In recent years, educational research has illustrated the persistence of social structures: Social class still has a decisive influence on educational trajectories within Europe (Hauschildt et al. 2021). Learners from working-class families are statistically underrepresented compared to their peers from academically experienced homes – as well in Austria and Germany (Kracke et al. 2018). Higher Education research is increasingly concerned with the question of how to design learning spaces in a way that prevents drop-outs from those so-called non-normative students and foster inclusion (Finnegan, Merrill & Thunborg 2014). For this symposium, I draw on a qualitative research project that aims at analysing university education and belonging to its practices and expectations from the perspectives of first-generation students. Led by the assumption that the examination of life histories can generate insights into social conditions (Dausien & Alheit 2019; Bron & Thunborg 2017), different biographical data has been generated over the course of three years (biographical-narrative interviews, diary entries, autobiographical stories of one's educational path), constructing 24 case studies of first-generation students across universities in Austria and Germany (n=4). This paper specifically explores the empowering potentials of these research methods and the question of how they can be integrated in university teaching practice. How can the use of research strategies that take one's own experience as a starting point have an empowering effect for non-normative students? How can belonging to university be constructed by using life-historical and narrative methods? The focus of the analysis is a seminar of the Bachelor's programme in Educational Science at an Austrian university, in the context of which students explored social inequality in their life course and (voluntarily) wrote autobiographical texts about their educational path. In this sense, I do not only discuss biographical, narrative research methods in terms of knowledge production, but also – in Pierre Bourdieu's sense (1997) – with regard to promoting emancipation among the study participants and shifting to the idea of knowledge production as a common process. Building on these theoretical propositions, this paper is the result of a joint reflection by two students participating in the project and one researcher. The concluding reflections highlight the emancipatory potential unfolding in autobiographical writing, underlined by an increase in reflexivity, (self-)critical thinking and experienced agency. The process of practising reflexive distance to one's own life history can be understood as an educational process that is closely linked to biographical and habitual transformations.

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