Search

A new method is proposed here aimed at eliciting the mechanisms which maintain the relational positioning of people and places within social space. This 'mapping tool' is inherently relational by design and involves participants creating visual representations of their geographic imaginaries, encompassing their perceptions and preferences of different localities. This is followed by an interviewing approach wherein participants 'speak to' their map, producing 'thick' narratives detailing the ties that bind people and places. The method was developed and used as part of a 3-year study into the geographic imaginaries of young people in the UK, involving the collection of 1,000 maps, together with over 200 interviews, across 20 diverse localities. We draw on empirical examples of using the method from this study, including processes of differentiation within the middle classes and the place-based identities of towns, cities and localities.

This article explores the patterning of student im/mobility internally within the United Kingdom, using exceptionally detailed student records data on full-time undergraduate entrants from 2014. For this cohort of students, geographic mobility was clearly the preserve of the most socio-economically advantaged, and was less common for Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups. Significantly, the student's 'home' region emerges as the most important factor driving im/mobility even when social, ethnic and educational differences are held constant. The concept 'structures of feeling' can help make sense of immobility in areas of the North-East, North-West and Wales, where students are likely to look on higher education choice through a different lens of accumulated and contemporary, inter-generational cultural experience. Exploring exceptions to the dominant trends, we also find a more complex patterning of im/mobility that is likely to reflect the deep historical and structural framing of young people's socio-spatial horizons.

Since 2010, the language of social mobility has been increasingly utilised by UK politicians from across the political spectrum to denote a commitment to 'fair access' to opportunity in both education and the professions. Within this policy discourse, the default understanding of inequality is premised on a narrow notion of access to elite education and employment positions, where a deeper understanding of the politics of social reproduction and inequality, or any meaningful emphasis on redistribution, is absent. The social mobility agenda is axiomatically an equality of opportunity agenda where the focus is on 'levelling up' those who are considered to be falling behind. Its focus on opportunity to the detriment of outcome thus rules out considerations of structural solutions to inequalities. In this article, we unpack the discourses of social mobility that are prevalent in recent UK government papers and political talk, with a specific focus on the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) in order to consider how these shape policy approaches to education and labour market participation. We argue that the presiding 'race to the top' mentality undermines the very equality that the social mobility agenda claims to be seeking to achieve, and in doing so we implicate the SMC in purveying contradictory understandings of mobility that compound and conceal existing inequalities. Through a focus on graduate employment, we problematise the role of higher education in the promotion of social mobility. We consider the role of employers participating in the Social Mobility Employer Index and expose the contradictions between the performance of social mobility and the reality of corporate practices that entrench social inequalities. Our work underscores the need for a new political conversation about social mobility and a redirection of attendant education and employment policy to focus on dismantling rather than reinforcing social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses social network analysis methods to explore how the spatial mobility of students to attend university creates regional divisions and socio‐spatial hierarchies of schools and universities. Using community detection methods as our methodological lens we stitch together regional economic geography, the student mobilities literature and the sociological and geographical analysis of elite education. Combining these statistical techniques with qualitative data from our broader study, we explore student flows between different geographical areas in the UK for universities. The clusters or 'communities' of areas underline how student migration to attend university in the UK is a moment which reflects and re‐creates regional and national boundaries. The second part of the paper examines school to university student flows, highlighting a distinctive, predominantly English cluster of elite schools and universities. Examining student mobility patterns with network methods allows us to distinguish a distinctive archipelagic geography of elite formation through higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the patterning of student im/mobility internally within the United Kingdom, using exceptionally detailed student records data on full-time undergraduate entrants from 2014. For this cohort of students, geographic mobility was clearly the preserve of the most socio-economically advantaged, and was less common for Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups. Significantly, the student’s ‘home’ region emerges as the most important factor driving im/mobility even when social, ethnic and educational differences are held constant. The concept ‘structures of feeling’ can help make sense of immobility in areas of the North-East, North-West and Wales, where students are likely to look on higher education choice through a different lens of accumulated and contemporary, inter-generational cultural experience. Exploring exceptions to the dominant trends, we also find a more complex patterning of im/mobility that is likely to reflect the deep historical and structural framing of young people’s socio-spatial horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using exceptionally detailed administrative data on all 412,000 students attending university in the United Kingdom in 2014–2015 combined with spatial census data from 2011, we explore for the first time how the ethnic composition of where students grow up is linked to where they attend university. We calculate a "diversity score" for every U.K. university, which is then compared with the ethnic diversity of the surrounding area, allowing us to explore the institutional geography of ethnicity in U.K. universities. These scores provide the basis for a multilevel analysis of factors influencing whether students move towards more or less ethnically diverse universities than where they have grown up. White students are more likely than their ethnic‐minority peers to move towards a university that is more diverse than their home neighbourhood. We thus explore how students' mobility decisions for university are influenced by the uneven geography of race in U.K. cities and universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]