Gendering the First-In-Family Experience : Transitions, Liminality, Performativity

Despite efforts to widen participation, first-in-family students, as an equity group, remain severely under-represented in higher education internationally. This book explores and analyses the gendered and classed subjectivities of 48 Australian students in the First-in-Family Project serving as a fresh perspective to the study of youth in transition. Drawing on liminality to provide theoretical insight, the authors focus on how they engage in multiple overlapping and mutually informing transitions into and from higher education, the family, service work, and so forth. While studies of class disadvantage and widening participation in HE remains robust, there is considerably less work addressing the gendered experiences of first-in-family students.

Garth Stahl is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland and Research Fellow for the Australian Research Council. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform.

Sarah McDonald is an early career researcher in the Centre for Research in Education and Social Inclusion in Education Futures at the University of South Australia. Her current research focuses on how the intersection between gender and class interacts with higher education, and how this interaction impacts upon the construction of feminine identities for young women transitioning into university. She is interested in gendered subjectivities, girlhood, social mobility, social barriers, and inequalities in education.