Understanding racialised elements of habitus of working-class women on an access to higher education course

This paper explores how race, ethnicity and class intersect to shape the educational experiences of seven mature working-class women on an Access to Higher Education Diploma course, at a further education college in England. Addressing limitations in Bourdieu’s ‘race-light’ framework, it adopts an intersectional lens to examine how structural inequalities are both reproduced and challenged. Using online focus groups, one-to-one interviews, and Play-Doh as a creative method, their narratives are used as a methodological device to understand the intersecting elements of habitus which shaped their return to education and aspirations for higher education. By foregrounding racialised habitus and white normativity, this paper highlights how race, and gender, are not peripheral but constitutive of how classed educational trajectories are formed, constrained and occasionally transformed. The findings underscore the potential of Access courses to foster more inclusive pedagogies as heterodox spaces capable of unsettling, but not fully dismantling, entrenched racialised inequalities.