Experiential 'hot' knowledge and its influence on low-SES students' capacities to aspire to higher education

The Australian Government has recently signalled its intention to fund programs that assist in 'raising' the aspirations of low socio-economic status (SES) students. However, this objective can imply that low-SES students lack adequate aspirations for their future. This implication supports deficit views of low-SES students and elides the aspirations that families and communities do hold for their futures. In response, this paper pursues a more complex exploration of how access to different kinds of social, cultural and economic resources affects students' capacities to articulate and pursue their aspirations. It draws on Appadurai's notion of the 'capacity to aspire', which repatriates aspirations into the cultural domain in order to pursue a more collective analysis than is possible when focusing on individual wants and choices. Ball and Vincent's concepts of 'hot' (informal) and 'cold' (formal) knowledge provide a complimentary resource for exploring how the social networks through which students from low-SES backgrounds access knowledge can resource their capacities to aspire. Through this conceptual framework, and drawing on empirical data collected in a secondary school on the northern urban fringes of Adelaide, Australia, the paper explores how low-SES students form aspirations within social networks that provide different degrees of access to, and the decoding of, information about higher and further education. The resources available to participants and the different strategies they employ in relation to both kinds of knowledge affect the relative strength or weakness of their capacity to aspire.