OCTOBER 2025
Dr Kirsty Finn — Student work, misrecognition and hierarchies of ‘experience’ (L-earning: Re-thinking young women’s working lives)
Dr Sandra Clare — Who is holding the hand that rocks the cradle in HE: Young-student-mothers
1st October 2025, 3–5pm C5.1, Ellen Wilkinson Building
This seminar will explore the intersections of gender, labour, and higher education, drawing attention to how care, recognition, and experience shape young women’s academic and working lives.
We had an amazing afternoon with Dr Kirsty Finn and a series of engaging, thought-provoking discussions. Below, you can read the abstract of this inspiring work: The paper presents work from the L-earning Project, to address therenewed attention in students working alongside their studies – ‘Earning while Learning’ (EwL). Prominent debates reference neoliberal funding reforms and a cost of living crisis as key drivers of EwL (The Sutton Trust, 2023). In the UK, discourse around student work for those in Higher Education focuses on the (negative) impacts on learning experiences, attainment and outcomes (Curnock Cook and Brabner 2024). This contrasts sharply with sector-wide initiatives that prioritise and promote unpaid internships and placements within the ‘graduate employability’ remit. Whilst the latter is heralded as essential to students’ experiences and futures, despite excluding marginalised students (The Sutton Trust 2025), part-time paid work is characterised as a distraction, that holds little value or meaning to those undertaking it.
Analysing data generated during a three-year UKRI-ESRC mixed-methods study, this paper interrogates EwL for students in England. First, we outline the changing shape of EwL, in relation to hours worked, rates of pay, and employment sector. Further, we present data from (1) focus groups with 83 young women in schools, Further and Higher Education institutions and (2) interviews with working women aged 23-29, to unpack the various perceptions, meanings and experiences of EwL. We consider how part-time work, and the framing of EwL, acts as a form of symbolic violence for women in education. Specifically, young women students are both compelled to EwL – due to diminishing financial support for and rising costs of study – and simultaneously invited to see this work (and themselves) as inherently valueless. We argue that different currencies and hierarchies of ‘experience’ – promoted within education and Government policy – allow for the misrecognition of EwL (and those undertaking it) as trivial and insignificant. This thereby leads to the gradual acceptance and internalisation of poor pay and conditions among women EwL, limiting opportunities for agency.
Keywords: employability; gender; higher education; misrecognition; symbolic violence; work experience.
Dr Sandra Clare’s presentation gave an overview of her recent doctoral study —Who is holding the hand that rocks the cradle — in which she examined young-student-mothering. Using feminist standpoint, autobiographical insight, and methodological pluralism, her study combined narrative inquiry, secondary analyses of ONS and HESA data, and critical legal ‘herstory’. She shared that, despite significant policy attention to widening participation in higher education, young-student-mothering is overlooked by legislation, institutional frameworks, and national data collection — and problematised the extent to which theories of social justice capture the wholeness of injustice.
She illuminated a complex ‘tri-dentity’ of youth, student, and mother that is rarely acknowledged in policy yet often pathologised in cultural discourse. These women are rendered invisible in structures meant to support them while simultaneously hyper-visible in narratives that stigmatise young motherhood — resulting in compounded disadvantages, including barriers to housing, income security, support networks, and full participation in student life.
What happens on campus mirrors a wider society in which students are regarded as care-free consumers, and care work attracts no economic value. Such positioning leaves young-student-mothering at the margins of both education and social policy.
The opportunity to present at PIA inspired Sandra to try something different — rather than rely on a PowerPoint, she drafted an experimental sequel to a classic fairy tale, following Prince Charming and a pregnant Cinderella as they study for a degree. The tale explores bureaucratic hurdles, nonsensical rules, the invisible work of care, gendered burdens, and the pressures of academia, challenging how fairy-tale ideals of success and fulfilment play out in the everyday realities of learning and mothering — encouraging the audience to reflect on what “happily ever after” really means.