糖心传媒

鈥淚 definitely tried softening my accent,鈥� said one participant. 

This piece argues that inclusion in higher education is often conditional, requiring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students and staff to manage how they present themselves in order to be recognised and accepted. A key insight from my PhD research is how students and staff from these communities were not only navigating academic success, but also how their accent, background, identity, and behaviour were perceived and judged within the institution. There were parts of themselves that might cause friction, and which needed to remain hidden.

These practices were not improvised in higher education alone. They had been learned and refined through earlier stages of education, reflecting broader processes of stigma management and selective self-presentation (Goffman 1963). 

Higher education, however, brought this into sharper focus.

For many participants, statutory education had been difficult, but at least familiar. Higher education was neither. Often the first in their families to attend, they described the higher education environment as unfamiliar and frequently difficult to read. This reflects broader patterns of cultural mismatch (Stephens, Markus and Fryberg 2012) as well as those identified specifically in Gypsy, Roma and Traveller educational experiences (Morgan, McDonagh and Acton 2023). 

Accents shifted. Family histories were abridged or reworked. Certain questions were answered carefully; others were avoided. What looked like confidence was often caution.

On paper, these students were widening participation successes. They had made it to higher education against the odds. They were included. In practice, however, inclusion did not translate into belonging. Belonging was not a settled state (Reay 2018) or a right conferred by entry, but a fragile, ongoing achievement. It depended on how they were read by others鈥攐n when they spoke, what they disclosed, and what they held back 鈥� and had to be continually negotiated in everyday encounters.

Higher education institutions tend to describe inclusion through policy, participation targets, access schemes, and monitoring frameworks. These measures offer a picture of progress that is tidy, measurable, and reassuring. What is less visible is the work required to make that picture hold.

What emerges from this research is a form of inclusion that depends on what can be understood as performative citizenship: the ongoing labour through which marginalised students make themselves intelligible within institutions not designed with them in mind. (Isin and Nielsen 2008; Butler 2015). 

Read alongside the , this becomes a story about knowledge mobilisation from below, understood as the process through which research and evidence are translated into policy and practice (Ward 2017). It is also about the limits of inclusion built on adaptation rather than change. Seen this way, the key questions become: whose knowledge is assumed? Whose must be adjusted, translated, or withheld? And who is expected to do the work of making participation possible?

Widening participation policy often assumes that once access is secured, inclusion will follow. Participation is treated as a technical problem, addressed through outreach, funding, and reporting. Yet education systems are also systems of knowledge, privileging particular ways of speaking, behaving, and knowing, while rendering others unfamiliar or out of place. This reflects broader processes of epistemic injustice and the reproduction of legitimate knowledge (Fricker 2007; Bourdieu 1990).

Within Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the term 鈥済adjo鈥� is commonly used to describe non-Gypsy social worlds and norms. For many Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students, entering higher education therefore means entering gadjo knowledge systems not of their making. This is not simply a social transition, but an epistemic one.

Long histories of exclusion shape how Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are seen within educational spaces. Even where formal access is achieved, students encounter subtle signals that their presence is conditional 鈥� dependent on how closely their ways of speaking, behaving, and knowing approximate institutional expectations. Inclusion, in this sense, depends on whether one鈥檚 way of being is recognised as legitimate, reflecting broader dynamics of recognition and misrecognition (Fraser 1997).

Participants described learning how to present themselves in ways that aligned with institutional expectations. Decisions about disclosure were weighed carefully, particularly around identity. For some, concealment offered protection; for others, it carried a sense of loss. Either way, it required sustained emotional effort, reflecting broader accounts of the emotional labour involved in navigating higher education by those less familiar with institutional norms (Reay 2018).

In this framing, knowledge tends to move outward from institutions, shaping decision-making and informing intervention. Less attention is given to how knowledge is mobilised within institutions by those required to navigate them, particularly from marginalised positions. This article shifts the focus accordingly, examining how knowledge is mobilised from below through the everyday practices of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students as they learn to read, respond to, and work within higher education.

Alongside this, participants developed practical strategies for managing everyday life in higher education. Some avoided personal discussion altogether, or, at least, engaged selectively. Others over-prepared for seminars to pre-empt assumptions about ability or commitment. Several spoke about quietly supporting peers, sharing advice about which spaces felt safer, which staff were more trustworthy, and how to manage moments of exposure.

Such a range of practices amounts to a form of informal innovation. They are not designed by institutions, nor recognised as good practice, yet they enable participation where formal structures fall short. Knowledge circulates laterally, through lived experience and peer networks, rather than through official channels.

At times, individual students and staff became more visibly involved in change. Where institutions were already under pressure to demonstrate inclusion, some voices were briefly amplified. Experiences were listened to; perspectives were drawn upon. These moments were often fragile and uneven, but they show how individual action can gain traction when institutional conditions are receptive. They did not, however, remove the wider burden placed on students to manage their own inclusion.

From a sustainability perspective, this model of inclusion is precarious. When participation depends on continuous self-monitoring and adaptation by marginalised students themselves, it risks exhaustion and withdrawal. Emotional labour is expended without recognition or support. Responsibility for inclusion is displaced away from institutions and onto individuals.

This matters for how we understand sustainable development through education. Social sustainability requires more than access and retention. It depends on institutions that are able to learn from those they include. When the labour of adaptation remains invisible, opportunities for institutional change are limited. Inclusion may appear to function, but it does so by absorbing strain rather than addressing its source.

Although this research is based in the UK, its implications extend more widely. Across education systems internationally, marginalised groups are encouraged to participate without institutions fully reckoning with how participation is lived. Students are welcomed conditionally, expected to adapt so that institutions can remain largely unchanged. There are alternative possibilities. Institutions such as Central European University in Austria, alongside Indigenous-led and decolonial initiatives in Canada (CCUNESCO 2024), for example, have made more sustained attempts to reshape curricula, governance, and epistemic norms (Smith 1999; Brunette-Debassige et al. 2022). These examples remain uneven and contested, but they suggest that inclusion need not rely so heavily on individual adaptation alone.

Gypsy, Roma and Traveller students are often treated as exceptional cases. In reality, their experiences illuminate a broader pattern in how education systems manage difference, showing how inclusion is sustained through informal labour rather than structural reform. For international and comparative education, this raises a pressing question: if sustainable development is to be supported through education, who is doing the work of making inclusion possible, and at what cost?

Taking knowledge mobilisation seriously means recognising the expertise embedded in students鈥� lived experience and shifting responsibility for inclusion back onto institutions themselves.

The students in this research were not failing higher education. They were making it work. The question is whether universities are willing to learn from that fact 鈥� and take on more of the work themselves.

This blog is based on Jethro Shirley-Smith鈥檚 runner-up submission for the 糖心传媒 Student Writing Award

References

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.Brunette-Debassige, C., Wakeham, P., Smithers Graeme, C., Haque, A., & Chitty, S. M. (2022). Mapping approaches to decolonizing and indigenizing the curriculum at Canadian universities: Critical reflections on current practices, challenges, and possibilities. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2022.13.3.14109

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