ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the narratives of particular students drawn from a series of interviews with 90 non-traditional learners in three universities in the South East of England. This material, alongside other cases, was analysed in great depth, over a period of four years. The students were located in an older ‘elite’ university and an ex-polytechnic based in an area of ethnic diversity. These specific narratives illuminate, in especially telling ways, some key themes across the overall sample: of the importance of familial, psychological as well as ‘imaginal’ capital (alongside the more familiar notions of educational and cultural capital), in enabling students to keep on keeping on. Students have to find the means, psychosocially, to overcome aspects of university cultures, or a habitus, that they may find difficult. The basic argument is that non-traditional students bring with them diverse forms of capital, and can be agentic in creating new capital forms, which, surprisingly, shape aspects of the university habitus in turn. The chapter draws on the sociology of Bourdieu (1986, 1990), with particular reference to his understanding of how universities serve to reproduce the existing social order. However, use is also made of the psychosocial ideas of Winnicott (1971) and Honneth (2007, 2009), to understand why particular students from non-traditional backgrounds may in fact prosper in the more diverse, if still hierarchical, system of university education. It is crucial to understand such transitional and even transformative processes as well as exclusions.
