Class, Students and Place: Encountering Locality in a Post-industrial Landscape

Drawing upon qualitative interviews with women students, this article explores the meaning of ‘class’ and ‘studenthood’ at a ‘new’ university in a large post-industrial town in the north of England. Classed experiences were evident in the way interviewees interpreted the locale predominantly in terms of its ‘working-classness’ and the social problems associated with deindustrialisation. Findings support the accepted notion of a distinct student identity and perceived divides between students and local people based on spatiality, locality, class and student habitus, which also intersected with gender to produce ‘locally specific’ experiences of space and safety within this setting. However, the article confounds the middle-class student and working-class local dichotomy by exploring accounts from a varied sample of women in terms of age, class, ethnicity and domestic background, which reveal alternative university experiences and shifting class relations as a result of deindustrialisation.