Abstract
This article introduces a new, empirically-derived conceptual framework for considering exclusion in English higher education (HE): legibility zones. Drawing on interviews with academic employees in England, it suggests that participants orientate themselves to a powerful imaginary termed the hegemonic academic. Failing to align with this ideal can engender a sense of dislocation conceptualised as unbelonging. The mechanisms through which hegemonic academic identity is constituted and unbelonging is experienced are mapped onto three domains: the institutional, the ideological, and the embodied. The framework reveals the mutable and intersecting nature of these zones, highlighting the complex dynamics of unbelonging and the attendant challenge presented to inclusion projects when many apparatuses of exclusion are perceived as fundamental to what HE is for, what an academic is, and how academia functions.
Highlights
English higher education (HE) in the early 21st century is theoretically the most inclusive it has ever been
I introduce the framework of “legibility zones”; these reveal the features of the hegemonic academic by mapping the areas of academic life in which unbelonging can be evoked onto three layers: the institutional (Section 5.1), the ideological (5.2), and the embodied (5.3)
I reviewed all transcripts in hard copy, highlighting and annotating sections that did not lend themselves to a short keyword. From this process I derived a picture of the kinds of activities and areas of academic life that engendered a sense of competition or inequality, and from that built an image of the type of academic who represented the yardstick based on what participants perceived to be success and failure. At this point I began a chapter for a collection about impostor syndrome (Wren Butler, in press) as the term had arisen in interviews a few times, which led to theorising unbelonging
Summary
English higher education (HE) in the early 21st century is theoretically the most inclusive it has ever been. That exclusion happens at all can only be inferred from the fact inclusion initiatives are required in the first place, and I suggest that to those who engage only casually (or reluctantly) with these imperatives, the discursive grouping of diversity with inclusion risks conflating the two. I introduce the framework of “legibility zones”; these reveal the features of the hegemonic academic by mapping the areas of academic life in which unbelonging can be evoked onto three layers: the institutional (Section 5.1), the ideological (5.2), and the embodied (5.3) Through this the dynamics of exclusion are shown to be complex and contingent, and the experience of unbelonging collective. I conclude that the possibility of inclusion is to some extent an illusion
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