This paper centres on how first-in-family university graduate Roma (Gitano) and non-Roma Hungarians of working-class origin experience higher education-driven social mobility. We focus on their university years and their transition from education to work, and explore the structural, institutional and socio-cultural conditions that shape Roma and non-Roma young people’s distinctive mobility paths.

Most research projects on racialised ethnic minorities’ successful university attainment (e.g. Flecha et al., 2022; Gallego-Noche & Goenechea-Permisán, 2022; Gamella, 2011; Padilla-Carmona et al., 2020) take for granted the lineal, positive effect of education on social mobility, similar to the quantitative tradition of social mobility studies (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019; Róbert, 2019). In contrast, our project – drawing on a recently developed perspective - goes further to study the link between higher education gains and social mobility chances for the racialised Gitano minority, and their non-racialised co-citizens from similar socio-economic and social contexts, through an intersectional comparison. This paper can be situated in the recent line of social mobility studies (e.g. Friedman, 2016; Mallman, 2018) Haga clic o pulse aquí para escribir texto. that investigate the individual, personal accounts of education-driven upwardly mobile people to understand the diverging outcomes and processes of their different mobility paths. So, we interpret social mobility using Bourdieu’s conceptual tools, particularly his concept of habitus, which connects both the structural and the individual levels. The individual experience of social mobility, and particularly the one driven by higher education, is a complex and often painful process, during which one must cope with misalignment between one’s primaryhabitus (embodied dispositions and tastes acquired in the family and [ethnic] community of origin) and a subsequent adoptedhabitus in the fields of education and initial professional career. There is a growing literature on the phenomenon of the dislocated and destabilised habitus – what Bourdieu (2004) called a ‘cleft habitus’ – in the case of the university students of lower-class origin. There has been relatively little exploration of how students reconcile shifts in the habitus they obtain in educational settings with their pre-existing, non-elite habitus (Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Naudet, 2018; Wang, 2022). This paper contributes to understanding this reconciliation process. We aim to unpack how class-changers, in moving between the social milieu of their origin and their destination, occupy a unique position between two fields, what can be called a ‘third space’. Their social position is described as one of social navigators and ‘outsiders within’ who can play a bridging role between two social groupings or class fractions (Bourdieu, 1984). Contrasting the Higher Education experience of Roma with non-Roma first-generation graduates in Hungary, we draw attention to the different opportunities of reconciling conflicting class-related habitus along ethno-racial lines.

For this purpose, we use the concept of ‘Third Space’ (TS) to understand these young people’s experiences. TSs provide a privileged space for reflection and selfhood elaboration during mobility trajectories (Bhabha, 1994). Empirical research finds that there are salient differences between Roma and non-Roma, that is ethnic/racial minority and majority, in the ways they occupy or create ‘third spaces’ due to the specificities of the Roma community's mobility journey through higher education.

This paper is based on interviews and participatory observations from a four-year-long research project (2018–2021) that investigated a different education-driven social mobility trajectories of 175 first-in-family Roma and non-Roma HE graduates in Hungary. We used ‘intensity sampling methodology’ (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to select 12 interviews from the 175, the ones whose arguments provide especially revealing, content-dense examples of ‘reconciled habitus’, that can further enhance our theoretical-conceptual framework. We focused on those individuals with a reconciled habitus (approximately ¾ part of our database), who following a period of sensing of dislocation eventually encountered their belonging, through negotiating the elements of their habitus. The informants of the project were identified relying on the researchers’ personal networks, the chain-referral sampling method, and also through social media advertisement. We identified interviewees as Roma or non-Roma, based on self-ascription. The collected narrative life-course interviews last from one to three hours, and they were mainly recorded in a one-off session, although in some cases repeated meetings occurred. Voice-recorded informed consent was obtained from all participants, a procedure that was initially approved by the research ethnic committee of the institution that hosted the project. Interviews audio files were transcribed verbatim, and from this moment on anonymised texts were used by our team in order to protect interviewees’ privacy following the research ethical guidelines. Anonymised interview texts were coded based on our theoretical questions, interview guide, and some additional categories that were created throughout initial rounds of analysis using the qualitative data analysis and research software ATLAS.ti 8. The research team prioritised 'epistemic justice,' ensuring Roma researchers took the role of knowledge producers rather than being solely subjects of study. Nonetheless, all authors of this conference paper are second-generation, non-Roma university graduates, two of whom have experienced habitus dislocation resulting from migration.

A diversity of contexts and agents help the reconciliation of destabilised habitus during HE-driven social mobility. We identified a series of factors in our interviewees’ mobility trajectories that most strongly influenced the habitus dislocation and the subsequent habitus reconciliation. Namely, most influential factors are the range and speed of social mobility (Durst & Bereményi, 2021; Friedman, 2014), the direction and destination of movement through social space (Nyírő & Durst, 2021), the person’s belonging to a racialized/ethnic minority (Durst et al., 2022), the range of geographical mobility, and family’s aspirations (Bereményi, 2018). These factors may be sensibly supported by institutions or informal groups at the universities. We found that ethnically targeting support groups foster reconciliation process by acknowledging ‘community cultural wealth’ or ‘Roma cultural capital’ (Boros et al., 2021). A comparative result is that we could not identify any support groups that focused on the community cultural wealth of ethnic majority class-changers. We explored ‘third-space’ experiences of class changers. For Roma individuals, TS entails embracing a shared sense of identity, one that is often influenced by ‘race’, and a shared commitment to improving the circumstances of Roma communities. Conversely, for non-Roma individuals, TS represents an opportunity to construct a symbolic home-making within an unfamiliar social context, in the middle class, by forging their own individual trajectory toward careers aimed at aiding others. Nevertheless, for both groups TS provided an opportunity for ‘dispositional relaxation’ (Hadas, 2021) during the HE years. In our sample, non-Roma often pursue bridging roles like social work or teaching, aspiring to contribute to a fairer society. In contrast, Roma youth often adopt a resisting perspective, challenging power dynamics and institutional norms (Bhabha, 1994; hooks, 1989; Soja, 1996). Formal and informal TSs exist, with Roma support groups more consciously addressing the challenges of social mobility compared to non-Roma equivalents.

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