Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book presents a framework for a new kind of thinking about student mobilities and belonging, which foregrounds the everyday and rhythmic dimensions of students experiences. Using case studies from a variety of UK higher education contexts, this book develops the concepts of everyday mobilities and mobile belongingness. The authors draw on key ideas about the changing characteristics of UK higher education and of student belonging, exploring the central themes of the sensory, affective and emotional aspects of student mobilities; contested and mobile belongings; and the significance of everyday life, to bring a new dimension to the literature on inter and intra-national student mobilities. This is achieved through an examination of the innovative ways in which social science methods have been (re)imagined through mobility, with a specific focus on youth and education. Kirsty Finn and Mark Holton bring together theory and research from the fields of education studies, geography and sociology, and combine this with a discussion of rich empirical data from three UK-based research projects to set out an explicitly mobility-centred approach to 21st-century student experiences. The findings can be recognised globally because they synthesise debates about travel and transport, students sense of place and feelings of belonging, and the interrelationship between physical, social and virtual mobilities that higher education brings together. In doing so, this text offers a coherent and grounded campaign for theory and research within studies of higher education that foreground multiple mobilities and diverse feelings of belonging.

Reviews

A compelling and refreshingly innovative accountFinn and Holton carefully elucidate and marshal their framework of everyday mobile belonging across a series of richly textured ethnographic chapters that reveal how a diverse range of contemporary UK higher education students move, stay, interact with space and negotiate belonging in a landscape shaped by the massification and marketization of 21st-century higher education. Alongside this exceptional ethnography, Finn and Holton also mount a nuanced critical scoping of higher education as both a sector and a scholarly field, and engage in thought-provoking ways with questions of method in mobilities research that are in themselves a crucial contribution. * Shanthi Robertson, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia *
An important contribution to existing insight through comprehensively drawing together understandings from the theorising of mobilities with the particular everyday lived experience of being a higher education student today. Chapters draw out the ways in which this experience is pivotally spatially and temporally contingent upon the specifics of space, place and locale, with a nuance that recognises the emergent risks and challenges for young people relating to wider changes in the contemporary educational and socio-economic landscape. * Tamsin Hinton-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Higher Education, University of Sussex, UK *

Author Bio

Kirsty Finn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow, UK. Mark Holton is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Plymouth, UK.