Rewriting the map: How first-generation students navigate capital and construct place identity in higher education

Abstract:

First-generation (FG) college students navigate higher education as both participants and disruptors in an institutional system that privileges dominant forms of cultural capital. This study explores how FG students develop place identity at a private university in the northeastern United States, examining the ways in which they interpret and negotiate the campus environment and the capital exchanges inherent to the space. Using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth model, this research critically interrogates how students leverage, preserve and redefine capital within an academic landscape shaped by neoliberal values. Through participant-generated photo elicitation and semi-structured interviews with five FG students, this study identifies themes that juxtapose the ways that students dually engage with and resist the commodified market of higher education. Ultimately, students show how they reshape institutional value systems to include their experiences. By reframing the university as both a marketplace of capital and a site of resistance, this study challenges neoliberal assumptions that student success is an individual pursuit of accumulation. Instead, it highlights the collective strategies, structural inequities and acts of disruption that shape FG students’ development of place identity. This research contributes to broader conversations about equity, spatial belonging, and the institutional commodification of student experiences, offering insight into how FG students assert agency in spaces designed to exclude them.

ZOOM LINK: https://zoom.us/j/4023055471