In the UK and Australia aspiration has figured strongly in policies concerned with increasing higher education participation, particularly for students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Frequently, these students and their families are positioned as requiring intervention to redress their lack of aspiration for university study. This recent prominence of aspiration extends from its prevalence as a key concept in the rhetoric of third-way politics during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Blair Government in the UK and the Labor party in Australia both emphasised the need to attract ‘aspirational’ voters: ostensibly a fraction of the working-class perceived to be actively pursuing socio-economic mobility, often through self-employment. In the context of ‘third-way’ ideologies and recent higher education policy the concept of aspiration serves to uneasily suture together social democratic impulses for the broader distribution of economic and educational resources and the neo-liberal belief in stimulating social mobility through individual enterprise and entrepreneurship in market economies.

Economic and individualised psychological conceptions of aspiration prevail in these policy discourses. These emphasise the need for the redistribution of resources while eliding the cultural dimensions of aspiration, including the politics of recognition implied in efforts to attend to the different cultural contexts that inform the educational aspirations of increasingly diverse student populations (Fraser, 1997; Appadurai, 2004). That is, policy discourses frequently represent and evaluate the aspirations of students and families from less powerful backgrounds in dominant cultural terms, characterised by middle-class values and the logic of capital. Desire for the accumulation of economic and academic capital is presumed to signal ‘high’ aspirations while alternative desires are presumed to signal a deficit of aspiration. However, it is unlikely that any group of people would categorise themselves as ‘lacking aspiration’. Rather, an apparent lack of aspiration is more likely to reflect some groups diminished capacity to voice their aspirations in terms that are readily recognizable from dominant standpoints (Appadurai, 2004).

While acknowledging the social justice imperative to support less powerful groups’ access to various forms of capital, this paper considers possibilities for extending thinking about higher education aspirations by making them a site for rich curriculum work in schools. Counter to interventionist logics of ‘raising aspiration’ among those who lack them, and the normative evaluation that they imply, this paper argues for creating intercultural dialogic spaces where diverse aspirations can be heard and valued, and where less powerful groups can speak back to the dominant cultural contexts in which they are encouraged to aspire.

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