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‘I Am Going to Uni!’ Working-Class Academic Success, Opportunity and Conflict

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Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism

Part of the book series: Global Masculinities ((GLMAS))

Abstract

More young people than ever now remain in post-16 education and progress onto higher education. However, despite these changes, white working-class young men are one of the least likely demographic groups to enter university. Drawing on an ethnographic study with young men from a deprived community in Wales (UK), in this chapter I look at the lives of a group of educational ‘achievers’, offering a different way to view working-class educational experiences. Despite working hard academically, the future aspirations of these young men to attend university are still tempered by the classed and gender codes that underpin expectations of manhood in this deindustrialized community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A pseudonym which translates from Welsh into English as simply ‘valley, valley’.

  2. 2.

    See Ward (2015a) for a full description of these friendship groups.

  3. 3.

    The young men chose their own pseudonyms

  4. 4.

    All school subjects were streamed into ability groups or sets.

  5. 5.

    In the UK, football or soccer (along with other contact sports such as rugby and boxing) has traditionally been thought of as a male working-class leisure activity and was a particular way to perform working-class masculinity away from industrial workplaces.

  6. 6.

    With the exception of Sin and Gavin (neither of whom did as well as expected and returned to the sixth form to resit their final year), all of The Geeks progressed to university. Sam, Ieuan, Scott and Leon left Wales to study and made the largest moves out of their community. While the rest stayed in South Wales, Ruben and Sean did move to the capital Cardiff to study, so they did make a break from Cwm Dyffryn.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Health, Policy and Social Science, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Michael R. M. Ward

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  1. University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

    Charlie Walker

  2. Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Steven Roberts

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Ward, M.R.M. (2018). ‘I Am Going to Uni!’ Working-Class Academic Success, Opportunity and Conflict. In: Walker, C., Roberts, S. (eds) Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63172-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63172-1_6

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