Affecting advantage: class relations in contemporary higher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the ‘other’ to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the ‘wrong’ capacities, such that privilege prevails. Drawing on interview data from a project undertaken in Australia with female postgraduate students from low SES backgrounds, we bring a pluralised affective capacities approach to bear. We argue that thinking class (dis)advantage with affect has considerable political potential. Affect emerges as a key site through which the normative and transformative capacities of the classed subject emerge. Attuning to affective dissonance, responsivity and capacities, we challenge the advantage afforded high socio-economic status in HE. We demonstrate how a focus on affective relations creates more complex constructions of ‘advantage’ and disrupts deficit framings – shifts the normative class positions on which HE relies and does so affirmatively.