Professor Penny Jane Burke

Access to higher education can be understood in a diversity of ways, as can the accountabilities that are attached to this notion. In this piece we make a distinction between different conceptualizations of access, and we articulate how these relate to accountability in the contemporary conditions of higher education, with a focus on university systems, institutions, and practices. Recent decades have seen a ¿massification¿ of student participation in higher education systems across many nation states. In this globalized context of numerical student growth, access to higher education is often taken as the opportunity to gain formal entry to a higher education study pathway. Commonly, this involves a focus on counting bodies of people from social groups that policymakers recognize as historically excluded from participation at tertiary level of their formal education system. Beyond this though, and if we explicitly move to consider how inequality becomes structured into institutions and practices, the notion of access can also help to explain whose and which knowledge matters in higher education. Drawing on sociological accounts of the character and limits of knowing and knowledge, the term ¿epistemic access¿ has been used to explore this dimension of accessibility. In the entry below, we first discuss efforts toward ¿widening¿ access to higher education before moving to of the issue of epistemic access. In considering these issues we explore the relationship of access to accountability, including the tensions between these terms.

This article draws on qualitative research undertaken in a further education college on access education. Fifteen in-depth interviews were carried out with participants, re-entering education through various programmes, including Return to Study and Access to Higher Education. The article focuses on a major theme emerging from their narratives about feelings of intimidation and inferiority in connection with their experiences of access education. The author explores such feelings within the context of a British history and cultural common sense in which working-class women have been constructed as inferior and even polluting. Furthermore, the author locates the access project within an institution founded on classist, racist and sexist traditions and examines the concept of ¿mass education¿ from various discourse positions that position ¿non-standard¿ students as illegitimate and inferior. The aim of the article is to reveal the ways that students are re/positioned by hegemonic discourses and the attempts of students and tutors to resist such discursive practices, creating oppositional spaces. © 2000, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

I explore the question of men's participation in higher education (HE) in relation to shifting, discursive and intersecting masculine subjectivities by drawing on qualitative interviews with men participating in HE. The paper contributes to a sociological understanding of the impact of masculine subjectivities on higher educational participation and aspiration. The in-depth interviews focused on the men's memories, aspirations and experiences, taking a life history approach to mapping continuity and change in relation to educational participation. The context for the research is the wider UK policy of widening educational participation and notions of a 'crisis of masculinity', which I critique drawing on feminist perspectives. In deconstructing the discursive production of the ideal student-subject produced through widening participation (WP) policy, I argue that an analysis of men's participation in HE must take into account the differences between boys and men in terms of complex power relations, inequalities and misrecognitions. The paper explores the theme of continuity and change in terms of the men's subjectivities, their memories of education and their shifting aspirations. More specifically, it examines the men's accounts in relation to the themes of respectability, bullying and laziness, which emerged from the data. I argue that the men take up the neoliberal discourses that underpin WP policy, placing emphasis on individual attitudes and deficit, and demanding forms of self-regulation. The men's accounts illuminate the fragility of their projects to be recognized as worthy of HE participation both through and against self-regulating practices and through the distancing of 'Other' (contaminating) identities.