You are what you speak: working-class postgraduate women and accentism in UK higher education

Everyday inequalities manifesting in postgraduate education remain under-researched. This paper focusses on one aspect: accentism. Previous literature evidenced how this harms undergraduates and academics but overlooked postgraduates. Addressing this oversight, this paper analyses working-class postgraduate women’s experiences of linguistic discrimination via two studies spanning Master’s and Doctoral education. Using an intersectional Bourdieusian framework, the findings suggest accentism manifests as symbolic violence in everyday and pedagogic settings, reflecting participants’ diverse social locations. These small acts of relational violence can damage participants’ feelings towards their own voices, and their sense of belonging, especially when intersecting with gender, race, regionality, and other axes of inequality. Although a variety of strategic responses were activated by participants, from resistance to adapting the habitus, these were less accessible for multiply marginalised subjects. Overall, we argue accentism is a profoundly distancing, affective, and intersectional feature of the academic pipeline that must be taken more seriously.