Residues and resistance: the chafe of working-class girl to academic

This chapter uses threads of a larger current PhD institutional ethnographic research project, “Searching for Recognition and Social Justice in Tertiary Education” (Hosken 2012b), that explores classed, gendered and racialised practices in a Western university. Auto-ethnographic narratives from this study are combined with the literature to foreground a class analysis of relationships between class, agency and social injustice in education. I argue that discourses of equity and diversity have displaced social justice and class in many Australian institutional and policy contexts, including education (Blackmore 2007). This displacement facilitates continued silence about class in Australian higher education, and is one of the reasons that universities  continue to be primarily about, and for, the middle class, and are not as successful as hoped in widening participation.