Connecting Bourdieu, Winnicott, and Honneth: understanding the experiences of non-traditional learners through an interdisciplinary lens

This paper, derived from the Europe-wide, EU funded RANLHE study on non-traditional students in universities, connects Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, dispositions and capital with a psychosocial analysis of how Winnicott’s psychoanalysis and Honneth’s recognition theory can be of importance in understanding how and why non-traditional students remain in higher education. Understanding power relations in an interdisciplinary way makes connections – by highlighting intersubjectivity – between external social structures and subjective experiences in a biographical study of how non-traditional learner identities may be transformed through higher education in England and Ireland.