My PhD looks at Widening Participation initiatives in HE and how these construct classed narratives around non-participation. The research engages with, and contributes to, critiques of neoliberal HE policy and post-Marxist literature that consider HE as a site of inequality reproduction as well as understandings of governance, interrogating how narratives created through WP and FA policy draw on and reproduce classed assumptions that stigmatise non-participants. I use a critical discourse analysis of landmark government reviews of HE, political debates, media receptions, and HEI Access Plans, exploring how ‘non-participation’ becomes infused with negative class connotations. I explore the framing of HE participation as a rational choice made to ‘improve’ oneself, and the simultaneous stigmatisation of non-participants that guides the subject whilst, at the same time, transferring responsibility onto them.
