eprintid: 118163
rev_number: 54
eprint_status: archive
userid: 32689
source: pure
dir: disk0/00/11/81/63
datestamp: 2023-02-13 16:45:04
lastmod: 2024-09-30 05:06:58
status_changed: 2023-02-13 16:45:04
type: article
metadata_visibility: show
creators_name: Webb, Christopher
title: ‘This country beyond the township’: race, class and higher education mobilities in the post-apartheid city
ispublished: pub
subjects: L
divisions: CANT
full_text_status: none
language: eng
keywords: capitals, education, mobilities, race, South Africa, students
note: © 2023 Elsevier Ltd.
abstract: This paper examines the impact of educational mobilities on the lives of university students from an urban working-class township in South Africa. In highly unequal urban contexts, these mobilities provide access to valuable material resources and engender subjective transformations that facilitate access to higher education spaces. Based on fieldwork with students from Khayelitsha, a black urban township in Cape Town, it argues that these mobilities are shaped histories of racial segregation, demands of globalizing labour markets, and students’ personal readings of changing urban environments. Drawing on the concept of mobility capital, the paper suggests that even as these movements enable access to educational opportunities, they do not automatically generate the forms of capital required for social mobility. While students used mobilities to access higher education, they struggled to develop the social networks, embodied dispositions, language skills and cultural competencies that would provide social advantage. Rather, their experiences on campus reveal how mobility capital is structured by material and symbolic inequalities, which are frequently alienating and exclusionary. Finally, the paper emphasizes the importance of everyday movements and attachments between home and university spaces to the formation of student identities.
date: 2023-02-01
date_type: published
publication: Geoforum
volume: 139
id_number: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103678
refereed: TRUE
issn: 0016-7185
related_url_url: https://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/archive/christopher-webb/Christopher-Webb
related_url_type: author
pureid: 33100365
dates_date: 2023-02-01
dates_date_type: published
citation:   Webb, Christopher  (2023) ‘This country beyond the township’: race, class and higher education mobilities in the post-apartheid city.  Geoforum, 139.   ISSN 0016-7185