Beyond Social Mobility: Biographies, Habitus and Responses to Changing ‘Conditions of Existence’ among University Scholarship Students

Abstract

Wider access to higher education at a global level has been accompanied by growing literature on experiences of social mobility often using the concept of habitus as a theoretical tool to frame responses to changes in ‘conditions of existence’. Drawing on the case study of a scholarship programme within an elite university in Lebanon, through in-depth interviews with students and university faculty and staff, this article elaborates on the typologies in responses that emerged as students position themselves in a new environment. These typologies, in contrast to the literature which presents them as a result of alterations in the habitus, appear to be related to each other and occur simultaneously within one person’s trajectory. As such, instead of viewing these responses as degrees of incorporation of each set of schemes of perceptions from both fields, the context of origin and the new social context appear to be multi-faceted, and the interaction between them is complex. I argue, along the lines of Lahire’s dispositional perspective, that the situation of contradictory experiences is not exceptional but characterizes all individuals to a certain extent, especially in the Lebanese context which is distinguished by its diversity in terms of regional and religious affiliations and in which class intersects with other types of identifications.