Feelings of shame appear as a central dimension in the experiences of working-class students (Loveday, 2016; Skeggs & Loveday, 2012). Literature shows that those, who – against statistical odds (Hauschildt et al., 2021) – are the first in their family to attend university are frequently accompanied by feelings of shame in academic spaces. In his analysis, German Sociologist Sighard Neckel exposes feelings of shame as deeply connected with social hierarchy and thus always related to the social biography of subjects (Neckel, 2020). Nevertheless, the significance of shame in social mobility tends to remain a side note in empirical studies (e.g. Hinz, 2016). Rather, these studies focus on the experience of foreignness, the lack of fit and coping with habitual differences (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Lehmann, 2013; Hurst, 2010; Reay, Crozier & Clayton, 2009). However, shame seems to be of particular importance looking at the current state of education: According to the meritocratic logic, disadvantage, dropouts, and lack of fit in educational institutions are discursively interpreted as individual failures, as collective patterns of interpreting of social inequality lose their significance (Neckel, 2020). Feelings of shame are thus necessarily produced in the educational institutions of an increasingly individualised society. The university acts as an accomplice in the social production of shame – and shame becomes a fundamental pedagogical problem (Magyar-Haas, 2020). Still, the question of how shame unfolds in concrete empirical contexts of class transitions has yet to be answered.

Against this background, the paper poses the questions: What role do feelings of shame play in processes of social mobility in the context of university? How is 'class shame' coped with in the process of social mobility? To answer these questions, I will draw on exploratively collected data from a research project that aimed at gaining better understanding of the lived experiences of working-class students regarding their navigation of their course of education (“Becoming Academic – First-Generations Students in Austrian und German Higher Education”, 2019-2023). This in-depth qualitative research was formulated as a biographical inquiry (Merrill, 2020), with data having been collected via biographical-narrative interviews and through written accounts. The aim of this paper is to use in-depth empirical research to gain insight into the emotional experience of social class in education and outline systematic reflections the role of shame in these processes. As an example, the autobiographical accounts of an education studies student are brought into the centre of the analysis and questioned regarding shame and its representation.

Particularly when debating social closure and education, shame needs to be conceptualised in relation to the reproduction of social inequality. Thus, the theoretical framework of this study combines Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and his work on habitus, milieu and field (Bourdieu, 1984) with Neckel’s concept of shame as a social emotion (Neckel, 2020). Neckel differentiates between moral and social shame: unlike moral shame, which is linked to guilt, social shame has a specific societal function (ibid.). Shame is thus considered both a product and a producer of class relations in that it devalues the shamed, legitimates the subordination of one subject to another in the experience of shame, and thus contributes to the self-participation of the shamed subjects in the maintenance of the social order. The feelings of inferiority expressed in social shame are not individual, but bound to membership of certain social groups, collective identities, and social classes (ibid.). Feelings of shame in the context of higher education are therefore not simply personal, they are rather profoundly social since the symbolic relations of violence are reflected in the subjective experience of shame (Bourdieu, 2001).

For this paper, I draw on a qualitative research project that aimed at analysing university education and 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 (Bron & Thunborg, 2017), different biographical data has been generated between February 2019 and January 2022: 17 biographical-narrative interviews and 7 autobiographical stories of one's educational path have been selected in a process of theoretical sampling (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), constructing 24 case studies of first-generation students across universities in Austria and Germany (n=4). The generally increasing, comparable rates of educational participation in Austria and Germany led to a growing number of students whose parents did not attain tertiary education (Hauschildt et al. 2021). However, most students at Austrian and German universities come from academic-experienced families, leading to a diverse student body in terms of social class and thus calling for an investigation on emotional practices. For the empirical investigation, first-generation students of Bachelor, Master or Doctorate programmes in the humanities and social sciences were selected. In focussing on these subject areas, the subject-specific cultures which shape the process of university socialisation were paid regard to. The students were invited for biographical narrative interviews or to share written stories of their educational path. Whilst biographical interviews have been extensively described as a valuable approach to understanding student experiences in higher education (West, Bron & Merrill 2014), written stories prove to be a worthwhile addition to engage narratively with students. The interviews ranged around two hours and were transcribed verbatim, the autobiographical written stories are between 5 and 20 pages long. The sampling strategy, the logic of data collection and the data analysis were developed in the style of grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to generate new hypotheses on the phenomenon of the emotional experience of social mobility. Thus, the focus of the methodology lied on reconstructing the students' emotional experience relating to university, their studies, and their interactions with their friends and families. Shame proved to be a viable core variable for further theorisation in the coding process of the data material. Through a comparative analysis of how upward mobility is experienced among the study participants, patterns of experiencing and dealing with shame can be traced.

Informed by an understanding of shame as a social and societal emotion, different roles of shame in class transitions can be reconstructed. I have developed two concepts based on the empirical analysis: shame as affective pattern (1) and shame as affective drive (2). Shame unfolds not only as a subjectively experienced and at the same time interactively produced experience of class differences, but also as a recurring affective pattern. The retrospective narratives open a resonance space for shameful feelings; in the biographical reflections of shame, shame once again is experienced. Reacting to (past) shame with (present) shame points to the structuring role shame in the biographical process of social mobility. Shame seems to congeal into an affective disposition in class transition, which structures and shapes the ways of dealing with painful experiences. Based on the empirical analysis, shame is not only to be understood as a 'negative', regressive emotional practice, but also considered as creative, affective force. Feelings of shame prove to be ambivalent: they are the painful experience of class differences, but paradoxically foster reflexivity and thus benefit the upward movement. Feelings of shame possible kindle an eagerness to leave a restricting environment behind and create the vague desire for a different life. These considerations seem particularly interesting in reference to the state of research and the open question of the complex role of feelings of shame in educational processes. Shame thus proves to be a fundamentally ambivalent emotion within educational class transitions. Certainly, shame is not the only emotion involved in social mobility: feelings of guilt, anger, sadness and melancholy, but also lust, pride, joy and enthusiasm are also of particular relevance in the collected narratives. The relationship between these emotions and their specific significance in class transitions will be investigated in future studies.

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