Access and Attachment to Higher Education for Sole Parents

Abstract

Most participants were cognisant that academic staff and particularly supervisors were scanning and assessing their work habits and commitments to their postgraduate studies. All of the participants shared concerns that their sole parenting commitments would be viewed negatively in the university context. Louise Morley (2013) argues, ‘[m]anaging identity, discrimination and other people’s negativity can be an additional affective workload which deters women’ (p. 124). As these sole parents began to recognise what it meant to be a postgraduate student, they perceived an academic regime that valued the ‘independent scholar: the rational, autonomous, implicitly male-gendered subject’ (Lee & Williams, 1999, p. 22). These sole parents sought to be recognised as competent postgraduate students, an identity shaped by ‘discourses of meritocracy in which the right to higher education is understood in terms of individual ability, potential and hard work rather than as shaped by structural, cultural and institutional inequalities and misrecognitions’ (Burke, 2013, p. 110). Participants in this study shared an awareness that when scholarly work is constituted through notions of meritocracy and as ‘implicitly male’, it could result in a tension between their academic work and their sole parenting obligations, which they regarded as potentially exclusionary.