Toni Beardmore

Current Research:

My PhD research “A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Working-Class Student Experiences in University” considers University as a paradoxical field. There is a public doxa of university being ‘The Great Equalizer’ for social classes, which simultaneously exists alongside the perception of university being spatially and socially distant to those at the lower end of the class spectrum. These imaginations make university a significant setting for my research on social-class, and how it is mobilised and presented in everyday experiences. My research investigates individual working-class experiences at university, exploring how a ‘classed’ identity permeates the student experience, and I look at this impact within Lifeworld Existentials of: Space, Time, Body, and Relationality.

My methodology and analysis in my PhD are inspired by Van Manen’s Hermeneutic Phenomenological approach, and Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of habitus, capital, and field.

My aim is for the PhD findings to contribute conceptually and methodologically to the growing field of reinvigorated social-class research, and capture experiences within the salient socio-economic context of the ‘cost of living’ crisis. Furthermore I aim to emphasise understandings of social class in a psychosomatic manner, relating to social, psychological, behavioural, and physiological experiences. An understanding which transcends the typical non-psychologised understandings such as occupation and income.