This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speaker: Dr Rille Raaper (School of Education, Durham University)

This seminar draws on Rille Raaper’s recent book ‘Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights’ (August 2023, Routledge). The paper starts by exploring what does it mean to be a student in today’s marketised higher education and argues that the homogenising notion of the student-as-consumer has become prevalent in today’s higher education. I argue that the student-as-consumer positioning needs to be seen as an economic construct that aims to insert self-interest and competition into the higher education market and divert attention from student diversity to a student who is primarily seen as an economic actor with homogenous (economic) aspirations and needs. Consumerism as it applies to higher education therefore should be seen as an extension of consumer capitalism in our societies that socialise young people in the mindset of consumption.

By using poststructuralist theoretical tools, I offer three provocative scenarios that help to explain the dominant constructions of contemporary students: ‘the lost and lonely subject’, ‘the futureless consumer subject’ and ‘the commodified subject’. While these scenarios may sound bleak, the paper intends to conclude with optimistic notes by exploring the new forms of students’ political agency that are emerging from this altered setting. I argue that the market forces and consumerist discourses that brutally shape students are also what trigger, enable and disable certain forms of political agency.

Rille Raaper is Associate Professor in Sociology of Higher Education at Durham University’s School of Education. Rille’s research centres around university students with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. She has conducted numerous research projects and published widely in the areas of higher education policy and practice and its impact on students as learners, citizens and political agents. Her recent projects have explored the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on disadvantaged students, student politics in the experience of disabled students as well as student influencers’ practices of social media platforms such as TikTok. Her recent book project titled ‘Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights’ was published by Routledge in August 2023, and it captures various strands of Rille’s work from the past ten years.

Students in market-driven higher education