Introduction

This chapter focuses on intersections of class and gender in the making of graduate careers in the finance sector. Finance is an industry perhaps best epitomizing hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995, 2000), where manhood is measured by financial success, and where both working and playing hard are de rigueur (Ingram and Waller, 2015). Working for a top City investment bank, in particular, is understood as a marker of aggressively achieved, hardwon financial success and masculine prowess. Graduate positions are fiercely competitive, one of the keenest examples of what Brown and colleagues have called ‘the global war for talent’ (Brown and Tannock, 2009; Brown et al, 2011).

Recruitment to elite graduate positions in such sectors as finance has increasingly focused on those from a small number of top-ranking universities (Wakeling and Savage, 2015), and the globalized nature of the neoliberal economic system has contributed to this trend (Brown et al, 2020), with ‘blue chip’ companies now recruiting from a global pool of talented graduates. This pattern of recruitment is a feature of the UK's financial services sector, particularly the City of London, following the ‘Big Bang’ financial deregulation in 1986 that allowed the electronic trading of stocks and shares, and that pushed London's financial status into a truly international world leader, rivalled only by New York.

The predominance of men in top jobs in the sector is documented in numerous reports (Metcalf and Rolfe, 2009; McDowell, 2011; Longlands, 2020; STEM Women, 2021). These highlight that despite the fact that women make up 43 per cent of the workforce in the financial services sector, they are significantly under-represented in leadership positions (STEM Women, 2021). This chapter focuses on what enables men to succeed and explores how male advantage in gaining access to high-status jobs in the sector is mediated by intersections with social class, benefiting those from middle-class backgrounds. The chapter focuses on three young male white graduates, all of whom pursued careers in finance. Nathan, who is white and from a securely middle-class background, completed a degree in law at the UoB. Harvey and Leo, both white and from a working-class background, studied economics (Harvey at the high-ranking UoB; Leo at UWE, a successful modern university).

Introduction

This chapter takes as its focus access to graduate employment opportunities in London and considers the role of the capital city in the reproduction of inequality. While graduate employment in professional and management positions is available across the UK, the Social Mobility Commission (2019) documents how London has seen a disproportionate growth in these positions in comparison to the rest of the UK, with 45 per cent of new jobs at this level being created in the capital. London is also widely recognized as a hub for elite graduate recruiters, particularly in respect to jobs in finance, law and IT.

The recruitment practices of these and other industries located in London have regularly been found to favour those who are already advantaged, effectively reproducing class inequalities. Cook et al (2012), for example, found that privately educated graduates were 13 times more likely to be employed in a London law firm than their state-educated peers. Through analysis of the recruitment and selection procedures of these firms, they conclude that these practices reproduce inequalities because they rely heavily on forms of symbolic capital to which the privileged have greater access. They discuss a specific ‘City effect’, where the culture of law firms conforms to the doxa of the field in recruiting the elite, something very much replicated in other elite industries in the city. Oakley et al (2017) draw similar conclusions in relation to the cultural and creative industries. Through analysis of the national Labour Force Survey, they highlight how the privileged dominate the sector, especially in London, with over 60 per cent of those employed in the cultural and creative industries in London coming from professional/managerial backgrounds, while the figure for the rest of the UK is roughly 45 per cent.

This pattern of recruitment practices then extends into a distinctive class pay gap within managerial and professional positions. Findings from the Social Mobility Commission's (2019) ‘State of the nation’ report document that those in professional or managerial occupations from working-class backgrounds earn 17 per cent per year less than their colleagues from more privileged backgrounds, and Friedman, Laurison and Macmillan (2017) note an average pay gap of £10,660 per year for those from working-class backgrounds compared to those from professional or managerial backgrounds.

Introduction

This was how Jasmine, a white, working-class sociology graduate from UWE, described her idyllic dreams of what her life after university would be like. This upbeat dream of the future is typical of many of the participants in the Paired Peers study. As young people make their early steps into working lives, going to university is seen to offer a passport to worldly success and a secure future in a decently rewarded job, and is reflected in their optimism. Indeed, as we have discussed in Chapter 1, university participation is constructed in policy and political discourse as the ticket to the good life and a route to social mobility (Ingram and Gamsu, 2022). The pervasive discourse of social mobility within the higher education policy domain has promoted and maintained a belief in the employment rewards of higher education, which, in turn, has encouraged working-class young people's participation. This prospect is particularly alluring to those, like Jasmine, who are the first in their family to enter higher education, who understandably bank on education as the route to a more prosperous future. For many middle-class young people, who see going to university as the taken-for-granted thing to do (see Bathmaker et al, 2016), the prospect may not evoke in them the same kind of optimistic visions of class mobility; rather, it brings tacit expectations of consolidating their class position and contributing to continuing class reproduction. Yet, most students entering higher education will have their own aspirations and their own visions of success, which, as the chapters in this book show, are more diverse than narrow measures based on employment destination and earnings. In this chapter, we consider the motivations and dreams of participants in the Paired Peers study, and look at how what actually awaits lives up to these dreams through the eyes of two graduates: Jasmine and Martin.

Introduction

This book is the outcome of a longitudinal qualitative study, the Paired Peers project, which followed the progress of a cohort of young people throughout their undergraduate study and beyond into the labour market and future lives. A key goal of the research was to compare the experiences of young people from workingclass and middle-class backgrounds.

While there have been major quantitative studies of graduate origins and destinations (Brown, 2006; Brown and Tannock, 2009; Purcell et al, 2009, 2013; Brown et al, 2010; Elias et al, 2021), there has been less qualitative work on graduate careers, especially of a longitudinal nature. Burke's (2016) and Tholen's (2017) studies are notable exceptions, along with Lehman's (2019, 2021) work in Canada. Very little is known about the complexity of graduate labour market transitions at the end of the 2010s, beyond the data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) through the former DLHE and the current Graduate Outcomes surveys, which have captured graduate destinations at six and 15 months respectively. Our study affords an opportunity to analyse processes, opportunities and strategies – and to allow individuals to reflect on what they are doing – in a way that no other data can (Corden and Millar, 2007). The existence of a well-motivated cohort of participants provided a unique opportunity to study in real depth the lives and values of a new generation of graduates, as well as their transitions to adult lives in a post-recessionary context, at a time of national and global change in the nature of jobs and occupations.

Participants in the research all studied at either UWE or the UoB in Bristol. Bristol is the largest city in the south-west of England. Located just over 100 miles west of London, Bristol's economy in the 21st century is built on the creative media, technology, electronics and aerospace industries. Like many UK cities, Bristol has two universities: UWE, a modern university and a former polytechnic, with a focus on both teaching and research; and the UoB, a traditional ‘redbrick’ university (that is, one of those founded in the 19th or early 20th centuries in major British cities), which is a member of the ‘elite’ Russell group of universities in the UK. Participants in the research presented in this book studied at one or other of these two universities.

The Paired Peers project, from which this excellent book emerges, will surely go down as a landmark study in British sociology. Spanning nearly 12 years, this unique and groundbreaking qualitative research has followed the lives of 90 working-class and middle-class students as they first traversed entry into, and progression through, university and now as they negotiate the precarious and uncertain graduate labour market. Reading The Degree Generation, I am struck by the ways in which the latest instalment of this project has once again moved our understanding on. These distinct contributions are made possible not only by the quality and the sensitivity of the analysis undertaken by the team (who themselves come from a variety of different class backgrounds), but also by the unique longitudinal research design undertaken. It is clear, for example, that the research team has built very important and deep relationships with their participants over the years, and this has clearly yielded insights that simply would not have been possible using other methodological tools.

The first of these is the simple observation that labour market futures are not the sole focus of graduates. Sociological and policy work in this area, particularly studies that focus on inequalities of outcome (like my own), tend to overlook the fact that young people emerging from university are not just concerned with constructing a career; rather, they are also building a life. Spending extended periods of time with participants, this simple reality becomes abundantly clear: they are not always making decisions with an instrumental emphasis on career success, occupational status or high earnings; instead, they are thinking about how to forge relationships with friends and family, how to enjoy their leisure time, or how to look after their mental health. This is important because it asks us to reconsider conventional understandings of ‘graduate success’ and instead think about young people's broader quest to find meaningful work and to live a life of, what the authors call, ‘personal value’.

Second, however, while this book certainly spotlights a uniquely broad understanding of the graduate experience, it also pulls no punches in simultaneously underlining the corrosive inequalities that stratify the UK graduate labour market. Here, in particular, they highlight how notions of ‘graduate value’ tend to be tied not only to particular universities and particular degree courses, but also, more broadly, to a certain performance or image of merit.

Introduction

This book is about the workings of social class, race (specifically whiteness) and gender in young graduates’ lives. Its aim is to provide insights into the ways in which the dominant policy goals of social mobility and graduate employability are experienced by young people themselves. The book is based on a longitudinal study of young people from working-class and middle-class backgrounds (the Paired Peers project), who attended one of two universities in Bristol, UK, during the 2010s: the University of the West of England Bristol (UWE), a modern ‘post-92’ university; and the University of Bristol (UoB), a member of the high-status Russell Group of universities. The book traces the unfolding of their young graduate lives through an analysis of a unique longitudinal qualitative data set gathered over a seven-year period.

This is the second of two books from the project team. The first book (Bathmaker et al, 2016) presents the findings of the first phase of the project and considers students’ experiences of getting in, getting on and getting out of university. It demonstrates the significance of social class, as well as gender and race, for students’ experience of higher education and contributes a critical and complex understanding of social reproduction and social mobility through higher education. In this follow-on book, we use data from both Phase 2 and Phase 1 of the project, and turn the spotlight onto the transition beyond university through to four years post-graduation. Most data about graduates in the UK are collected through the national graduate outcomes survey, a limited quantitative survey that captures a snapshot of graduate destinations just 15 months after leaving university. Our book provides an original qualitative longitudinal perspective on the process of early career development, which is not captured by the graduate outcomes survey or by other studies.

The Paired Peers project (2010– 17) followed a cohort of 90 young people from middle-class and working-class backgrounds who started undergraduate study in England in 2010 and who graduated in 2013/14. The study followed these young people throughout their undergraduate lives and for four years post-graduation.

Introduction: decolonizing what?

Like many universities, the University of Bristol is engaged in a process of examining its complex links with a colonial past. The University's relationship with slavery, for example, is memorialized in the names of some of its buildings and facilities and it has benefited from investments derived from slave labour, such as tobacco, chocolate and sugar. The process of reckoning with the university's heritage involves a broad range of work that is being coordinated by a high-level strategic committee chaired by the provost.

Acknowledging past injustices and incorporating them into the story that universities tell of themselves makes a contribution towards reparative justice as argued by Walters (2017) in the context of Brown and Harvard universities. Indeed, as was the case with both of these US universities, research into the past and its legacy is one way to understand the structural injustices that persist into the current day and inform actions that might improve the lives of those who continue to be harmed as part of this legacy.

This pursuit of intergenerational equity is one of the features that brings decolonization into alliance with climate justice. Colonial injustice, like climate injustice, involves inequities that play out over many generations. In the case of climate, current extractive activities may impose significant costs on future generations. In the same way, colonial injustice persists through time because of its deep embedding within economic, educational and social institutions and within cultural norms and power relationships. Injustice, in other words, may be passed between generations even in the absence of any intentional activity unless it is explicitly identified, countered and dismantled. In both cases, of climate and colonial injustice, inequities can be obscured by the fact that oppressor and oppressed are not always contemporaneous.

This chapter concentrates on intergenerational manifestations of coloniality without wishing to hide contemporaneous injustice so as to limit the focus on a specific aspect of education, that is, what Pinar et al (1995) define as the culture-preserving aspects of curriculum over time. They write that an educational curriculum is ‘what the older generation chooses to tell the younger generation … [the curriculum] is intensely historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological and international.

Introduction: education for future survival

We live in a critical moment of epochal transition from the Holocene into the Anthropocene (‘the Age of Man’), in which human forces have fundamentally altered the planet's geo/biospheric systems, triggering a cascade of ecological crises and threatening the future of life on Earth as we have known it, including that of our own species (Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al, 2007). As our carbon emissions continue to overheat the planet, we face a climatic trajectory of intensifying floods, droughts and fires (IPCC, 2018). As we continue to clear forests, destroy habitats, and diminish biodiversity, we precipitate mass displacements and extinctions and create the conditions for ongoing, devastating, zoonotic pandemics (Grandcolas and Justine, 2020). Without the will to redress the root causes of the Anthropocene, we are now suffering the tragic consequences. Like Plumwood (2007), we believe that first and foremost this is indicative of our failure to imagine alternative ways of living with the Earth.

Education is directly implicated in the crises of the Anthropocene and our failure to imagine alternatives. Despite efforts to promote education as key to achieving sustainable lives, schools and higher education systems continue to prioritize workforce supply for economic growth over environmental sustainability. The Cartesian dualisms that structure our curricula and pedagogies are instrumental in perpetuating the delusion that we are somehow separate from the world around us and can act upon it with impunity (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018). The fact that the world has the highest number of ‘educated’ people in its history and yet is the nearest to ecological breakdown is a stark reminder that ‘more of the same kind of education will only compound our problems’ (Orr, 2011, p 238; see also Komatsu et al, 2020; Rappleye and Komatsu, 2020; Silova, 2020).

Introduction

School teachers in England are in a problematic position with respect to the ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ agenda. On the one hand, they have some scope to determine what they teach in terms of content and methods, and are not prohibited from engaging in such initiatives, as evidenced by the wide-ranging work underway (for example, Moncrieffe, 2020; Gandolfi, 2021; Glowach et al, 2023). On the other hand, England has what we might term an ‘unconducive policy environment’ for this work. The Department for Education does not endorse such initiatives and external accountability measures do not incentivize them. Despite the government's expressed aim to ‘eliminate discrimination [and] advance equality’ in education (DfE, 2014), its reforms to the national curriculum have been widely criticized for ‘nationalistic ideologies, with monocultural and Anglocentric emphases on exclusively British literature and propagandist history’ (Cushing, 2020, p 429). National policy actors have little appetite to acknowledge or address well-documented curricular biases towards the perspectives and contributions of white men (for example, Lais, 2017; Parkin and MacKenzie, 2017; Bain, 2018; Belas and Hopkins, 2019; Watson, 2020; Moncrieffe, 2020; Smith, 2020; Tikly, 2022). Indeed, the government has responded with hostility to calls for a more diverse and representative curriculum. While in post, the influential schools minister Nick Gibb rejected calls to make the teaching of Black history compulsory, arguing: ‘We will not create a more harmonious, tolerant and equal society through promoting a curriculum based on relevance to or representativeness of any one group. … A curriculum based on relevance to pupils is to deny them an introduction to the “best that has been thought and said” ‘ (The Guardian, 2021).

English schools operate in an unconducive environment for the kinds of decolonizing work advocated in this book. Such work is neither forbidden nor encouraged, but it is undermined by enduring legacies of colonial, racial and patriarchal domination. In this context, this chapter highlights the critical role of teacher agency in initiatives to decolonize the curriculum. ‘Agency’ refers to intentional, creative acts that run counter to social norms and expectations, and which may challenge the status quo (Priestley et al, 2015).

Introduction

This chapter revisits practices of citation-quotation in academic writing within the context of an inequitable academia, operating amid a planetary crisis. After setting out how epistemological, material and ecological reparations are intimately entangled, the chapter attempts to draw together citationalquotational practices already in evidence and which may be usefully theorized to enhance diversity in the sources and types of knowledge we can valorize. It considers how such practices can help address the epistemic-material violence of knowledge-generating systems that are still inflected with colonial and patriarchal values. By focusing on the problematic of quoting Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing-living that involve intimate, sometimes wordless, interactions with human-plant-animal-material elements the chapter considers the usefulness of experimental, multimodal means of communicating that go beyond our conventional reliance on human language and text. By paying critical attention to the politics and ethics of both citation and quotation, the chapter highlights the role of post-human practices that may help us to recraft citational, quotational and publishing practices towards a more just world.

This chapter considers how key practices of knowledge generation in Western academic practice – citation/quotation – may be reimagined and freshly deployed. A central premise here is that the epistemological and the material are entangled and therefore citational-quotational practices can be crafted thoughtfully and inventively to invite alternative, more just and sustainable futures. The current epoch – the Anthropocene – and the debates around its naming serve as an entry point to reiterate the need for reparations that fix ongoing injustices and invite alternative futures that may serve more-than-human needs. Thus, the chapter first explores how conventional practices of citing create gendered, raced and myriad other inequalities in academia, and the sorts of reparative practices that are suggested by critical scholars. The later sections draw on moments in the works of scholars studying alongside Indigenous communities to argue for using post-human quotational practices that include human and non-human voices and interactions. This leads to considering multimodal presentations of academic work, grounded in an ethics of care, as a way of acting towards epistemic, material and ecological reparation.

Nanaykuna, Turiykuna, ukun sunquymantam rimaykamuychik llapankichiqta. Runasimi rimaqmi kani, Inkakakunapa wawanmi kani, tawantinsuyumanta hamun. From the bottom of my heart, with my sincerest regards, I greet you all in my mother tongue, Quechua, which is the language of the Incas. Globally, we have to allude to the Incas because this is the civilization we come from in this part of the world where I am speaking to you from. I want to thank the organizers for this opportunity to share some words, thoughts and hopes. I also want to congratulate the university and its partnership with UNESCO for creating a broader and global space for discussion that is possible thanks to online technologies.

Indigenous people are more than 480 million of the world's population divided into seven geo-cultural regions, and this is how we participate in the United Nations. In the American continents, we are nearly 60 million people. Since colonial times, Indigenous people have gone through all kinds of attempts to dissuade us from being who we are. We have been through invasion, colonization, evangelization, ideologization and politicization. More recently, colonies started to dissolve, and states, nations and republics began to form. We have also participated in these developments with the hope for freedom to gain our legitimate rights in a new state – a democratic state, at least, theoretically. However, the establishment of republics and countries in our traditional land areas has not brought about the acknowledgement and legitimization of rights for the people and cultures preceding colonization.

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to reflect on grassroots activity and corporate strategy relating to decolonization at the British Council. The first was a staff-led, decolonization webinar series. The second was an anti-racism action plan driven by senior leaders. The chapter begins with an outline of the British Council's role and purpose and the events that took place in the summer of 2020. It identifies themes that emerged from interviews conducted with those involved in the Decolonisation Series and the antiracism plan and places them within a framework that shows how the process for decolonization at the British Council began.

The British Council

The British Council builds connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and other countries through arts and culture, education and the English language. The British Council works in two ways – directly with individuals and with governments and partners. Working in English and arts and culture, the British Council connects the best of the UK with the world and the best of the world with the UK. These connections lead to an understanding of each other's strengths and of the challenges and values that we share. This builds a trust between people in the UK and other nations that endures even when official relations may be strained. The British Council has over 10,000 members of staff in offices, teaching centres and libraries in the UK and more than 100 countries and territories worldwide. In 2019– 20 we connected with 76 million people directly and with 983 million people overall, including online and through our broadcasts and publications.

Why a book on decolonizing education for sustainable futures?

These reflections, from Artemio Arturo Cortez Ochoa, son huasteco violinist and one of the editors of this book, connect to many of the themes explored in these pages. They serve to illustrate, for example, some of the complexities in ensuring sustainable futures, in this case the sustainability of a form of cultural expression and the histories and ways of life it embodies. They also illustrate the nature of what Maldonado-Torres (2007), Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013; 2015) and many contributors to this book describe as ‘coloniality’, the enduring presences of colonial extraction and oppression in the postcolonial present.