Kirsty Finn

• Lancaster University

Chapter two examines the ways in which higher education students have come to be known in relation to their im/mobilities and to how they feel a sense of belonging to place and space. The chapter elaborates on some of the patterns illuminated in chapter one, and reveals how students are positioned through the interplay of policies and public discou...

The first chapter will draw out the key patterns, policies and discourses which have circulated around student mobilities and belonging, both historically and in contemporary society. It begins with a focus on the inter and intra-national mobilities of students to explore how increasingly globalised networks have shaped, and re-shaped, contemporary...

This fourth chapter builds on the themes of the previous chapters to outline a manifesto for more mobile-sensitive theories of student experiences which attend to the sensory, affective and psychogeographical nature of student mobilities, contested belongings, and the significance of everyday life as a moving and dynamic entity that has a rhythm an...

Part two of the book will examine the innovative ways in which methods have been [re]imagined through mobility. This section will explore some of the various techniques that social scientists have employed to discuss and document mobility in research with a specific focus on youth and education. Mobile methods have been used to capture behaviours,...

Starting from the point at which students enter into higher education, this chapter will examine the social and geographical mobilities that are attached to students commencing university. Through a discussion of the monolithic terms ‘traditional/non-traditional’ and ‘local/non-local’, this chapter will critically examine the characteristics of stu...

This short chapter sets out the rationale for the book and for the manifesto for a new kind of thinking about student mobilities and belonging which foreground the everyday and rhythmic dimensions of students’ experiences. It outlines the motivations of the three authors to contribute to disparate fields of higher education studies through the deve...

In this chapter, we provide methodological notes for each of the studies that inform our analysis and the discussion that follows in Part Three of the book. In the first three chapters we set out the patterns of student geographies in the UK and reflected on some of the problems inherent to much of the research around (im)mobilities that, crucially...

Chapter eight will be developed through an examination of the contrasting ways in which local and non-local students make sense of their term-time location in and through their everyday mobilities. Part one of the chapter focuses on students’ changing activity spaces and the ways in which the iterative movements between home and term-time accommoda...

In this final empirically-focused chapter, we turn to the issue of post-student mobilities; or, what happens after students exit higher education as new graduates and move out into what we are calling, the ‘graduate class’. Much of the language about what happens following completion of university is predicated on the assumption that university-lea...

The conclusion brings together the arguments expressed in the book regarding theory, methods and the significance of empirical research on the everyday experiences of students for advancing debates about contemporary practices of mobility and belonging in 21st Century higher education. The final chapter challenges higher education scholars to ‘thin...

Notions of place and dwelling have become increasingly dynamic of late. No longer is place considered the sedentary equivalent to mobility, instead the spaces at which place and mobility intersect have produced exciting new ways of thinking about liminoid and mobile places, and how one might dwell in and through these intersections. In this paper w...

This paper advances theorising around student geographies in higher education (HE). It extends recent work, which has problematised the primacy of social class and binary thinking about student mobilities, and presents local/non-local experiences and im/mobility as a defining dualism. Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study of women's experienc...

Notions of place and dwelling have become increasingly dynamic of late. No longer is place considered the sedentary equivalent to mobility, instead the spaces at which place and mobility intersect have produced exciting new ways of thinking about liminoid and mobile places. One such prism through which the vibrancy of place can be particularly reso...

This article makes the case for a more robust mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, in order to problematise the enduring binary of [im]mobility (‘going away’ versus ‘staying local’) and to challenge the presumed linearity of educational (and mobility) transitions in higher education. Through a discussion of two UK-based studies, we...

University-to-work transitions tend to be discussed in terms of skills, outcomes and the readiness of graduates for an increasingly insecure and flexible labour market. Such a focus on individual attributes and orientations depicts graduates as lonely and ostensibly rational figures; disembedded from their intimate networks and devoid of emotional...

The diffuse mobility choices made by contemporary University students at various scales has opened up exciting avenues in which to investigate youth transitions. In the UK context there is a sense that residential mobility is often privileged over stasis. Hence, ‘local’ students’ mobility performances can often be mistaken for immobility which writ...

The diffuse mobility choices made by contemporary University students at various scales has opened up exciting avenues in which to investigate youth transitions. In the UK context there is a sense that residential mobility is often privileged over stasis. Hence, ‘local’ students’ mobility performances can often be mistaken for immobility which writ...

This chapter is concerned with young people’s changing patterns of home leaving. Around the world young people are delaying the process of moving out of the parental home and are living with family for much longer periods into early adulthood. There are a number of reasons for this transformation; principally it reflects the shifting experience of...

Over the past decade the number of students entering higher education has risen dramatically and the 'university experience' has become an increasing influence in the lives of young people. Personal Life, Young Women and Higher Education: A Relational Approach to Student and Graduate Experiences provides an innovative and holistic view of young wom...

Caitlin’s first interview takes place on a September evening in 2006. Although she was one of the first to volunteer to take part in the project it has been difficult to pin her down; she is a busy and active young woman. The interview takes place in Caitlin’s family home which is located one mile out of Millthorne centre on a purpose-built estate....

Ashley lives with her mother and older sister (20 years old) in a traditional terraced house in the centre of Millthorne. It is a July morning in 2006 when Ashley and I meet for her first interview and we take shade in the cool sitting room at the front of the house. Nobody else is at home; both her mother and sister are out at work. Ashley’s paren...

I’m in Catherine’s family home to conduct her third interview. It is July 2007 and she has been back in the North West for the whole summer. Being back in Millthorne has been strange for Catherine after a year spent on the South Coast of England where she attends a post-1992 HE institution. The geographical distance has meant that journeys home hav...

It’s a lovely, warm summer’s day in July 2006 when I pull up outside Esther’s family home in a small parish village on the outskirts of Millthorne. Her house is part of a relatively new estate set amongst older cottage homes and quaint village shops. All the houses on the street have immaculately manicured gardens and on the day that I arrive to in...

Emily has lived in Millthorne all her life and her family are local to the area. When we met in 2006 she was living at home with her parents and older sister in a semi-detached house on a new-build estate about two miles from Millthorne centre. Though living at home, Emily’s older sister was then in her final year of an undergraduate degree at a lo...

Mira and I meet for her fourth interview in a classroom of the school where she works as a teacher. It is February 2013 and Mira is halfway through her third academic year at this primary school a few miles from her home in Millthorne. It is six years since we last met and as we sit on chairs that are designed for much smaller people, Mira talks me...

It was never Sophie’s ambition to study at university. A lifelong lover of performing arts and theatre, her aspiration has always been, and remains, to be an actor. Sophie offers this information within the first five minutes of her first interview. Her decision to study at university is, in fact, part of a longstanding negotiation with her parents...

The subject of emotion constitutes an emerging field within sociology. Underpinning debates about changing family relationships is a longstanding focus on troublesome emotions such as anxiety, stress and ambivalence. Key scholars – Bauman; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim; and Giddens – have been influential in setting the tone of this debate in which probl...

Recent research into young people’s private social worlds has highlighted the significance of family and friend relationships for students’ experiences of the transition to university. Drawing on data generated through a qualitative longitudinal study with 24 young women undergraduate students, this paper provides an original contribution to this g...