Advancing Sociology of Education: A Personal Perspective on the Contribution of Sociological Research Online

Higher education choice-making

Sociological Research Online has published many articles that have made an important contribution to the sociology of UK higher education. Perhaps one of the most significant such articles is ‘Making a difference?: Institutional habituses and higher education choice’ by Diane Reay, Miriam David and Stephen Ball. This was published in 2001, when I was coming to the end of my PhD that was also focussed on higher education choice, albeit with a rather different focus (primarily on the influence exerted by friends and peers). Although I was concerned at the time about potential overlap between the two pieces of research (particularly as I hoped Diane Reay would be my external examiner), I found this article, and others from the same project (e.g. Ball et al., 2002), highly stimulating. It was, and still is, important in focussing our attention on the role played by individual educational institutions on educational processes, through deploying the concept of ‘institutional habitus’ – that is, ‘a complex amalgam of agency and structure [which] . . . could be understood as the impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behaviour as it is mediated through an organisation’ (1.2). The article examines six different types of institution across both state and private sectors – from a further education college that ran Access to Higher Education courses (typically taken by mature students) to a prestigious boys-only private school. Reay et al. show how what is constructed as a ‘good’ higher education is informed by the different cultures and circumstances of the institutions. In the case of the further education college, this was one that ‘builds on long-standing relationships with a number of local higher education institutions which have developed mature student friendly admissions policies’ (4.5). In contrast, at the private boys’ school, a ‘good’ university is one that is perceived to be ‘elite’, where you go ‘regardless of how good the course is in your particular subject’ (4.4). Implicit and sometimes explicit in the narratives from staff, students and parents that are cited by Reay et al. are spatial notions of proximity and distance – played out with respect to the differing relations that the schools and colleges have with elite universities, newer universities, and local institutions. This spatial representation, they argue, ‘maps out a geography of taken-for-granteds, possibilities and probabilities’ (5.8). Indeed, an additional contribution of the article is its contention that the choices of those attending highly prestigious private schools can, in many ways, be as constrained as those of students attending large state colleges. This is a direct result, the authors maintain, of the ways in which institutional habitus sets parameters around what is considered ‘possible’.

Most relevant to my own research at the time, however, was what Reay et al. had to say about the processes of choice-making undertaken by the students in their sample. They suggest that this, too, is informed by institutional habitus – noting that it was only in the further education college that students went about making their higher education decisions in a collective manner, offering each other advice and support, and working through obstacles together. In all the other schools and colleges in the sample, students approached their choices in a much more individualised manner. This was something I was finding in my doctoral research, too, where friendships often became quite strained as students decided where to apply for university, sometimes to the point where some chose not to discuss their decision-making with their friends at all (Brooks, 2003a, 2005). Reay et al. maintain that such differences between the institutions in their sample cannot be explained solely in terms of familial habitus (as students from the further education college had a similar social class profile to those attending one of the other colleges), and emphasise instead the expressive order of the further education college, in which ‘primacy was given to collegial ways of working and interacting’ (7.3). Given the now-sizable literature that has pointed to the often individualised and competitive cultures of many schools, colleges and universities (e.g. Phipps and Young, 2015), documenting how alternative institutional cultures can be established and maintained, which value and promote collective ways of working, is significant.

‘Making a Difference?: Institutional Habituses and Higher Education Choice’, at the time of publication, offered a welcome riposte to some of the central tenets of the ‘school effectiveness’ movement, which tended to downplay the sociological context within which teachers were working and students learning. Its longer-term impact has, however, been even more significant – in bringing the attention of higher education scholars to the influence schools and colleges can exert, beyond that of the ‘familial habitus’ of their students. Researchers have taken up the concept of institutional habitus very widely – not only when exploring the places where decisions about higher education are made (e.g. Donnelly, 2015) but also in relation to higher education institutions themselves (e.g. Lee, 2021). It is something that I have been sensitive to myself in several projects in which I have sought to tease out the ways in which institutional cultures can impact on the experiences of both students and staff (e.g. Brooks, 2013a).

Identities of students who choose to live ‘at home’

Over a decade later, in 2013, Jessica Abrahams and Nicola Ingram published ‘The chameleon habitus: exploring local students’ negotiations of multiple fields’, which also engaged with the concept of habitus. Their focus was students, many from working-class backgrounds, who had chosen to remain in the parental home for their higher education, and attend a local institution (in this case, all students in the sample attended one of two universities in Bristol in the south-west of England).

Abrahams and Ingram’s article is significant, first, and perhaps most importantly, for reframing the experiences of a group of students who are commonly problematised in lay discourses and whose struggles (rather than achievements) are often dwelt upon in the academic literature. Even recent scholarship on the experiences of working-class students tends to focus (entirely legitimately) on the obstacles they face, economically, socially, and culturally (e.g. Osbourne, 2024). In contrast, ‘The Chameleon Habitus’ documents very effectively how ‘shifting back and forth between misaligned fields’ (2.4) of home and university can generate what Abrahams and Ingram consider to be a productive ‘third space’. Such a space, they maintain, is ‘neither one space nor the other – nor is it a compromised space between the two worlds’ (2.4). Instead, it is one that opens up new cultural possibilities. They build on this to argue that Bourdieu’s (1999) concept of the ‘cleft habitus’ (i.e. one that is ‘divided against itself’) should be understood in more positive terms than is often the case.

Their analysis paved the way for other researchers who focused, in a more positive manner, on the experiences of students who live at home. Finn and Holton (2019), for example, provide a compelling account of the lives of such ‘commuter students’ and show how, far from being immobile (as some of the literature would position them), their ‘everyday mobilities’ (moving to and from campus) are highly productive – providing, for example, important mechanisms for transitioning between the world of the university and that of their family and friends. There are also connections between Abraham and Ingram’s work and that in human geography, which has critiqued the way in which mobility has been valorised, arguing for more positive readings of immobility (e.g. Forsberg, 2019).

A further contribution of this article, and one that I have benefitted from, is its innovative creative methodology. Abrahams and Ingram base their analysis on plasticine models made by their participants – to represent their identities inside and outside university – alongside a focus group and individual interviews. Such models, as the authors argue, present an effective means of making concrete abstract or intangible ideas (such as those commonly related to identity), which can then open up discussion topics in ways sometimes not possible in a conventional interview. A few years after writing this article, Jessica Abrahams came to work with me on a large, cross-national project, exploring how higher education students were conceptualised across Europe. She convinced me to deploy a similar methodology as part of this research. The plasticine modelling enabled participants (higher education students) who had often not met each other before to get to know each other – through an activity that most seemed to think was fun, and to surface issues of which we had been unaware (Brooks and Abrahams, 2021). For example, the numerous models of clocks and hourglasses made by Danish students provided dramatic insight into the ways in which they felt they were being driven at an inappropriate pace through their studies, because of specific national reforms aimed at reducing the duration (and cost) of a degree, and led directly to our analysis of ‘student timescapes’ across Europe (Brooks et al., 2022).

Understanding policy networks and actors

The third article that has made a significant contribution to my own understanding of higher education is Kim Allen and Anna Bull’s ‘Following policy: a network ethnography of the UK character education policy community’, published in Sociological Research Online in 2018. Unusually for an article that speaks to key debates in higher education, it takes a broad perspective that is equally relevant to scholars interested in policy at other levels of the education system. Character education is defined by the UK’s Department for Education as education that enables ‘character traits which can improve educational attainment, engagement with school and attendance’ (DfE, 2019: 7). These traits are held to include ‘virtues’ such as courage and honesty; social confidence; resilience and a focus on long-term goals; and an appreciation of long-term commitments to others (both individuals and communities) (DfE, 2019).

Through a ‘network ethnography’, first pioneered in education policy by Ball and Junneman (2012), Allen and Bull provide a comprehensive account of the key policy actors who have contributed to the rise of character education in the UK, exploring flows of funding and influence across national borders. In particular, they show the significant financial and ideological influence of the John Templeton Foundation – an American neo-conservative philanthropic body – on both social science research conducted in universities and the formation of education policy, notably the rolling out of ‘character education’ in many UK schools. As part of their analysis, they note the individualistic and socially conservative ideas that underpin much of the research and policy influence, as well as its promotion of free market solutions. While many studies in the sociology of higher education have examined the impact of neo-liberal ideas on educational processes and practices, Allen and Bull’s work is innovative in examining where such ideas originate. It also contributes to the wider body of work on the rise of ‘external actors’ in policy formation and educational practice (e.g. Ball, 2008; Lubienski et al., 2022) and the implications of this for democratic representation and accountability. Moreover, the international links they evidence, specifically the close links between ‘policy entrepreneurs’ in the UK and US, provide further insight into the various globalising pressures experienced by both schools and universities.

In my own work, I have been interested in the ways in which ‘character’ is addressed by policy actors. For example, an analysis I conducted of how young people were constructed in education policy developed by the UK’s Coalition government between 2010 and 2015 demonstrated that certain character traits were valorised, particularly those typically associated with a masculinist subject position, such as autonomy, independence and the relishing of competition (Brooks, 2013b). More recently, however, there are more connections between my work and Allen and Bull’s emphasis on the rise of new network actors. Indeed, in exploring the impact of the post-Brexit transition from the European Union’s Erasmus programme for international student mobility to the UK’s Turing Scheme, Johanna Waters and I have charted the rise of a new group of actors: third-party providers of short-term mobility opportunities (Brooks and Waters, 2024). We have argued that they can be seen as a new type of ‘migration infrastructure’ (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) which, although largely non-profit-making, has ushered in a new form of international student mobility: very short-term, with very little academic oversight (see also Brooks and Waters, forthcoming). This, we suggest, is contributing to the stratification of educational mobility opportunities, a theme developed in more detail below.

Stratification of opportunities

Sociological Research Online has played a key role in publishing articles that have taken further debates on the internationalisation of education – a research area in which I have been working for almost two decades. While much of the literature in this area has focused on the motivations and experiences of mobile students, the journal has published a number of articles that have explored, instead, the role of transnational education (i.e. education provided in one country by an institution based in another). Johanna Waters and Maggi Leung’s article, ‘Young people and the reproduction of disadvantage through transnational higher education in Hong Kong’, published in 2012, provides a fascinating account of students in Hong Kong undertaking British degree programmes. The majority of the participants in their research had taken, or were in the process of taking, ‘top-up degrees’; they had typically studied for a ‘local’ associate degree or higher diploma and were ‘topping it up’ to a full degree through taking a one- or two-year British programme of study franchised to local providers.

Waters and Leung’s article is important for bringing into sharp relief the complexities of international higher education, and various tensions bound up in transnational forms of provision. Indeed, they show, through interviews with students, staff, and employers, that ‘top-up degrees’ often had a widening participation function. Such qualifications frequently enabled students who had been unable to access higher education in Hong Kong through more traditional routes (largely because their academic performance was not sufficiently strong and university places were limited) to gain an undergraduate degree. While previous research had highlighted how some students from East Asia moved to Western universities to escape the highly competitive and pressurised higher education systems in their home nations (e.g. Waters, 2007), Waters and Leung demonstrated that transnational education offered a further opportunity to bypass the local system – and one that was more accessible (than moving overseas) to those with limited family finances. For many of the participants in their study, the British ‘top-up’ degree provided what they saw an ‘entry ticket’ to professional employment; without it, they would not have even been able to apply for graduate jobs.

Waters and Leung go on, however, to show how this apparently emancipatory intervention did not ultimately disrupt processes of social reproduction. This was played out through the ‘reduced privileges’ to which the students had access. Many of the British top-up degrees were provided through a local higher education institution, commonly through its continuing education department, and were ‘sold’ to students on the basis that their education would be to all intents and purposes identical to that received by the ‘domestic’ students studying at the local institution. However, Waters and Leung demonstrate the various ways in which the top-up students were treated differently from their peers: they had poorer access to library and computing facilities and significantly fewer opportunities to engage in university-run social activities; and their seminars were often held in much more geographically distant locations. Taken together, these experiences had the effect of underlining the ways in which such students were positioned as ‘different’ from ‘normal’ university students in Hong Kong.

This article paved the way for a growing body of work in the area of international education that has illustrated the diversity of provision, and critiqued previously commonly held notions that taking up international opportunities is the preserve of the privileged (e.g. Lipura and Collins, 2020; Yang, 2018). Moreover, it provided a compelling early account of how an international qualification is not always a means of securing social advantage. This has been an argument I have made – often writing with Johanna Waters – in relation to other forms of international education. For example, we have shown how UK students who choose to study abroad often do so because they have failed to access what they believe to be ‘appropriate’ education in the UK (Brooks and Waters, 2009), and have suggested that the recent widening of short-term mobility opportunities for UK students (through the Turing Scheme) may be associated with the increasing stratification of experiences, with those from lower income backgrounds more likely to be found in shorter-term, less academically focussed provision (Brooks and Waters, 2024; see also Waters and Brooks, 2021).

Knowledge hierarchies

Transnational forms of higher education provision are also the focus of Jingran Yu’s article published in Sociological Research Online almost a decade later, in 2021. Her contribution, ‘Consuming UK transnational higher education in China: a Bourdieusian approach to Chinese students’ perceptions and experiences’, extends the work of Waters and Leung by teasing out further complexities of UK international education. Her geographical focus is also East Asia – although on mainland China rather than Hong Kong and, rather than examine UK programmes provided through local institutions, she focuses on a specific transnational campus: that of the University of Nottingham, based in Ningbo. Transnational education in China differs from that in many other parts of the world by virtue of its top-down (rather than bottom-up) nature, with many ventures coordinated by the Chinese government – as a means of mitigating possible ideological threats from foreign powers. The Nottingham campus is officially a ‘Chinese-Foreign Co-operative University’ (and the first of its kind to be set up).

On the basis of a seven-month ethnography at the campus, Yu shows that the students who attend Nottingham Ningbo are typically Chinese and from affluent backgrounds, and have very good academic records and English language proficiency. They are thus a very different cohort from those involved in Waters and Leung’s research. The impact of the transnational education is also different. Indeed, Yu argues that the campus serves to reinscribe global knowledge hierarchies. Unlike Chinese-Foreign Co-operative Universities that followed, the curriculum at Nottingham Ningbo was fully controlled by the UK partner. Thus, while the university promoted the idea of a ‘truly international education’, it tended to fall back on ‘dominant pedagogies and values developed from a Western context’ (p.232). The extent to which students were able to benefit from this, Yu contends, was dependent on their own educational habitus – and whether this was in line with the Western habitus of the university. Moreover, the transnational campus offers an opportunity for Chinese students, albeit those with the requisite economic capital, to develop ‘the linguistic and institutional cultural capital that is necessary for future global mobility’ (p.223) – providing a stepping stone to postgraduate study in the UK or US – in a low-risk environment, where Western pedagogical norms can be learnt without the need to physically relocate and adapt to an entirely new culture.

The privileging of Western perspectives is evident also, Yu maintains, in her interviewees’ perspectives on recent changes to the Nottingham Ningbo campus. It was commonly held that the campus had shifted over the past few years from a focus on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as part of which students were able to choose from numerous modules spanning different areas of knowledge – what she calls a ‘humanitarian’ orientation – to a much more instrumental, ‘utilitarian’ setup, in which there was a stronger emphasis on education as a means to employment and a positioning of students as consumers. Interestingly, Yu asserts that this shift was misrecognised by her participants and seen, not as a result of the UK’s shift towards a more marketised higher education system, but as a consequence of accommodating Chinese culture more fully. She concludes that this reveals the persistent symbolic power of UK higher education in a transnational context and how it is reproduced, even where provision is meant to be underpinned by a ‘co-operative’ partnership. Yu’s article thus contributes to the body of work that has documented the hierarchical structuring of the global higher education field, and the key role played, within this, by hierarchies of knowledge (e.g. Connell, 2007; Rizvi, 2000). It is innovative in showing how such hierarchies are played out in transnational campuses (that rarely open themselves up to researchers), and the limited ability of the Chinese state to resist the operation of UK symbolic power in this particular context. In future years, it will be important to chart whether this symbolic power is sustained in a changing global context – one in which Chinese scholars and Chinese universities are playing an increasingly dominant role in knowledge generation, for example (Marginson, 2022).

Variable exchange of cultural capital

I Lin Sin’s article, ‘Ethnicity and (dis)advantage: exchanging cultural capital in UK international education and graduate employment’, published in Sociological Research Online in 2016, is based on research conducted with Malaysian students who had obtained a UK qualification – through studying in the UK itself, or on the kind of transnational campus discussed by Yu, or via the franchising arrangements upon which Waters and Leung focussed. While there are various points of connection with the two articles covered above, Sin’s main aim in her article is to show how ethnicity plays a key role in Malaysian students’ choices about and experiences of international education, and the routes they take subsequently into graduate employment. For example, despite similar levels of formal certification, graduates from the bumiputera majority in Malaysia (i.e. those with ancestry indigenous to the South East Asian region) sought out jobs in the public sector, while their non-bumiputera peers (with immigrant ancestry and cultural ties outside the region – such as in China or India) were much more likely to be found in the private sector. This, Sin argues, is because the exchange value of an overseas qualification is heavily mediated by ethnicity – with bumiputeras much more welcome than non-bumiputeras in public sector employment. A key contribution of her work is thus to illustrate how social divisions other than class are important when theorising international student mobility. Until relatively recently, most discussion had tended to ignore variables such as gender and age, as well as ethnicity – pointing instead to the typically high socio-economic status of those who move, and the role of international student mobility in reproducing class distinction (e.g. Kratz and Netz, 2018; Waters, 2009).

Sin’s work also demonstrates, however, that how exchange value is assessed differs from context to context. Indeed, she provides data from her study to show how, in the UK, it was her participants’ nationality rather than their ethnicity that constituted the most significant barrier to employment – because of the UK’s strict rules about post-study employment and more general immigration restrictions. This focus on the specific context in which educational qualifications are being exchanged has provided a useful corrective to some studies of international student mobility that have assumed that an overseas qualification is an automatic ticket to professional success. Following Sin’s 2016 article, various scholars have shown how the value of an overseas degree can differ quite considerably depending on the national context, the sector of employment, and/or the graduates’ social characteristics (e.g. Tuxen, 2022; Xiong and Mok, 2020). There are also clear links to Waters and Leung’s work discussed above, which has shown how the type of overseas qualification is also significant.

Alongside emphasising the relevance of ethnicity (and nationality) to understanding the experiences of mobile students, Sin demonstrates why the middle class should not be seen as a unitary category. For Malaysians, their ethnicity is as important as their social class – played out in their experiences of student mobility, as well as other aspects of life. This has been a prominent theme of my own work – particularly through my doctoral research, which showed how the educational experiences of the lower (or ‘liminal’) middle class were often substantially different from their upper-middle-class peers with higher levels of parental education and/or wealth (Brooks, 2003b, 2005). More broadly, the heterogeneity discussed in Sin’s article raises important questions about whether the category of ‘international student’ is an analytically useful one – or whether it has the effect of obscuring other, perhaps more important, social divisions. This is something Johanna Waters and I have discussed in our book on student migrants (Waters and Brooks, 2021). Although we argue that the label is significant for political reasons, among others – for bringing attention to experiences that are encountered only by those who move abroad for study – we acknowledge that it can serve to mask the relevance of other social identities that may be important in developing a more holistic understanding of this particular group of students.

Higher education students’ unions

Within the UK, a prominent point in political debate over the past few years has been the extent to which universities act as politicising institutions. Political scientists have argued that the political orientations of graduates are significantly different from non-graduates, and suggested that higher education exerts a liberalising influence (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). A more polemic position has been taken up by various right-wing politicians, who have criticised universities for pursuing ‘woke’ political agendas and inhibiting freedom of speech (Donelan, 2023). Nevertheless, empirical research that has sought to examine directly the impact of higher education on students’ views has suggested that the influence is small, and that, if change occurs over the course of a degree, it is not necessarily related to higher education experiences per se (Fryer, 2023; Simon, 2022). An important contribution to this debate has been made by Rille Raaper, in her work on the political engagement of those involved in students’ unions. In her Sociological Research Online article of 2021 – ‘Students as “Animal Laborans”? Tracing student politics in a marketised higher education setting’ – she explores the impact on such engagement of recent changes to the UK higher education sector.

Raaper advances two main arguments. First, she contends that the current higher education context constrains some forms of political activity. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, she maintains that political action requires individuals to be willing to take the initiative and ‘set something new into motion while accepting that outcomes will always remain unpredictable’ (p.134). In a higher education sector characterised by high levels of competition and instrumentality, it is difficult, she suggests, for students to take risks and engage in collective political action. They are, instead, incentivised to prioritise immediate necessities, and focus on career goals. Moreover, because of the way in which higher education is funded (leading to students graduating with high levels of debt, and many having to work throughout their course to support themselves), financial concerns are often uppermost in students’ minds.

Second, however, Rapper argues that a disinclination to engage in collective action does not mean that students should not be considered as political actors. Indeed, she maintains that the changes played out in the UK higher education sector over recent decades have facilitated new forms of political engagement. She cites the example of students’ unions using consumer protection law (associated with the rise of an individualist consumer discourse in higher education) to safeguard educational experience, noting: ‘Students found themselves in situations where they had strong beliefs [about] higher education being transformative rather than economic, and where consumer rights became part of protecting the good practice in universities’ (p.138). She also describes her research participants from students’ unions taking part in interest-based groups, and social media-led campaigns – evidence, she suggests, that while collective action has become less common on university campuses, political engagement has been sustained, although in more subtle and individualised forms.

Raaper’s article is important in surfacing some of the complexity in students’ political activity. While it does not answer the questions discussed at the start of this section about whether higher education politicises today’s students, it does show that the context in which students learn appears to shape how they engage politically. It also contributes to our wider understanding of political activity on campus, alongside research that has shown how student societies play a key role in developing students’ ‘political habitus’ (Loader et al., 2015), and how social media increasingly enables politically engaged students to link up more effectively – sometimes across national borders (Peterson et al., 2016). My own work on students’ unions in some ways reflects the arguments made by Raaper in relation to complexity and nuance – evidencing how the national higher education context (Abrahams and Brooks, 2019; Brooks et al., 2022) as well as material factors specific to individual higher education institutions (Brooks et al., 2016) can affect the political orientations and behaviours of students.

The importance of sociological insight

To some extent, Raaper’s article rehearses themes developed by Nathan Manning and Kathy Edwards in their 2013 article in Sociological Research Online: ‘Why has civic education failed to increase young people’s political participation?’. Manning and Edwards were writing in a context in which various national governments were concerned at declining levels of youth participation in elections and an alleged disconnect between young people and other parts of civic life, and had in some cases instigated particular initiatives to remedy these supposed problems. Such interventions included civic education programmes, delivered in schools and colleges, underpinned by the belief that it was a lack of knowledge of politics that had led to political disengagement. Manning and Edwards examined the impact of these (knowledge-based) programmes on the behaviour of young people through a systematic review. On the basis of this, they concluded that civic education had had little impact on young people’s propensity to vote or to register to vote, and only a modest effect on other forms of political participation.

Manning and Edwards go on to argue that most of the articles they reviewed paid little attention to sociological theorising about young people’s political participation, and tended to assume the same logic as policymakers – that is, conceiving civic education in ‘naïve, mechanistic terms as a remedy for young people’s apparent lack of knowledge and interest in electoral politics’ (2.8). They contend, instead, that the broad body of sociological work in this area can provide insights that are important for policy (as well as for furthering our understanding of young people’s lives). First, they outline a wide range of factors – discussed in the sociological literature – that explain why young people have become less likely to engage in formal politics. These include assumptions, dominant in some parts of society, that young people are ‘on a developmental path’ (3.1) and thus not fully formed, adult political actors; longer transitions from youth to adulthood that can ‘disrupt and undermine young people’s integration into the polity’ (3.3); under-representation at all levels of government; and feelings of being excluded from electoral politics. Second, they show that young people are engaging in politics in other ways, such as through everyday acts linked to issues of identity (e.g. vegetarianism, energy and water conservation), and new technologies – which often address a ‘placeless public’ (3.20) – about issues that cross national borders. Thus, Manning and Edwards maintain, a failure to vote should not be read as evidence of uninterest in and disconnection from politics and civic life more generally.

Here, there are clear resonances with Raaper’s arguments about the changing nature of political engagement – although, unlike Raaper, Manning and Edwards suggest that there are still myriad examples of young people willing to take risks in their political engagement and, although some forms of engagement are quite individualised, they have not replaced collective action entirely. There are also strong links to my own work on young people’s politics, and the sociological work foregrounded by Manning and Edwards has been important in developing my own understanding of how young people engage in the civic sphere (e.g. Brooks, 2007). For example, my recent research on students across Europe has suggested that their political engagement is related to beliefs about whether or not they will be listened to, and also the ways in which political activity is framed (Abrahams and Brooks, 2019; Brooks et al., 2020). For example, we have argued that, over recent years, students’ political activism has often been positioned, particularly in the media, as a threat (Brooks et al., 2022). In the UK and Ireland, student-led forms of protest such as ‘no platforming’ and the designation of ‘safe spaces’ (providing spaces for discussion without the threat of violence, harassment or hate speech) have often been seen as a threat to the university as a place for free speech and debate (Brooks et al., 2022). Similarly, in Spain, students have been framed in the media as a threat – in this case for engaging in (unspecified) acts of violence, with no opportunity provided for students to explain their actions or even the causes they were protesting about (Brooks et al., 2022). In these ways, sociological analyses can provide an important riposte to simplistic policy pronouncements.

Anti-racism and civic education

Civic education is also the focus of Alice Pettigrew’s article, ‘Confronting the limits of anti-racist and multicultural education: white students’ reflections on identity and difference in a multi-ethnic secondary school’, published in 2011. Pettigrew draws on an ethnographic study of an inner city, multi-ethnic comprehensive school in the south-west of England to examine how students negotiate questions of identity, difference and fairness. Although the school prided itself on its harmonious and successful multicultural ethos – and had been commended by relevant government and regulatory bodies for this – Pettigrew argues that, beneath the rhetoric associated with the ‘imagined community’ of the school, were various challenges and tensions that raise important questions about how civic education might best work, and the limits to antiracist pedagogy as played out in UK schools.

The article documents how, despite the school’s official commitment to multiculturalism, students tended to form friendship groups with others from the same ethnic background. This was, Pettigrew suggests, a means of navigating ‘a daunting, often hidden and potentially treacherous regulatory framework’ (8.1) that operated across the school. For example, she notes ‘the prevalence of racialised language, “banter”, and joking discourse among and across collective groupings’ (5.7). Although some students explained this as a consequence of the perceived absence of any ‘real racism’ in the school, she argues that there was considerable ambiguity in where boundaries between the two should be drawn, and it was often left to socially powerful pupils to make such determinations.

Pettigrew also discusses the absence of any specific pedagogical support in the school to enable pupils to reflect critically on their own experiences – because of institutional assumptions that equal relationships would naturally flow from the mixing of students. As a result, judgements about ‘fairness’ between ethnic groups were often made through what she calls ‘a temporally foreshortened, “present-orientated”, and distorting lens’ (6.10), in which both historical and contemporary structural inequalities were ignored. This approach, she contends, reflects the dominant approach to citizenship education, as played out in British schools, which is ‘less concerned with helping young people confront the complexities and potential challenges of their lived reality than with promoting an abstract, aspirational, and ultimately exclusionary conception of how “we” (the British) would like to see ourselves and how we would like to be seen’ (8.4). My own work on citizenship education, conducted around the same time Pettigrew’s article was published, engaged with related issues, including whether it had been too focussed on political knowledge and active citizenship behaviours, rather than more democratic understandings, and whether it had promoted young people’s responsibilities over their rights (Brooks, 2007, 2009). Furthermore, Pettigrew’s conclusions articulate well with those I and others were developing from a slightly different perspective: that citizenship education needs to facilitate conversations about what it means to live and be politically engaged in a democratic community – and not to assume that shared understandings necessarily emerge from particular behaviours – whether that is from carrying out voluntary work as part of an ‘active citizenship’ agenda, or being part of a multi-ethnic school.