Being working class in higher education : class, place and feeling "at home"

This chapter examines how class shapes experiences of belonging at university for working-class students from Western Sydney, Australia - an area that is imagined, from the outside, to be a place of lack and stagnation, the "other" Sydney. Following Bourdieu's notion of "degrees of integration", it argues for the importance of attending to classed and placial degrees of fit and describes how feeling "at home" in Penrith affords degrees of fit at Western Sydney University's campuses in Penrith (a "new" university). Our environments, the places we are most at home in the world, can operate as elastic horizons and provide "degrees of integration" in new environments. Homeliness does not, however, involve a passive withdrawal from the world and this chapter argues that a sense of homeliness can be agentic. Yet, revision and transformation are never radical, and the pull of class and place can limit and orient movements in the world - towards sameness and away from difference.