Playing the Field: Cultural Capital and Racialized Navigation in Higher Education

• In Event: Power, Privilege, and Positionality in Higher Education

Abstract

In higher education, access to mentorship, letters of recommendation, accommodations, and opportunity is mediated through relationships with institutional agents — faculty, advisors, and administrators—who hold authority over evaluation and recognition. Cultural capital scholarship has largely explained inequality through differential possession or institutional valuation of dispositions. I extend this framework by arguing that race–class positionality shapes students’ perceptions of the institutional field itself: how they read power dynamics, anticipate risk, and assess what forms of engagement are possible for someone like them. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates at a non-elite university, I shift analytic attention from whether students possess the “right” dispositions to how they interpret and navigate the relational rules that structure institutional life. Students approach institutional agents under conditions of interpretive uncertainty, developing distinct readings of the field that produce divergent modes of engagement. Students develop patterned readings of the field that guide strategic decisions about tone, visibility, and relational distance in ways that shape access to resources. White middle-class students more often interpret institutional relationships as open and flexible, enabling informal familiarity. White working-class students describe ambiguity that produces tentative and contingent engagement. Black middle-class students anticipate heightened scrutiny and adopt strategic professionalism, while Black working-class students interpret the field as constrained and potentially unsafe, leading to guarded, risk-averse interaction. These repertoires demonstrate that race and class do not simply influence how much cultural capital students possess; they shape how students perceive the boundaries of acceptable action within power-laden institutional relationships.
By centering students’ perspectives, the analysis reframes cultural capital as a field-responsive practice and foregrounds how actors read the field and calibrate action before interaction occurs. This mechanism helps explain how race-class positionality structures not only unequal resources but also unequal perceptions of possibility, shaping access to opportunity within higher education.

Author

• Sherelle Ferguson, University of California-Irvine