Interdependent motivations suppressed some of the negative effects of lower class, providing evidence of alternative capitals or personal motivational resources. We conclude that conceptions of educational success that elide non-academic forms of success and minimise student's motivations, especially community-based motivations, offer a limited and limiting understanding of the student experience.

Drawing on ESRC-funded research (RES-000-22-0832), this article examines the accounts of men participating in London access and foundation programmes in relation to their shifting masculine identifications. I consider how the men's early memories of schooling shape their student masculinities. Their accounts are contextualised in relation to hegemonic discourses of widening participation and neo-liberalism. Drawing on feminist critique, I pay attention to the men's self-regulating practices in their struggle to be recognised as deserving of higher education access and participation. The interconnections and contradictions within men's identifications across a range of differences are considered in relation to their experiences and imaginaries of accessing higher education.

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and 'massification' of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour's programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse - of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive - can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.

This paper draws on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project on men (aged 18–54) participating in pre-university access and foundation programs in four London further and higher education colleges. Men’s educational choices and decisions are analysed and discussed within current policy debates about widening participation and lifelong learning. These choices are placed within a framework which focuses on masculinity in terms of classed and racialised identifications. For working class and ethnic minority students choices tend to be constrained by mix of material, institutional and emotional forces. For middle class ethnic minority students these factors are only partially alleviated.