Nelygybės reprodukcija aukštajame moksle: VU TSPMI atvejis /

This bachelor’s thesis deals with the phenomenon of neoliberal discourse internalization and its potential effects and impact on students who come to study to the VU IIRPS from a relatively lower socio-economic status. The discourse of VU IIRPS features highly global tendencies of higher education marketization, which is based on mostly neoliberal ideology and, particularly, its practical instrument of New Public Management. However, in Lithuanian context the discourse of IIRPS stands out due to its emphasis on attracting the best students, elitism, and leadership development. Thus, these questions are raised: What happens to the habitus of students from a relatively lower socio-economic status – is the neoliberal discourse resisted? Or is it adopted, thus continuing the reproduction of inequality? What are the feelings and experiences of the students and how do these experiences influence their actions? The theoretical framework of the thesis is constructed using the theory of social practice of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the triadic interplay of the field, capital, and habitus, with an emphasis on the functioning of this triad in the context of higher education institutions. The qualitative interview method is used to uncover the internal logic of these changes and the linguistic instruments of implicatures, and presuppositions are used to focus the analysis of these interviews. Thus, the findings of analysis are ordered: The persuasiveness of Bourdieu's theory is once again. It is worth noting that the Institute can be seen as a kind of field with the expectation of attracting and rewarding those with the greatest amount of cultural capital (which often depends on the amount of economic capital available). In particular, the narratives of the seminars as a competitive space were particularly evident in the interviews with students – although most informants do not seem to be consciously involved in this competition from the outset, but they intuitively understand that the sessions are based on this principle. IIRPS does not seem to have a system of checks and balances in this area – students who have been awarded high grades from the first seminars continue to accumulate capital in a purposeful way. Having said this, another problem seems to emerge – the messages broadcasted by the IIRPS are characterised by internal contradictions between the values of community and elitism. In the researcher's view, these values are at odds. Since, as the interviews highlighted, students' interpersonal relationships are often determined by a rather uneven distribution of cultural (and thus economic) capital, community becomes almost impossible – students seem to be attracted to similarly structured habitus, and the IIRPS unfortunately does not intervene here. This work stands out for its anthropological nature, revealing the internal processes of reproduction of inequality from the perspective of the students who directly experience inequality, and opens the possibility for further research of a similar nature.  .

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Solovjovas, Laurynas,

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

lit

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210584426&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210584426