Educational Pathways and Classed Trajectories

Helene Snee and Chris Porter

Education has a contradictory relationship with social class, offering both emancipatory potential and the reproduction of classed advantages. Social mobility meanwhile is often put forward as a way of tackling class inequality but raises its own questions about the accompanying vision of social justice. Educational pathways and Classed Trajectories aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, campaigners and anyone interested in these concerns to advance research agendas, develop innovative methodologies, promote reform, and keep class on the curriculum. Areas of interest might include exploring classed educational inequalities and how these relate to other social divisions; lived experiences of class among students and staff at all levels of education; critical pedagogies and teaching class; and fostering critical perspectives on social mobility.

Helene Snee

Dr Helene Snee is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a sociologist of inequality with interests in class, gender and social mobility; youth; and education.  Her most recent publications explore social mobility trajectories and discourses around education in feminised professions. Her books include A Cosmopolitan Journey? Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel (Ashgate, 2014), which was short-listed for the BSA’s Philip Abrahams Memorial Prize, and was a contributor to Social Class in the 21st Century (Pelican Books, 2015).

Helene’s current research explores the mobilisation of emotion and affect in classed encounters as mediated through creative practice. She also working on an interdisciplinary research and public engagement project that uses co-production and craft-based participatory methods to contest and remake established measures of cultural participation.