Navigating and negotiating with inequality and injustice: the lives of underprivileged rural students from primary school to higher education

• In Event: Belonging and inclusion in higher education: Students' experiences at home and abroad (I)

Proposal

This paper delves into the experiences of socio-economically underprivileged rural students as they navigate and negotiate with social inequality and injustice throughout their educational journey, from primary school to second-tier universities in China. The research examines how these students encounter and cope with these structural challenges, and how their more recent higher education experience influences their perceptions of such injustice as they enter adulthood. Additionally, it investigates how these students exercise reflexivity and agency in the face of challenges, hoping to make changes but losing their voices.

The paper analyzes how students make sense of their past and their more recent experiences with social injustice throughout their educational journey. The socio-economic disparities in rural regions of China create a challenging backdrop for young students' development. Early schooling experiences expose them to the realities of limited resources, unequal opportunities, and the mismatch between their everyday rural life and the national education agenda on modernization. As these students progress to universities and migrate to urban spaces, they encounter different social dynamics and a more diverse environment, such as relational conflicts, institutional politics, credentialism, fierce competition, and institutional stratification. As first-generation university students, they often have to understand and deal with these complex and sophisticated challenges on their own.

Moreover, this paper is guided by Marginson’s call for seeing higher education as self-formation and problematizes the conventional way of seeing rural students as ‘incompetent’ or ‘deficient’ when encountering structural challenges. The paper analyzes how the higher education space, plays a complex role in enhancing student reflexivity and agency while reproducing social injustice and inequality, thus reshaping their perceptions of and attitudes towards structural challenges. This paper details how students are constrained by financial difficulties and the lack of sociocultural capital but also showcases how they exercise reflexivity and agency to reflect on, respond to, and act on the inequality and injustice, especially how they make sense of their self and their relations with the world around them. Despite facing adversity, some students managed to find their position within the existing system and some find innovative strategies to pave their way out. The study uncovers the strategies and initiatives adopted by these students to address social inequality in their communities and beyond.

To answer the above inquiries, a narrative-based approach in an embedded multiple-case study framework is utilized. It focuses on 37 students’ narrative cases embedded in three geographically distinct second-tier universities, located in third-tier or fourth-tier cities in China. Students coming from socio-economically underprivileged rural backgrounds across China are recruited. Data collection involves a variety of sources, including students’ autobiographies and two sequential in-depth semi-structured interviews.

In conclusion, this paper closely relates to the theme 'the power of protest' by showcasing how socio-economically underprivileged rural students in China challenge systems, advocate for change and reclaim their voices and hope to rectify the structural injustice that once silenced them. The study sheds light on the dynamic changes in their attitudes towards social injustice and inequality throughout their educational journey, as well as the complex impact of higher education on their perspectives. It emphasizes the crucial role of higher education in reshaping their reflexivity and agency while also questioning how higher education reproduces social injustice due to higher education massification, marketization, and stratification. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the reflexivity and agency these students exercise in addressing and acting upon the injustice, calling for a change in the higher education system. By amplifying their voices and experiences, this research aims to contribute to a better understanding of this marginalized student population and a reimagined purpose of higher education.

Author

• Yushan Xie, Department of Education, University of Oxford