ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on pedagogical and institutional conditions at the university that constrained students' freedom to participate. It analyses student narratives to understand how students engaged across diverse sites at the university, including classrooms, residences, administrative and academic staff, and the institutional cultures and practices of the university. Student narratives showed how inequalities emerge from unevenly distributed resources, recognition, knowledge and power. Cluster of structural conversion factors that emerged in narratives was related to pedagogical arrangements that failed to create critical engagement with knowledge. The chapter describes the negative conversion factors in five categories, which include: individualising failure, uncritical engagement with knowledge, lack of participation in decision-making, alienation from lecturers, and misrecognition. Across narratives, a discourse of individualised failure downplayed the role of structural constraints, so that instead of criticising unjust structures, students were more likely to describe their academic achievements as a reflection of their inherent academic ability.
