‘I don’t feel like I belong’: first-in-family girls’ constructions of belonging and space during the transition from secondary school into university

ABSTRACT

University spaces can be experienced as unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing by working-class students. Early difficulties adjusting to university can lead to attrition. This article draws from a larger study examining the experiences of first-in-family (FIF) girls in one Australian city as they transition from secondary school into their first year of university. In exploring how FIF girls may experience the affective dimensions of belonging through university spaces, this article seeks to highlight how belonging occurs through gendered and classed meaning-making. The thematic analysis in this article is based on the narratives of two FIF girls, Kate and Christina. Central to this analysis is an exploration of how Kate and Christina navigate feelings of belonging within their universities according to the classed and gendered aspects of the multiple higher education spaces they come to inhabit.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• girlhood
• higher education
• transitions
• widening participation

Introduction

For over two decades, girls and young women in Western contexts have been depicted as the success story of education. School achievement, overrepresentation in higher education, and an increased role in the workforce are highlighted as examples of a post-feminist society where gender inequalities no longer exist (McLeod and Yates 2006). While the success of girls in education is a captivating image, the feminine success discourse does little to capture how girls experience education, especially in relation to how social class impacts on the higher education experiences of girls who are the first in their family (FIF) to attend university (McDonald 2021, 2024; Stahl and McDonald 2022a). While widening participation agendas in Australia have often focussed on the availability of university places, securing a university place is not the only barrier to higher education that FIF students must overcome (Snowden & Lewis, 2015). Other factors must be considered, including previous school experiences, family support and the transition to belonging within spaces of higher education (Reay 2001; Reay, David, and Ball 2005; Sellar & Gale, 2011; Southgate, Kelly, and Symonds 2015). Although belonging is an important area of focus within youth studies research (Harris, Cuervo, and Wyn 2021), there has been a less explicit focus within education research on how FIF girls experience and negotiate feelings of belonging.

As an important aspect of how working-class girls experience the transition from secondary school into higher education, considering experiences of belonging offers ‘productive ways of thinking about the relational dimensions of youth experience in complex times, and young people’s connections to place, people, material spaces and objects’ (Harris, Cuervo, and Wyn 2021, 6). Belonging as a concept is often undertheorised in studies of young people (Noble 2020; Wright 2015). For the purposes of this article, I conceptualise belonging as a form of membership which is experienced at the level of the individual as both internalised and embodied and, often, as labour-intensive (Noble 2020). Belonging does not function as ‘a fixed state that individuals achieve’ (Gravett and Ajjawi 2022, 1391), but is instead fluid, variable, and unpredictable, and experienced in a multitude of ways. Conceptualising belonging in this way is consonant with Massey’s (1994) theory that there is a multiplicity in how social spaces are perceived, as how spaces are experienced and interpreted is variable at both the level of the individual and according to differing social positions such as social class and gender. Gravett and Ajjawi (2022, 1387) make a similar connection between space and belonging, asking ‘how might we see things differently if we understand time, space and belonging not as fixed, uniform or discrete, but interweaving, experienced relationally, and as having a multiplicity of meanings, stories, and possibilities?’

The aim of this article is to consider the impact of gender and social class on how FIF girls navigate and experience belonging during the transition to university. I draw on critiques of the feminine success discourse (for example, see Archer, Halsall, and Hollingworth 2007a; Harris 2004a; McLeod and Yates 2006; Pomerantz and Raby 2017; Ringrose, 2007), particularly in relation to neoliberal aspects such as responsibilisation and individualism, to consider how girls may position a sense of belonging in terms of success and failure. Rentschler and Mitchell (2016, 2) highlight how girls and young women struggle to assert their rights to territory and their ‘experiences of belonging to and relating with others in key spaces of learning, working, playing, consuming’. Such struggles – as a ‘contentious reality that shapes girls’ lives’ (Rentschler and Mitchell 2016, 2) – inform not only how girls navigate belonging within new social spaces, but how they experience girlhood. Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody (2001) suggest that the experience of working-class girls who cross boundaries between working-class and middle-class spaces can be fraught with anxieties about potential failure. This struggle frames socially mobile working-class girlhood.

This article focuses on how two first-in-family (FIF) girls, Kate and Christina, navigate belonging within higher education through analysing how they both perceive and position themselves within their universities. FIF students are commonly defined as students who are the first in their immediate family to enrol in higher education (Southgate, Kelly, and Symonds 2015). In order to undertake this analysis, I consider universities as made up of disparate physical and social spaces which are constructed according to how they are experienced. How individuals perceive and interpret these spaces contributes to their experiences of belonging. Researchers have argued that working-class people commonly experience strong attachments to place and space, based on generational histories and traditions (Reay and Lucey 2000; Stahl and Habib 2017). Similarly, researchers such as Atkinson (2012), Cuervo, Chesters, and Aberdeen (2019), Reay, David, and Ball (2005) and Thomas (2018) have explored how upwardly mobile working-class young people make connections to new spaces of learning within higher education and what the implications may be for both their sense of belonging and sense of self (see also Finn and Holton 2020). In this article, I build on these ideas to consider how FIF girls position themselves within university spaces according to how they experience the affective and intersecting dimensions of gender and social class, and how this positioning impacts on their feelings of belonging.

This article proceeds in four parts. First, I highlight the literature on working-class belonging in higher education and then the literature on girlhood, belonging and relations to space. Second, I describe the methodology, including an outline of the larger research project. Then, the narratives of two FIF girls, Kate and Christina, are presented before concluding with an analysis which highlights how they experience belonging through discursive understandings of university spaces regulated through regimes of gender and social class.

Working-class student belonging within higher education

In recent years, there has been a ‘turn’ to studies of belonging within research on young people, especially in the areas of sociology of youth and youth policy studies (Harris, Cuervo, and Wyn 2021). Harris, Cuervo, and Wyn (2021), in an effort to highlight how belonging is chronically unconceptualised, undertook a critical analysis of theories of belonging within youth research. Although resisting a definitive definition of belonging, they note common themes across theories and definitions:

Belonging is thus about membership, rights and duties, forms of identification with groups or other people and with places, and the emotional and social bonds that come of feelings of being part of a larger whole. It is about both the subjective and affective experience of connection and the social, structural processes of recognition, inclusion and exclusion. (Harris, Cuervo, and Wyn 2021, 3).

Yuval-Davis (2006) suggests studies of belonging should take into account three factors: social locations, referring to how we belong to specific social categories (such as social class or gender) and which carries with it particular positionalities in reference to power; identities and emotional attachments, which relates to identity narratives – and individual emotional investments – and signals group membership; and ethical and political values, which reflect how the previous two factors of belonging are ‘valued and judged’ according to ‘specific attitudes and ideologies’ (203). Similarly, Bell (1999) theorises belonging as stemming from how we understand and identify ourselves and, as a result, how we locate ourselves within various social realities. For Bell (1999), belonging holds both an affective and performative dimension of ‘be-ing’ and ‘longing’.

The struggle to belong has framed much research on widening participation (for example, see Crawford and McKenzie 2023; Gravett and Ajjawi 2022; Thomas 2018; Wong 2023). In reviewing the literature on widening participation, I highlight three domains of belonging: the desire and struggle to fit in; belonging as capital; and different forms of working-class exclusion. Research has documented how the ‘successful’ working-class university experience often requires substantial identity work from working-class students in order to ‘fit in’ (Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009; Reay, David, and Ball 2005). University spaces have been described as ‘sites of power and knowledge in which narratives are articulated and identities constructed, resulting in different lived experiences within those sites’ (Thomas 2018, 42). Thomas (2015) argues that students can feel socially dislocated and excluded from these spaces when aspects such as gender and social class position them as outside of normative understandings of higher education students.

In the Australian context, Patfield, Gore, and Fray (2022, 14) argue that first-generation students can experience participation in higher education in terms of ‘silences’ where ‘the education system can reinforce the broader social positioning of first-generation entrants if it does not provide opportunities for young people to build up valuable capital’. Furthermore, first-generation students – referring to those who are within a generational move to university rather than the first in their family – have varying ‘capacities to draw on legitimised capital relevant to this field’ (13). While some first-generation students are able to ‘inherit’ relevant knowledges from siblings or cousins, others may draw on the experiences of friends or social networks. These experiences are in contrast to those whom Patfield, Gore, and Fray (2022, 13) refer to as ‘outsiders’ who are ‘anchored in the relative value of their family’s limited educational histories and the kinds of capital they can typically access within their homes and communities at this point in time’. O’Shea (2021) similarly highlights the sense of shame and othering that is embodied by FIF students, suggesting that feelings of belonging may be more achievable for those who feel a sense of deservedness about being at university.

When discussing the strategies young working-class students may draw on to navigate belonging within higher education, Cuervo, Chesters, and Aberdeen (2019, 858) suggest a reliance on peer groups and friendships, which provide ‘a vital source of support and information, particularly in places where opportunities are not abundant or experienced in everyday life practices.’ Similarly, King, Luzeckyj, and McCann (2019) report that friendships are a significant factor in helping FIF students to have successful university experiences. Conversely, students who do not manage to form strong relationships can view this as a failure on their part (Stahl, McDonald, and Loeser 2021). The formation and construction of particular learner identities is another aspect of how working-class young people respond to the unfamiliar spaces of higher education, and this often takes place in an effort to increase a sense of belonging (Stahl and McDonald 2022c; Stahl and McDonald 2022b). With a focus on gendered learner identities, the following section examines how young women engage in positioning and constructing the self in response to gendered and classed discourses of academic success.

Post-feminist narratives of successful girls

I return now to Yuval-Davis’ (2006) recommendation that research which engages with concepts of belonging should account for the ways in which social categories and identity narratives are read through ideologies and discourses. In this section, I consider the complex identity work that takes place when working-class girls construct narratives of the self which are positioned according to discourses of feminine success.

Research focussing on common narratives about the educational success of girls has highlighted how the postfeminist values of power, autonomy and choice resonate with the individual responsibility discourse of neoliberalism (Brinkman, Brinkman, and Hamilton 2022; Lee 2023; McDonald 2024; Pomerantz and Raby 2017). Allen and Osgood (2015) suggest that the ideals of neoliberalism have created an exclusionary ‘normative femininity’ which is based around the values and experiences of the middle class and which masks or downplays the effect of inequalities such as gender, but also class, race, ethnicity, disability and sexuality. This normative femininity is embedded within education in terms of the way girls engage in extensive work to negotiate and construct their identities against the ideal of the ‘supergirl’ (Brinkman, Brinkman, and Hamilton 2022; Harris 2004; Pomerantz and Raby 2017) who is not only ‘academically successful and future focused, but she is also able to excel across multiple aspects of school, including extracurricular activities, clubs, sports teams, community service, and peer relationships’ (Pomerantz and Raby 2017, 28). Within this context, there is evidence of how girls take up neoliberalism in the formation of identities that are tied to the image of the ‘supergirl’ which includes narratives of ideals and aspirations about what it means to be a successful girl.

Yet, as Brinkman, Brinkman, and Hamilton (2022, 40) highlight, ‘Not all girls have the same access to become a Super Girl – some have more access to choose this route … ’ Girls who are not ‘supergirls’ may experience social isolation, a sense of failure and diminished academic opportunities (Brinkman, Brinkman, and Hamilton 2022), and, especially for working-class girls with more restricted access to these markers of success, a tenuous sense of belonging within spaces of education (McDonald 2024; Pomerantz and Raby 2017). In the analysis that follows, I explore how discourses of feminine success impact on the way in which two FIF girls, Christina and Kate, negotiate belonging within university spaces.

Methods

The research project examined the experiences of 22 FIF girls from diverse schooling sectors in Adelaide, Australia, as they moved from secondary school into their first year of university (McDonald 2021; Stahl and McDonald 2022a).

Participants were recruited through social media, in-school presentations and school leaders during their final school year. Data collection took place through multiple one-on-one semi-structured interviews. Interviews were first conducted in the weeks after participants graduated from high school, and then twice during the first university year. Further interviews were conducted after participants had completed their second year of university. During the interviews, the participants were invited to discuss their relationships with both their schools and universities, with a focus on how they negotiated gender relations and learner identities in the context of these sites. The interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and then coded using the NVivo computer-aided qualitative data analysis package. Thematic analysis took place through coding as a way to ‘cluster’ data so that answers to specific questions could be read and understood in the context of the larger cohort. Participants were asked to describe themselves and their experiences (Brinkman, Brinkman, and Hamilton 2022) as part of a ‘self-narration’ (McLeod and Yates 2006). At the same time, moving away from coded data and onto reading the interviews as narratives became important in building an overall picture of participant experiences (Denzin 2013). Sometimes, a specific comment or experience shared by a participant was better understood when read within the context of their previous interviews rather than only analysed within the theme under which it had been coded. This speaks to theories around coding by researchers such as St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) and Denzin (2013), who discuss the importance of moving away from specifically coded ‘data’ and onto understanding how our ways of knowing can be underpinned by a ‘narrative of passion, a narrative of commitment a narrative which teaches others that ways of knowing are always already partial, moral, and political’ (Denzin 2013, 355).

During the interviews and thematic analysis, how some participants positioned their experiences in ways that evoked social class and gender became evident. The experiences reported to me during interviews by Christina and Kate are illustrative of narratives which highlight a nuance within the successful but at times precarious natures of their university transition experiences. In deciding to focus specifically on two young women for this article, I drew on Reay’s (2018, 18) suggestion that case studies allow for work which brings ‘working-class young people’s narratives to life’ through devoting ‘time and reflexivity in order to develop in-depth case studies.’ Christina and Kate’s narratives are explored here because they both specifically discussed how they struggled to experience belonging, and how they attached this struggle to specific physical university spaces.

Navigating belonging through diverse experiences within university spaces

Christina

I first met Christina the week after she completed her final secondary school exams. Christina’s dad was an electrician and her mum worked as a student support officer; Christina suggested both had expressed disappointment in not having finished school and it was important to them that Christina continue her education. Although Christina was academically successful in secondary school, she tended to downplay her success by making comparisons between herself and others. Christina was a flautist and an A + music student, yet she frequently spoke about two male percussionists in her class who, she told me, received more attention from the teacher and received slightly higher grades. While Christina was clearly talented, she described her final school performance as ‘I still did the worst in my class’ and told her parents she would not be receiving a subject award because ‘I’m the worst’. Christina felt overlooked and disappointed not to be celebrated in the way the male percussionists were. Perkins (2013, 197) speaks of how the field of music is organised in a hierarchy in her research on learning in conservatoires, and although Christina studied music at secondary school, she still experienced what Perkins (2013, 207) describes as ‘the potentially negative impact of hierarchies on those not positioned at “the top”’. In terms of discourses of feminine success – particularly linking academic achievement with individual effort and responsibility – it was evident that by not being positioned at ‘the top’, Christina saw herself as a failure. Christina’s low self-esteem in terms of her success continued as she entered university.

Christina finished secondary school with an Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank (ATAR) of 86.4, which gained her access to her first choice of a Bachelor of Laboratory Medicine. During her first semester at university, Christina continued to make comparisons between herself and others in terms of academic success. Christina spoke about feeling uncomfortable in a specific building at her university where the students studying medical radiation science would often congregate. She believed that an ATAR of 99 was needed to be accepted into medical radiation science, and this belief made Christina feel uncomfortable in that space:

Sarah:

Are there any spots in the uni where you don’t feel very comfortable?

Christina:

Um, down in the BG building. It’s where all the medical radiation science students are … and they’re all really smart and they do all the placements. And it’s really hard to get into those courses … so they’re kind of posh. (laughs). And it’s literally uncomfortable down there ‘cause they all think they’re really good.

Sarah:

Okay. So, you just don’t feel like you belong in that –

Christina:

I don’t go down there unless I have to. Like one of my chem tutorials is down there which sucks. But it’s just really weird. I don’t feel like I belong down there because they’re all really up … like up themselves (laughter). They’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m in the medical radiation science, I’m better than you.’ But they did get a 99 ATAR, so I guess they have a right to brag.

Christina was also intimidated by other science students, and she attached much of this intimidation to their high ATARs, despite herself having received a high ranking. While the system of measurement used for the final year of schooling has been shown to negatively impact on how young people perceive their achievements (Smith and Skrbiš 2017), it appeared that Christina was positioning herself in terms of notions of feminine success. Christina was a success story, yet how she discussed her experiences highlighted feelings of exclusion, where she framed her understandings of belonging and not belonging around preconceived notions of success.

Multiple studies have sought to explore the ways in which working-class youth take up understandings of social class in constructing their own subjectivities (Archer, Halsall, and Hollingworth 2007; McLeod 2000). Reay (2001) indicates that children internalise understandings of their class positionings as early as primary school, sometimes already making connections between social class and academic achievement. Pomerantz and Raby (2020, 12) argue that ‘class identity is made visible through the concrete objects that are productive of material relations, routines of daily life, and shared histories of the body’. Another dimension of Christina’s struggle with belonging was her acute awareness of difference and hierarchies, evidenced by her comments about the clothing worn by the radiology students:

Sarah:

But how do you … Can you tell that they’re medical radiation students or what?

Christina:

Yeah, they have the shirt. They have a special shirt and special clothes (laughs) … I think it’s just for when they’re going into the radiation suite, then they can all have like a uniform on. But it’s still annoying. (laughter). The health science students also wear them as well, but I don’t know why. What do they even do? Health science is such a broad degree.

Sarah:

(laughs). And they have polo shirts as well?

Christina:

They have, like, shirts that say health sciences on them. Like nice shirts.

Sarah:

And so, you don’t have any like special shirts or anything?

Christina:

The lab wing doesn’t have anything.

It appeared that Christina’s irritation at seeing the ‘special shirts’ stemmed from the way the shirts positioned, in her mind, their wearers as important or ‘special’ – something which Christina herself longed to be. For Christina, the shirts functioned as a visual embodiment of the middle-class social field of individual success – of the ‘supergirl’ – and they signified what Christina struggled to access. In turn, the shirts were emblematic of something Christina believed she was not: posh, smart, and ‘better’ than others.

In considering the importance of dress in determining belonging, during this interview, Christina was wearing a university-branded hoodie. Documenting feelings of in/authenticity of working-class women in the United Kingdom, Skeggs (1997, 107) writes that ‘Appearance is simultaneously and across time a site for pleasure and strength but also a site of anxiety, regulation and surveillance’. While Christina watched the students in their special shirts, designating particular dispositions to them, with this surveillance came an awareness of being surveilled in turn. By wearing the university hoodie, Christina engaged in a public performance where her university clothing was ‘linked to valuations of oneself, to knowing oneself and to being accepted as part of a group’ (Skeggs 1997, 107; see also McDonald 2024). However, the hoodie did not appear to hold the same affective power for Christina that the exclusive ‘special shirts’ did (when I asked about it, she said she did not wear it much). The hoodie was not enough for Christina to feel a level of acceptance and, when asked about her feelings of belonging, she described feeling lost:

Sarah:

Do you feel a sense of belonging at uni?

Christina:

Not really. I need to find, uh, find myself there still. I feel a bit lost. But I’m getting there.

During discussions about how the transition to university was experienced and the importance of belonging, a discourse of ‘finding’ oneself at university was not uncommon among the girls in this study. Reay (2001, 337) writes about how mature-aged working-class university students see university as a place to find themselves, where the students struggle ‘between realising potential and maintaining a sense of an authentic self’. Notions of class hybridity and the uncomfortable nature of feeling out of place (e.g. class pathologisation, getting it wrong, etc.) sit alongside a middle-class culture of investment in self-improvement. Working-class interactions with middle-class cultures have implications for how the neoliberal discourse of deservedness and hard work manifests differently for different students (McDonald 2024; Keddie, Black, and Charles 2020), where working-class young people may view any shortcomings as individual failure rather than as indicitive of broader social structures.

Kate

As with Christina, I met Kate in the weeks after she completed secondary school; her mum was a stay-at-home-mum and her dad worked in packaging. Kate was confident about her academic abilities and looking forward to university study, gaining entry into a STEM degree at a prestigious university. When I later spoke to Kate during her first semester at university, she expressed similar feelings to Christina about navigating belonging within particular physical spaces of the university. Kate spoke multiple times about feeling uncomfortable in the main student hub. The student hub at Kate’s university has multiple levels of student spaces filled with couches, tables, chairs and smaller enclosed spaces. It is often a space where clubs set up for special events or where photos are taken on graduation days. It is also circled by various food vendors. Because of the multipurpose nature of this space, as somewhere to eat, catch up with friends and study alone or in groups, and as a general meeting place within the university, it is usually busy and relatively noisy. Other participants asked for interviews to be held in this space and it never felt like the wrong place to engage in conversation. When we discussed the spaces where she felt most comfortable within the elite university Kate attended, she told me about an alcove she had discovered next to one of her lecture theatres:

Sarah:

Where do you feel most comfortable?

Kate:

Um, probably in the hidden alcove thing. I don’t seem to like the main section of the [student] hub, because so many people kind of like are there looking at you and I’m just kind of sitting there like, I feel like I’m being judged. So, I like the alcove because I can sit in the corner and be like, yeah, no one can see me.

Kate’s discomfort with the student hub was evident at multiple points during her interviews where she used words such as ‘stressed’ and ‘awkward’ to describe the space. Kate disclosed a sense of being watched, and in turn judged. Reay (2017, 97), discussing student learner identities and higher education, highlights how students from non-traditional backgrounds can struggle to ‘achieve a degree of fit with a new unfamiliar field’. Similar to Christina, there was a sense of surveillance within Kate’s narrative, where she described watching others but also being watched.

Drawing on theories of space and place, universities arguably are made up of multiple and disparate spaces which function as both individual and overlapping fields with various levels of formality and informality, where ‘some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t’ (Massey 1991, 26). It seemed that, in part, Kate felt uncomfortable within the main open spaces of the student hub because she was aware there were unspoken rules about how to navigate it but was unsure of what those rules were. For example, although the space was quite noisy most of the time, Kate described an experience where she thought people in the student hub were angry with her for wearing headphones:

I wear over the head headsets, and some people, you can tell they’re really against that, ‘cause sometimes you can still hear what’s coming through the headsets. So, you can see like the evil glare, and you’re like, oh God.

Kate’s words suggest an awareness of a specific discourse and social activity existing within the student hub; however, she struggled with the multifaceted nature of the space as a place to study but also to eat, relax and socialise. The multifaceted space differs from many secondary schools where spaces have more explicit and specific uses. It is worth noting here that some middle-class and elite schools in Adelaide are beginning to build these multifaceted student spaces, highlighting an aspect of class disadvantage in terms of how students navigate early interactions at university.

While Kate struggled to reconcile the busyness of the student hub with her view of university as a place to study and work, she was pragmatic about navigating overt feelings of belonging within the university, suggesting that understanding, or feeling comfortable within, specific university spaces was not essential to her identity as a university student:

Sarah:

Do you feel a sense of belonging at … uni?

Kate:

I mean, kind of? I don’t – I don’t aim for that. A lot of people, I don’t know, apparently a lot of people aim [to] feel belonging, or like represented in a group or something. I don’t know, I don’t understand it, but I don’t really care (laughs). So, I dunno. I feel like I have friends, that’s good enough for me. So –

Sarah:

Do you feel like you belong in a space?

Kate:

Um, no (laughs).

Sarah:

No?

Kate:

I walk in there and I feel oddly out of touch. They’re all really prepared for uni and I just sit there with my food eating casually, or on my laptop. I feel very out of place. Then I’m like, eh, it happens. I’m sure everyone else feels the same at some point. I dunno. So, I’m just – I just sit, and I get through it, and I watch everyone else look like they’re a part of the uni, and I’m like, maybe from someone else’s perspective I look like I’m a part of it, I dunno. But I feel like most people kind of freak out sometimes thinking … maybe I don’t look like I’m in the right place here, but eh.

There was a self-consciousness in Kate’s narrative as she divulged that she did not feel that she belonged within the university space, although the actions she described – eating, using her laptop, listening to music – were actions most of the students around her were also engaging in. Yet, despite a self-consciousness that she should care about belonging, Kate appeared mostly unbothered that she did not feel a sense of belonging, suggesting that ‘belonging’ in terms of an affective experience may not be a necessary aspect of being at university. Kate was engaged in university even if she viewed herself as an interloper. Her experience aligns with the work of Harris, Cuervo, and Wyn (2021, 225) which questions the importance of belonging so often highlighted in youth studies where there is ‘an underlying assumption that it is good to belong, that young people have a problem with belonging right now’. For Kate, remaining at university and ‘being’ a university student did not hinge on a sense of belonging.

As Kate completed her second year of university, she came to recognise some of the reasons she did not experience a sense of belonging. When I next spoke to Kate during this period, she described university experiences which highlighted her strong awareness of social class, and of where she fit in. Kate was invited to a Women in STEM industry dinner, and she told me how, before this, she had never experienced a formal three-course dinner. She spoke about how she did not know what cutlery to use and had never heard of, nor could she pronounce, many of the items on the menu. Kate described how although she and her friends ‘like to pretend we’re way up there’ in terms of social class, she knew that in fact she was ‘not at all high’:

I’d say I’m definitely on the lower end. That dinner solidified it for me, that I was on the, yeah, lower end. Considering everyone was talking about these fine dining places, and I was like, Pizza Hut, guys. It’s a br–, great restaurant. Pizza. All, all you can eat. Like, it’s, uh, brilliant. Why are you not going there? Like, it’s cheaper. (laughs)

Kate knew that the importance of the event was in the opportunities for networking, and yet the networking further highlighted her social class. Kate was perceptive in her understanding of how the conversations she was drawn into made particular assumptions about her background:

I can tell there’s a difference in social status. Immediately. Just from talking to them. And they’ll often ask questions where I’m kind of like, well, yeah, I guess I have an answer. But also, this is more aimed at someone higher class. Like, I, the only answer I can give you is just like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been surviving.’ Or, ‘Yeah, I’ve worked retail.’ I don’t have any major stories to tell you at this point. I haven’t had the money to experience them. And so, a lot of them talk about, like, how many holidays we’ve been on. What sort of holidays, or what trips do you like? Wouldn’t know. Never been on one.

In Kate’s first year of university, she felt out of place and felt others belonged within those spaces more than she did, although she was unable to explain why this might be. At the conclusion of her second year, Kate demonstrated a perceptive awareness of how and why she often felt out of place.

Discussion

An aspect of how Christina and Kate experienced the transition into university life was in how they positioned and perceived themselves within new and unfamiliar spaces. Within both Christina and Kate’s narratives, there was a sense of being the subject of the gaze of other students, echoing Trowler’s (2019, 94) observations that some students perceive themselves as not belonging within particular university spaces, but rather see these spaces as being owned by the ‘imagined community’ of other students. Yet, university spaces also function as a site of distinction between social classes – for both Kate and Christina, the ‘imagined community’ was the middle-class students who do, in fact, take up the majority of enrolments in higher education. How Christina described the medical radiation students suggests she associated high grades and entry into ‘exclusive’ courses as indicative of a particular classed identity, describing the students as ‘kind of posh’ because they gained entry into an exclusive degree. Christina highlighted a neoliberal discourse of deservedness and hard work (Keddie, Black, and Charles 2020) in suggesting that the medical radiation students deserved to act in ways that marked them as superior – ‘up themselves’, ‘posh’ – because they had individually earned that right through their high grades. Christina experienced her own educational and social achievements (for example, her lower ATAR and less exclusive degree) as a failure of the self and she internalised the shame of not performing to neoliberal, middle-class expectations. Christina’s narrative highlights the pervasiveness of the neoliberal ‘supergirl’ figure. As a result, Christina found it difficult to see herself as even belonging in a specific building, despite her own classes being held there.

As Kate encountered university spaces, she positioned herself on the margin both figuratively and literally as she physically located herself in the very outside margins of the student hub. Kate understood that her particular performance – the casual eating, the laptop – was likely recognised within the field of higher education. Yet, she experienced a disjuncture between the socially acceptable performance and her internal disposition. This disjuncture between outward performance and internal feeling highlights how a sense of belonging, or of not belonging, is both internalised and embodied.

Reay (2005) suggests that working-class university students can, at times, experience a sense of shame which is attached not simply to failure in an academic sense, but rather a perception that they have failed to fulfill university expectations to be the ‘right’ kind of student. Both Christina and Kate appeared to view belonging within the university space as a marker of a successful – or the ‘right’ kind of – student. Christina positioned herself as ‘lost’, suggesting an ability to perform the right kind of student could be found. This sense of longing aligns with Probyn’s (1996, 19) suggestion that individuals are ‘caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become, a process that is filled with yearning rather than positing of identity as a stable state’. In contrast, although Kate similarly lacked a sense of belonging, she was less bothered by this than she perceived others to be. Kate did not appear to feel the same longing to belong so evident in Christina’s narrative but seemed resigned to feeling out of place. Instead, Kate came to recognise and articulate why she did not always feel a sense of belonging and, with a perceptive analysis of her experiences of being a working-class student in middle-class spaces, she could accept that she would need to continue to network within these spaces in order to be successful. Christina’s perceptions suggest that some young FIF women may come to belong at university through a negotiation with respectability in which they position themselves against those they view as more academically successful. This positioning can be experienced as a sense of failure (see McDonald 2024). However, Kate’s perceptions were less focused on success in an academic sense, but instead focused on successful performances of a university student. Kate was pragmatic about her lack of belonging: because of her gender and social class, she did not see a ‘way in’ to belonging, and yet she was planning to stay there anyway. While Kate’s pragmatism may offer a counternarrative to how girls position the self against neoliberal discourses of feminine success, it is precisely in accepting the self as having no way into belonging in the Women in STEM space that we see how Kate too is impacted by the individualist nature of ‘supergirl’ narratives.

Conclusion

This article has explored how Christina and Kate, two FIF girls, experienced the transition into university as a series of negotiations of belonging in and across spaces and places within higher education. It is evident that the navigation of belonging can be contingent on understandings of both familiar and unfamiliar physical and discursive spaces. Furthermore, gendered and classed meaning making through subjective positioning is evident in the way that Christina and Kate located themselves within, or outside of, university spaces. For Kate, a lack of familiarity with the discursive markers of different spaces constituted feelings of awkwardness as she positioned herself as out of place or inauthentic. Furthermore, this positioning was experienced through the social interaction of watching and being watched, as both Kate and Christina variously perceived the (middle-class) gaze of other students or gazed at others. It was through these social interactions that embodied performances in certain spaces constituted the ‘shaping of subjectivity’ (McLeod and Yates 2006) in terms of class and gender. Disjuncture between bodily performances and internalised subjectivity highlights how a sense of belonging, or of not belonging, is impacted by wider discourses, such as narratives of feminine success, but experienced at the level of the individual. Finally, the narratives of Christina and Kate are an important reminder of the diversity in the importance that FIF girls may place on belonging, where, for some girls, belonging is not a necessary aspect of being at university. Yet, at the same time, what is evident across both girls’ experiences is how a sense of belonging is entangled with neoliberal post-feminist narratives of the ‘supergirl’. Instead, it appears that belonging can seem out of reach for girls who see engaging in a performance of the successful girl as individually impossible.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the reviewers for their extensive engagement with this paper and for the improvements that resulted from their kind support.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah McDonald

Sarah McDonald is a Lecturer based at the Centre for Research in Education & Social Inclusion in UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia. Her research interests are in gendered subjectivities, girlhood, social mobility, social barriers, and inequalities in education.