Habitus Revisited: Structure, Agency, and the Educational Experiences of Working-Class Students In Contemporary Higher Education

Bourdieu's concept of habitus remains central to understanding educational inequality, demonstrating how dispositions cultivated in the family shape educational trajectories and contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies. Yet as universities worldwide enroll increasing numbers of working-class, first-generation, and other non-traditional students, the concept requires renewed examination. This session reconsiders habitus not as a deterministic mechanism of reproduction, but as a dynamic and contested site where students negotiate institutions historically structured around middle- and upper-class forms of cultural capital.

Our central concept is hysteresis, or habitus lag: the mismatch that arises when dispositions formed in one field confront another governed by unfamiliar expectations and hidden curricula. Habitus ordinarily mediates the relationship between structure and agency; this session explores the moments when that mediation becomes strained, disrupted, or transformed. We are particularly interested in how experiences of habitus lag generate forms of cleft, destabilized, or hybrid habitus as students move between family, community, and university fields. For working-class students, these tensions are not merely psychological but also structural, requiring ongoing adaptation, reflexivity, and resistance.

We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological papers addressing questions such as: How do students negotiate cultural boundaries between home and campus? Under what conditions does higher education transform habitus rather than demand assimilation? How do institutions reproduce or challenge class inequalities? And how might Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus be rethought for the twenty-first-century university?

We welcome contributions from diverse national and comparative contexts.