Symbolic haunting: first-generation university students’ limited sense of entitlement

First-generation university students frequently experience limited sense of entitlement in higher education, yet existing research treats this as a static condition stemming primarily from habitus-institution misalignment. This article comprehends entitlement through Bour­dieu’s lens of symbolic violence and its embodied affective dimensions. Drawing on interviews with 27 first-generation students in a German university, I introduce the concept of symbolic haunting—the pervasive, accumulative influence of emotional imprints from multiple mechanisms of symbolic violence across life trajectories and institutional encounters. I argue that limited entitlement emerges as an accumulative outcome of symbolic haunting, wherein accumulated symbolic violence—the symbolic power of world-making, the efficacy of institutional rites, classification with feelings, struggles for recognition, and the symbolic alchemy of capitals—exerts lingering effects that continuously shape present and future experiences. This approach illuminates the symbolic, affective, and temporal dimensions of entitlement previously underexplored in the sociology of education research.