The good, the bad, and the exhausting : the experiences of first-in-family students of colour at Amsterdam's institutions of higher education

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Master Thesis

The Good, the Bad, and the Exhausting

The Experiences of First-in-Family Students of Colour at

Amsterdam’s Institutions of Higher Education

Gizem Gerdan

Student ID: 11242159

E-mail: gizem.gerdan@gmx.at

MSc Sociology: Migration and Ethnic studies

Department of Sociology

Supervisor: Margriet van Heesch

Second Reader: Sarah Bracke

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Summary

The following thesis aims to answer the question of how students from racially/ethnically marginalized groups, who are also the first ones from their families to go to university, experience academic education in Amsterdam and subsequent academic spaces in general. Furthermore, one sub-question deals with present knowledge about the experiences of underrepresented students in institutions of higher education in Europe and in the Netherlands specifically. Through this litera-ture review it became clear that the experiences of Students of Colour are oftentimes discussed within the framework of the minority culture of mobility: to counteract feelings of otherness and experiences of exclusion students engage in organisations that connect them to other students with similar racialized identities or volunteer to give back to the communities they grew up in.

In the semi-structured interviews I conducted with students and recent graduates of Am-sterdam’s institutions of higher education, it become clear that interviewees experience various disconnections from their family, fellow students, and academia. A schism evolves between the participants and their families due to the inequality in academic knowledge and changing world views. In some cases, this is supported by a language barrier between the participants and their parents, that is caused by limited language skills in the participants’ mother tongues and acquiring of more academic lingo in everyday life. In relationships with fellow students, the participants sometimes express a feeling of discomfort when in academic spaces, because they can feel their Otherness. Consumption choices like travelling, partying, and drinking alcohol, are also mentioned as areas in which some participants feel their race/ethnic and/or class background becomes rele-vant. Some participants have also shared experiences of implicit racism and micro-aggressions in the classroom and from university staff. While one participant was hesitant to label it as racism, another could feel that her being a Black woman was the crucial factor in these problematic situa-tions. She could also tell that stereotypes of the “angry Black woman” influenced her colleagues’ perception of her.

The participants are not victims to these disconnections. Through strategies of reconnection they navigate academic spaces and their changing socio-economic status. As seen in previous re-search, Students of Colour in Amsterdam also engage in student organisations that put emphasis on being different than a typical university student and offer a safe space for these differences. Friendships with other students who share a similar background (ethnic, religious, or educational) also become clear as important sources of dealing with disconnections and gaining energy and ambition to work on one’s identity. Although the schism between students and their family is a greater challenge, strategies to deal with these situations include reconnecting with one’s mother

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tongue to be able to communicate with parents better, and making effort to uphold nurturing rela-tionships with siblings.

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1 A Compass to Navigate Academic Spaces

1.1 Introduction

It’s a summer afternoon in Vienna and I am sitting in a big lecture hall at the University of Vienna. Outside it is warm and sunny, but you would not know that from sitting in the hall, which was built in the sixties and does not have any windows. The air is stifling and it is almost difficult to breathe. I try to keep my attention on the lecture about Anthropology of Migration but it is difficult. I keep looking around the room at my surroundings. The hall is almost full, there are about 200 fellow students of anthropology, but there is nobody sitting directly next to me at the left-hand margins of the amphitheatre.

The lecturer describes the recruitment of workers for the booming post-WWII economy in Austria. She touches upon the history, scope, and difficulties of the bilateral agreements Austria has signed with various countries in the 1960s. She starts talking about the rocky road to these agreements because worker’s representatives and unions had objections and feared it would put native workers out of work. She gives names of representatives, dates of talks, and how a common ground was still able to be found.

In this lecture hall with at least 200 other students, most of whom are unfamiliar to me, I feel a sudden sadness and melancholia. The objective history the anthropologist is describing, is part of my personal biography. My grandfather was one of the recruited foreign workers. However, I do not recognize any acknowledgement of his existence. He is not represented in the lecture as a human being, or as someone who was as much part of Austrian history as the unions. Not part of history as a worker. But as a human who lived in Austria, who was part of society, who changed society.

I become smaller in my seat, the lecture and the room become a distant noise. I feel ignored in this lecture. The possibility of this lecture topic being personal to some students does not seem to occur to the lecturer. I feel tears building up in my eyes, my sadness becomes anger but I could not speak up. Instead of telling the room what I feel, I write down my thoughts in an internet blog post, just to let somebody, anybody, know about my experience.

This is just one of the many times I felt alienated during classes at university because I couldn’t see a reflection of myself in the topics and curriculum. When the topic of migration came up during my studies of sociology and cultural and social anthropology, I felt indirectly and word-lessly addressed. The topic was me and people like me, but I also felt like my presence was being ignored. As if it were impolite to talk about the elephant in the room.

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My further studies into Migration and Ethnic studies in Amsterdam, and discussions with other students, have shown me that I am not alone with repeatedly feeling alienated in class. Sev-eral of my fellow students have told me that they felt they were the object of scholarship, but never gained a voice or face, as if they were not present. They felt objectified by academic course con-tent, and sometimes their subject position was made invisible and ignored. The opposite experi-ence of being interpellated to speak about matters relating to ethnic background or social identity was also familiar to many of my fellow students at the University of Amsterdam. Interpellation (Althusser, 2001) is the act of being addressed or hailed by another that constitutes subjection. When hailed by the teacher or by peer dynamics in the class room to speak on an issue, a student’s

subject is formed within the ideology of race/ethnicity. The subject that is formed in an interaction

that revolved around a racial/ethnic issue, is one that is defined by its belonging to a racial/ethnic category. So, when students were not totally ignored or dismissed, they were tokenized as a mi-nority student and were expected to be a spokesperson for people who they shared one socially relevant category with. In my interviews these experiences were particular to students in the social sciences and humanities, for example Isabel, a Black student of the social sciences, reported this interpellation during a class room discussion about the social justice movement Black Lives Mat-ter. Black Lives Matter originated in the United States, and although she is not from the States, she could feel students looking at her, expecting her to weigh in on the issue, merely because she is a Black student.

Experiences like this can make students feel uneasy in an academic space. The feeling of not fitting in, or being the odd one out, can maybe even make them question their presence at university. Students who are made to feel different may not see university as a safe space to de-velop creative ideas, new theories, or technological innovations. Additionally, if students are con-fronted with stereotypes about their background, abilities, and aspirations based on their gender, ethnicity/race, language abilities, or any other aspect of their personality that may suggest they don’t fully belong to the academic sphere. Their study experience can become shaped by restriction rather than freedom.

The restrictions imposed on these students are result of greater societal structures. Univer-sity and academia do not exist within a vacuum, but came to existence in – and are still part of – structures of inequality. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu considers education (higher education included) as a contested field within society, one that obeys similar rules as existent in society (Bourdieu, 1997). Students who don’t fit into the mould of a white, middle-class institution are confronted with challenges that other students don’t face. The problems can be exclusionary in nature, like one’s opinions and views being ignored or dismissed during a course or being absent

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in the curriculum, or laborious and tiresome, like having to speak in a specific voice and accent or feeling pressured to enjoy leisure time in a specific way. This may sound strange, free time that is not spent at university is a private matter after all. However, many of the participants of my inter-views mentioned the commonness of partying and going for “borrels” (after class or work drinks in bars) and the uneasiness they feel in spaces where alcohol is consumed in abundance. Selma, a master’s student who identifies as Muslim, describes it as follows:

Every time I go to them [borrels], they ask questions like “why don’t you drink?” and then you have to explain everything and then there’s perpetuating questions like, “why don’t you drink”? “So you don’t eat pork”? You know, like all that kind of stuff, it’s just tiring, like, why should I explain myself all the time?

Selma points out the tiresome nature of not fitting in herself, and later tells me that she avoids going to borrels altogether because she doesn’t want to explain her choices over and over again.

The experiences of minority and underrepresented students at the University of Amsterdam have become a topic of interest during the general democratization and decolonization efforts of this particular institution (Wekker et al. 2016). The diversity commission that was set up at the University of Amsterdam focused its research mainly on experiences of discrimination and exclu-sion of students and staff. Although “minority and underrepresented students” may refer to a num-ber of social categories (gender, age, sexuality, etc.) the results relate mostly to the experiences of students who are ethnically marginalized in Dutch society, and to disabled students.

In my research, I want to find out more about the different forms of alienation, interpella-tion, and general difficulties of students who are from marginalised groups in society. I will mainly focus on the aspects of class and racial/ethnic marginalisation, to look at cases of socially upwardly mobile students from minority backgrounds.1

As a guiding research objective, I pose a general question: How do students from

ra-cially/ethnically marginalised groups, who are also the first ones from their families to go to uni-versity in Amsterdam, experience Dutch academic education and subsequent academic spaces in general?

I am specifically interested in the experiences of students studying at the various institu-tions of higher education in Amsterdam. I aim to not only focus on experiences of exclusion or

1_{I use racial/ethnic marginalization in combination because I consider it important to point out the concurrent}

exist-ence of both racial categorisation that was based on supposed biological differexist-ences between peoples and ethnic cat-egorisation that employs culture as an explanation tool for supposed irreconcilable differences between peoples. This topic will be elaborated on in the 2nd_{chapter when dealing with the difficulties of talking about race/ethnicity in the}

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open discrimination, but on the overall experience of students, ranging from study related experi-ences to relations to staff, friends, and family. From this rather general research question, I derive the following sub-questions:

• How has this topic been dealt with in existing research and theory? How can research and theory shine light on the experiences of underrepresented students in Europe, and specifically the Netherlands?

• Which common topics and experiences come up in the interviews and how do the research participants relate to these experiences and make sense of them?

• How do my research participants strategically navigate academic spaces and their changing social status in regards to their peers and family members?

1.2 Relevance of the Empirical Study

Doing research on the mechanisms of habitus and exclusion is not only an academic but also a personal venture for me. I too have felt reluctant to speak up and afraid to rock the boat of academia’s canon and my ascribed place in it. Hence, I see this research as a chance to finally speak up and demand space and demand to be heard. Other than this personal motivation, this thesis can also contribute to the decolonization and diversity discourse that has been going on since the student protests and the occupation of the Maagdenhuis in 2015 at my own university, the University of Amsterdam. In response to the demands for decolonization of the university, a di-versity commission was set up last year that reported mainly on the experiences of discrimination and feelings of exclusion of students and staff at the university. This report (Wekker et al., 2016) constitutes an important starting point for a conversation that needs to keep going. A conversation that is not only about the University of Amsterdam, but also about education and academia in general.

Universities often pride themselves on being hubs for pioneers of change and advancement, but continue to exclude particular groups from these hubs. This does not happen through obvious techniques, but through tacit rules of fitting in. Sarah Ahmed (2015) calls it “passing” in and through institutions. Passing that requires a change of behaviour and body because the institution was not made to fit everyone. From a social justice standpoint, this exclusion of particular bodies is not acceptable.

Looking at the experiences of first generation students from racially/ethnically marginal-ised groups not only gives a voice to people who are made marginal within academia, but also contributes to theoretical discussions about the reproduction of social inequality in education (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). While there have been similar studies on the experiences of working

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class students and/or Students of Colour in North America (Barker, 1995, Lehmann, 2012), similar research in Europe is scarce (Shahrokni, 2015) and mainly focuses on the obstacles immigrant children and offspring of migrants face on their road to tertiary education (Crul & Schneider, 2010; Griga & Hadjar, 2014; Strömp et al., 2012). My research can contribute to closing this qualitative gap on the experiences of racially/ethnically marginalised students in Europe.

I am interested in the subjective experience of academic education and academic spaces and the strategies my research participants develop to navigate these spaces. Therefore, I intend to find answers to my research questions by studying and comparing relevant literature and by con-ducting qualitative empirical research. The empirical data are collected through qualitative inter-views (Bryman 2012; Hennink et al., 2011) and auto-ethnographic deliberations (Ellis et al., 2011).

Although academic literature uses “first generation student” as a term for students who are part of the first generation of academically educated members in their family, it doesn’t specify intra-generational order of entrance into higher education. I specifically looked for students who were the first ones from their nuclear family to go to university, as I regard knowledge transmitted through family as an important factor at the entrance of higher education. The participants have all self-identified as being a member of a racially/ethnically marginalised group in the Netherlands.

1.3 Methodology of the Empirical Study

I reached out to potential participants through my personal networks and the internet. Three of the participants are fellow students who are also doing their sociology masters at the University of Amsterdam. All in all, I have interviewed five graduate students, and five bachelor’s students and one recent graduate of a master’s programme. Six of the participants are current students at the University of Amsterdam, two are studying at the Free University, while one has graduated from the Free University earlier this year. Another two students are currently enrolled at the Uni-versity of Applied Sciences. Dividing the students into local and international students is some-what tricky. While five of the participants have relocated to the metropolitan Netherlands for their studies, one of them is from Curaçao, and another was born in the Netherlands, moved to Suriname as a toddler with her parents, and came back to Amsterdam for her studies.

As I am a student of social sciences myself and have reached out to potential participants through personal networks, students of social sciences are overrepresented. Three of the partici-pants are enrolled in the master programme sociology at my own university, the University of Amsterdam. The other participants are from the following study programmes: English linguistics, communication science, information technology, human geography and spatial planning, business administration and economics, sports studies, and medicine.

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I conducted two structured and nine semi-structured interviews with students from ra-cially/ethnically marginalised groups, who are the first ones from their family to go to university. The first two interviews were structured interviews that were fruitful but restricted the answers and stories told by participants to research results from other studies. Hence, I changed the set-up of the interviews to semi-structured interviews with open questions that left more room to the interviewees to tell stories that they deemed interesting or important. All interviews were recorded digitally and later transcribed. While the first three interviews were transcribed verbatim and com-pletely, the following interviews were only transcribed partially. As I do not speak Dutch, the language of communication with my participants was English, the interviews were also mostly conducted in English. One participant switched continuously between English and Turkish, as we both command both languages, and many interviewees would sprinkle in Dutch words into their speech when they were at a loss for the English translation. This proved very practical in every situation, as I was able to infer the meaning of these words drawing on my German language skills.

While I already started noticing certain patterns in interviews well before I started tran-scribing them, it was certainly necessary to analyse the transcribed material in a systematic fashion. I decided to analyse the collected data through issue-focused analysis (Weiss, 2004). I started close-reading the transcripts by looking for themes and topics that were urgent to the interviewees and therefore would come up regularly in interviews. These topics partly coincide with ones that come up in similar research conducted in the United States and Europe. Some topics, like the images and views on the different universities in Amsterdam, are obviously unique to this research.

But even though broader themes were brought into the analysis, the “coding category is developed and defined through interaction with the data” (ibid., p. 156). I built categories by group-ing similar themes together and lookgroup-ing at their relation to the other themes in the same group and to themes in different groups. This lead to five major coding categories: race/ethnicity terminology and speaking about oneself; views about universities; diversity work at university; disconnections; and reconnections. While the category of disconnections consists of three sub-categories (family, fellow students, old friends) and paints a rather unfavourable picture of the study experience, the reconnections category can be regarded as a counter-effort to these disconnections. These recon-nections are what I will later discuss as coping mechanisms and strategies of navigation through academia and academic spaces.

In the presentation of my results I have decided to anonymize my participants to a certain degree. Four interviewees explicitly asked not to be named, indicating that some information about their private and university life should not be made public. To respect the wishes of these four people, I have changed their names and decided to omit certain pieces of information about their

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studies and involvement in activism. The rest of the participants will also be referred to by altered names for the sake of consistency but I will tell more about the details for their study and private life if necessary to understand the context of their experiences.

1.4 Education in the Netherlands: Context of this Study

Before we start talking about experiences of students in higher education, we need to talk about the education system in the Netherlands. Going through the education system in the Nether-lands is a selective process that requires pupils, parents, and teachers to work together to choose a trajectory at the end of primary education at the age of twelve (EP Nuffic, 2015). At this stage of selection, the teachers usually give a recommendation to the pupil and their family of which level of secondary school education would fit the pupils ambitions and capabilities. The pupils are con-fronted with a division in the secondary school education that offers general secondary education and preparatory secondary vocational education (voorbereidend middelbaar beroepsonderwijs, VMBO). General secondary education is once again divided into pre-university education (voorbereidend wetenschappelijk onderwijs, VWO) and senior general secondary education (hoger algemeen voortgezet onderwijs, HAVO). Depending on which type of school was chosen, secondary school education can last four (VMBO), five (HAVO), or six (VWO) years. This cross-road in the education system is not free of consequence. Pupils with a “non-Western” background tend to go on to the lowest level of secondary education, the VMBO, while Dutch pupils without a migration background are more likely to continue to HAVO and VWO, which prepare them to enter higher education (CBS, 2016).

Pupils who do decide to continue into higher education are once again at a crossroads, as there are two different forms of institutions: research universities (wetenschappelijk onderwijs, WO) and higher professional education (hoger beroepsonderwijs, HBO). Students from “non-Western” backgrounds are again more likely to attend HBO institutions, generally translated in English as universities of applied science. (CBS, 2016). All these educational divisions and struc-tural arrangements have an influence on the trajectories of Pupils and Students of Colour. Studies have shown that a selective and stratified education system is generally not advantageous for stu-dents with a migration background (Crul &Schneider, 2010; Griga & Hadjar, 2014), and can help to explain underrepresentation.

These differences in the institutions do not merely reflect an occupational division but also a hierarchy among the institutions. While entrance into a university of applied sciences is possible with either a HAVO or VWO diploma, research universities require a VWO diploma or the

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com-pletion of one year of HBO education. This hierarchy of institutions was also visible in the lan-guage of the participants of my study. On several occasions participants described research uni-versities as “university university” while referring to uniuni-versities of applied sciences as HBO or HvA (Hogeschool van Amsterdam [University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam]). Even though the Dutch terms for these two types of institutions also differentiate between “universiteit” and “hogeschool”, both types are part of tertiary education. Additionally, the fact that statistics show that students with a “non-Western” background are more likely to study at “hogeschools”, prompted me to include university students of applied sciences in my study.

1.5 Preview into Theory

In the previous section I used “non-Western” (migration) background when referring to statistics collected by Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, CBS). This ter-minology was until very recently used to differentiate between people who hailed from the Neth-erlands or elsewhere, the Dutch terms autochtoon and allochtoon literally meaning “from the soil” or “not from the soil” respectively. This system of division relies on the country of birth of one self and one’s parents as carrying information on ethnicity, and therefore employs a culturist (Schinkel, 2013) approach to talking about difference. In the following chapter I will show that this culturist approach works in a similar fashion as pervious deterministic discourse in naturaliz-ing difference and fixnaturaliz-ing categories of people that are incompatibly different from each other.

This discussion of terminology will lead into why talking about race/ethnicity is evaded in the Netherlands but how it is still relevant in the social structuring of society, and therefore aca-demia as well. The report of Statistics Netherlands employs terminology that links ethnicity and ethnic marginalisation to migration. This is a trend that I also often observed during my time as a student at the University of Amsterdam, where my fellow students would speak of marginalisation and racism as if they were new phenomena of the late 20th century. I argue for continuing to use race and racialisation alongside ethnicity in order to point to the historical continuity and colonial legacy of race/ethnicity.

The underrepresentation of racially/ethnically marginalised students are oftentimes ex-plained within a deficiency discourse (Essed, 1999), where lack of language skills play an im-portant role. The previous section has already given an idea about other structural conditions that may also affect individual educational trajectories. The selective education system that relies on teacher’s recommendations is built on the assumption that teachers always have the best intentions for their students and will recommend schools based on merit and capabilities. Teachers who are socialised in a social context of prejudice, discrimination, and racism can very well carry these

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views themselves and be biased in their views of students. Teachers underestimating students at every level of education from primary, to secondary, to tertiary came up in multiple interviews during my research.

1.6 Chapter Outline

Throughout the course of this thesis I want to not only conduct research into the field of higher education, but also bring my study participants and their lives and experiences to the fore-ground. It is an act of speaking up in a field that has silenced me before, but which I plan to make up for by letting eleven other people speak with me.

I will start the next chapter by elaborating on the theoretical aspects of race/ethnicity and class. Looking at previous research helps answer my first sub-question of how this topic has been dealt with so far in European and Dutch social research. Here we will encounter the framework of the minority culture of mobility that is oftentimes used in studies concerning the social mobility of descendants of immigrants.

In the third chapter, I will look at the results of my semi-structured interviews to discover answers to the second sub-question: Which experiences and topics are common experiences and are repeatedly mentioned by interviewees? After close-reading and open coding the interview tran-scripts, three areas of disconnection have emerged as themes. Participants feel a schism between themselves and their parents that is fuelled by the growing educational gap and sometimes accom-panied by a language barrier. At university, participants often feel their difference in relation to other students, especially when it comes to leisure time activities. Unfortunately, some students have also reported confrontations with micro-aggressions and racism in the class room and in in-teractions with instructors and university staff.

Chapter four will continue with presenting results from the empirical study and tackle the last sub-question about navigation strategies in academic spaces. While I discuss various forms of disconnection in the previous chapter, here we will get to see strategies that the interview partici-pants employ to overcome some of the mentioned disconnections. These strategies include: claim-ing race/ethnicity as skill, joinclaim-ing student organisations that appeal to one aspect of their un-derrepresented identity, and forming friendships with people who share similar backgrounds.

The fifth chapter will start with answering all sub-questions and discuss them in the light of the theoretical knowledge we have gathered in chapter two. This re-embedding into theory will also show us any gaps in theory that may arise. At the end of this thesis, I will dare to imagine a better future, in which at least some of the disconnections found in the study can be avoided.

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2 Being a Fit in Academia: Theoretical Contemplations and

Previous Research

2.1 Introduction

One tempting answer to the question of why certain groups are underrepresented at univer-sity and in academia is that some people may just not be interested in pursuing higher education. It is a long, arduous, and in some cases, not even financially lucrative pursuit after all. But answers that refer to individual free choice fail to account for the obvious pattern visible in society. In the previous chapter we have seen that pupils with a “non-Western” background tend to attend MBO level secondary education, rather than HAVO or VWA. Of those that do attend these general sec-ondary education levels, many students of this group continue their education at a university of applied sciences, rather than a research university. This pattern makes it obvious that education needs to be understood as a realm in which socially relevant categories of difference influence education outcome and experience.

It is also evident that the trajectories students from racially/ethnically marginalised groups are guided towards tend to stress market and labour oriented education rather than science or arts education. This brings economic factors into the discussion, and is one of the reasons why I was interested in the intersection of the socially relevant categories of race/ethnicity and “class”. In this chapter, I want to give theoretical insights into how these two categorisations become relevant and impact education aspirations and outcomes. To do so, I will review literature on race/ethnicity in the Netherlands, race/ethnicity in education, “class” as a positionality due to specific constellations of different forms of capital, and the role of class in education.

The literature I call on in this review is heavily influenced by my academic socialisation in Western Europe, specifically in Austria and the Netherlands. I was limited to English (and Ger-man) language literature, which may have caused gaps in the review. While my starting point for this literature search were the syllabi of the classes I took during my studies, I deepened this re-search with the help of the library database of the University of Amsterdam. With keyword com-binations like “education + inequality”, “education + inequality + race”, “education + inequality + class”, “race + university + Europe”, etc. I found works of Dutch thinkers and scientists like Gloria Wekker and Philomena Essed that are invaluable for this topic of research. Although, I had heard the name Gloria Wekker before (in relation to the diversity commission of the University of Amsterdam), I had never come by her name in a syllabus for a class I took, despite her being one of the most important voices on race/ethnicity in the Netherlands.

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I will start with discussing the university and academia as a social space with specific rules and norms, continue with describing the relation of race/ethnicity, class, and education. At the end of the chapter I will look at existing research in North America and Europe on the matter of ra-cially/ethnically marginalised students at university to answer my first sub-question: How can

re-search and theory shine light on the experiences of underrepresented students in Europe, and specifically the Netherlands?

2.2 Passing: Academia as Garment that Needs to Fit

University and academia are within a social space that has rules and norms for behaviour, speech, and even thought (dubbed “academic canon” in the academic jargon). Having access to and being an actor in this space is not a self-evident right for some students. Isabel, a current student of the social sciences at the University of Amsterdam, reflects on her time at the University of Applied sciences Amsterdam, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree, as having made this conditional entrance visible to her:

It is almost as if you had to be accepted before you can even be considered to state your opinion, you know. And it reflected that in racism, sexism, all of that, which I realise now, because I wasn’t aware of those things then.

Isabel voices the concern that universities as institutions of higher education are designed for a specific audience, an audience that fits the prescribed norms in this space. Australian anthropolo-gist Sara Ahmed explains these norms or the habitus of this space as a garment that fits or doesn’t: “An institution is like an old garment: if it has acquired the shape of those who tend to wear it, then it becomes easier to wear if you have that shape” (Ahmed, 2015). I understand this as meaning that those who do not have the right shape must make an effort and struggle, adjust, or change their bodies, in order to fit into that old garment. If this tiresome and laborious task is achieved, Ahmed describes it as “passing”. Students who put on the old garment of university and see it fit their bodies, are spared this task and Ahmed argues that this privilege of fitting into the garment right away, is an “energy saving device” (Ahmed, 2015).

People who do not fit, were essentially not meant to belong in certain spaces. These Others are oftentimes people who are marginalised by some socially relevant aspect of their identity in wider society. This aspect can be their race/ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability status, age, or socio-economic background in any combination and variation of different identities. In academic institutions, just like outside of the ivory towers of different disciplines, discourses that favour white, heterosexual, middle aged, secular and Christian men seem to be dominant. This results in a white and male curriculum, with most works of academic “canon” being produced by white men.

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This garment is made for him, and other students and staff who try it on have to bring the labour of making it fit. Ahmed argues that the process of trying to fit into the garment, makes othered students stand out even more, drawing attention to their efforts (Ahmed, 2015).

The notion that higher education is a site of reproduction of inequality in societies was already a major line of research in the 1970’s for French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Conse-quently, his theories of the different forms of capital and habitus lend themselves very well to the study of education. I will draw on precisely these theories to explain why I chose the level of parents’ education as a marker for social inequality and a factor in students’ experiences in uni-versity. But while Bourdieu contributed important insights into understanding material reality as it is experienced subjectively, his theories still rely on classical research categories of economy and status to understand inequality. The intersection of economic inequality with other socially relevant categorisations for individuals is rather lacking in this theory. Gender, race/ethnicity, sex-uality, (dis)ability status, and age are some of such factors that also shape one’s subjective experi-ence. It is this intersection (Crenshaw 1989) of economic and racial/ethnic categorisations that I am interested in, and how it shapes my study participants’ experience of academia in Amsterdam. Therefore, I want to discuss why it is important to keep race/ethnicity in mind, even though it is an often contested and dodged topic in the Netherlands.

2.3 Race/Ethnicity: New Terms for an Old Phenomenon

In order to talk about racial/ethnic marginalisation, I have to start with problematizing lan-guage. So far in this thesis, I have described the marginalisation that can be based on phenotype, religion, place of birth, language and other “ethnic” markers, as racial/ethnic marginalisation. In doing so, I followed a format employed by Dutch thinker and professor of Gender Studies Gloria Wekker in her book “White Innocence” (2016). Although my reasons for using both racial and ethnic marginalisation side by side so far are different from Wekker’s, they are closely related to arguments that she also makes.

I have also encountered “non-Western” background or “allochtoon” as a descriptor for de-scendants of migrants from non-Western countries in official publications. It was mentioned that this is due to a culturist approach to human difference that is prevalent in Europe right now. But what does this mean exactly? Ethnicity, or specifically “where one comes from”, is the more ac-ceptable way of talking about difference. But the connection of ethnicity to culture, rather than biology, lulls us into a false sense of security. The assumption is that we are not imposing deter-ministic judgements on people, but that we are deriving our categories from derivatives of human action. But as Schinkel (2013) has shown, ethnicity, and the ensuing culturist discourse, works in

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similar ways as racism. National identity becomes linked to ethnicity, which is further linked to phenotype and expectations of values that a person of a specific ethnicity will hold. This way some ethnicities and cultures are made to be incompatible with other cultures and their marginalisation to the outside of society is explained and excused through their incompatible, and often “back-wards” values. If race was “an important mechanism for limiting and restricting access to privilege, power, and wealth” (Smedley & Smedley, 2005, p. 22), ethnicity works in similar ways. Gloria Wekker (2016) also argues that the referral to culture rather than biology, assumes stability of Other cultures and hence becomes interchangeable with biology in its function.

I want to illustrate this by looking at discussions about immigration and immigrant inte-gration. Migration is the field in which a lot of the processes described above, of culturalization, supposed incompatibility, and marginalisation come into effect. In the Netherlands, the conceptual pair of allochtoon-autochtoon was until very recently used to describe difference based on place of origin. This was essentially a method of distinguishing those with the “right” kind of culture to those with “backwards” and incompatible cultures. The word autochtoon was used for ethnic white Dutch people, people who were “from the soil”. The counterpart “allochtoonen”, referred to people “not from the soil”. But the ascription to one of these categories was not solely based on the place of an individual’s birth, but also on the birth place of one’s parents. The places of birth were once again divided into Western-allochtoon and Non-Western-allochtoon, in some cases this way of categorizing reached into the consequent generations: excesses such as second generation non-Western allochtoon were formulated to describe the grandchildren of people who were not born in the Netherlands. But why is the categorization as non-western allochtoon transmitted to conse-quent generations while the category of western-allochtoon rarely attracts attention? Why is there an interest in keeping the ascription of non-western allochtoon alive for generations that are in reality “from the Dutch soil”?

This adoption of the word allochtoon to mean non-Western and therefore non-compatible only describes a certain group of migrants. It is a sign that some migrants are racialized/ethnicized as the societal Other, while other migrants are regarded as merely different but not incompatible, nor so threatening, even earning the label “expat” rather than “immigrant”. “Allochtonen are the ones who do not manage this [make a successful claim to Dutchness through white appearance], through their skin color or their deviant religion or culture. The binary thus sets racializing pro-cesses in motion; everyone knows that they reference whites and people of color respectively.” (Wekker 2016, p. 23)

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Essed and Hoving (2014) describe ignorance, evasion, and denial as characteristics of Dutch racism. These qualities of Dutch racism also explain why mentioning racialisation and rac-ism often receives the answer: we don’t think in terms of race in the Netherland but in terms of ethnicity. Denying the historically founded racialisation process that divides people into different races (biological or cultural) functions as a tactic of evasion. As Wekker states ethnicity still ac-complishes “the work that race used to do, ordering reality on the basis of supposed biological difference (although the term was banished), is still being accomplished” (Wekker 2016, p.23). Hence, she considers race “a fundamental organising grammar in Dutch society” and uses both race and ethnicity in her book.

This means that ethnicity and race become the same thing, when they are used to distin-guish particular groups of people from ‘native’ Dutch or European people. This process of cate-gorisation and racialisation is not static and set in stone but rather subject to change. Who is con-sidered outside of society and marginalised is an ever-continuing process of negotiation. Race/Eth-nicity are the expression of relations between groups, and these relations can change, markers of difference can change or disappear (Gingrich, 2008). Esther Gans (2014) shows in her discussion of antisemitism in the Netherlands the ebbs and flows of marginalisation of Jewish people and the changing rhetoric to legitimize this marginalisation. These insights into racialisation/ethnicization make clear that race/ethnicity are not “natural” categories in and of themselves, but rather come alive and become loaded with meaning in the social world. In the process of marginalisation based on race/ethnicity these meanings are usually loaded with negative meaning and become relevant in a negative way. But even racialized/ethnicized categories that are loaded with positive meaning at first glance, like stereotypes about East Asian people as being smart and tech-savvy, or Black people being good athletes, in fact contribute to making these categories relevant in a negative way. They lead to dehumanization of the people who confirm the stereotype by not considering the time and effort it takes them to achieve these things, while individuals who do not conform to the stereotype are ridiculed.

In the context of Dutch history, I have decided to keep using both ethnicity and race in the continuation of this thesis, because I see the terms race and racism as accomplishing an immediate and accepted connection to historically grown exclusions. While ethnicity can be an attempt to hide the marginalisation practices in progress, race and racism evoke history and power dynamics all at once. It can also be considered a statement to counteract the tendency of evasion when talking about race and racism in the Netherlands

It is these entanglements of history, racism, and evasion that force us to consider language when we talk about marginalisation based on race/ethnicity. There are ways of talking about this

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marginalisation that are understood as self-identification and arose from activist movements. One such word is “Person of Colour”, which can be reworded and combined with any noun. I will use one such rewording, Students of Colour, when talking about my research group. Some of the par-ticipants I interviewed for my research have also chosen this self-identification for themselves. In the Netherlands in the 1980s the term “Black, Migrant, Refugee” emerged from activist move-ments to refer to the group of people who are subjected processes of culturalisation and covert racialisation (Wekker, 2009) and is oftentimes used in Dutch publications. I will naturally also use the counterpart, white, as a marker for students who are not ethnically marginalised. Because whiteness needs to be recognised, voiced and made strange as well (see Dyer, 2015).

2.4 How do Race/Ethnicity and Class Become Relevant?

The quantitative data shows an underrepresentation of racially/ethnically marginalised peo-ple in general secondary education and higher education. This underrepresentation of racialized students is oftentimes described within a deficiency discourse. Their insufficient language abilities are put forth as a reason. Lack of information about requirements in higher education, and missing support and supervision for these students are considered other reasons that need policy interven-tions (Essed, 1999, 215). Structural factors, the condiinterven-tions of higher education, and the culture of higher education are rarely discussed as factors. Similarly, underrepresentation of students of lower socio-economic backgrounds is also connected to a “culture of poverty” or “culture of low education” in layman’s public discourse. Poor people are thought to not value education as much as people from higher classes, and therefore they have lower education aspirations.

To not fall into the trap of culturalist discourse, we need to consider structural factors and the experience thereof in individual lives when theorizing about underrepresentation of marginal-ised groups in higher education. Looking at processes behind underrepresentation, rather than merely looking for explanations, can open possibilities for agency and change. The theories of Pierre Bourdieu about the four types of capital (social, cultural, economic, and symbolic), the hab-itus, and the field can help us close the gap of objective structure and subjective experience.

Although of concern to sociologists, class is not an uncontested concept in sociology. It is being criticized as an obsolete category that does not exist in empirical reality but is being created by its continued use (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001 cited in Fuller, 2007). However, class and socio-economic status [SES] – a more Weberian understanding of social positionality – have sur-vived as analytical categories until now. Class as a category of analysis is pervasive especially in research about the educational aspirations and achievements of students from the working class (Fuller, 2007; Lehmann, 2012). Bourdieu’s understanding of class as combination of “position in

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an objective social space” (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 2) and subjective moment has proven very useful to combine objectivism and subjectivism, structure and agency. While the specific composition of the different forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986) can be considered objective structure, the expres-sion of this composition in the body, the habitus, is the subjective moment in his theory.

Bourdieu’s forms of capital, especially cultural capital, are central to the study of repro-duction of inequality in education. Cultural capital can be formalised in the form of credentials (like higher education degrees) or be informal knowledge about the world, music, art etc. Bourdieu even postulates that the specific constellations of capital lead to a specific taste in people with similar constellations, hence the taste of the middle-class becomes distinguishable from the taste of the higher classes. The forms of capital also find expression in language. Institutionalised edu-cation in schools and universities relies on the use of specific codes in the transfer of knowledge. As school for children of classes with high cultural capital is an extension of early childhood so-cialisation within their family, they are better equipped to understand the codes of communication and knowledge transmission than children from families with lower cultural capital (DiMaggio, 1979, p. 1464). Fuller (2007) also notes that children whose native language (or the one dominantly spoken at home) differs from the language of instruction, can also have a disadvantage in linguistic ability. I have chosen to intersect racial/ethnic marginalisation with class in an attempt to grasp the complexities of these two marginalisation processes working together and alongside. Racially/eth-nically marginalised students are oftentimes affected by both processes of marginalisation, many of them being descendants of low-educated migrations, who came to the Netherlands through guest-worker programmes with Morocco and Turkey.

Another important concept by Bourdieu is useful for this study: social fields. Social fields are relational spaces, which have their own institutions and rules (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015). The social field is the arena of social and cultural production in which different actors interact with each other (DiMaggio, 1979, p. 1463). Actors in a social field are in conflict with each other over the power of definition and hierarchization. Although different fields are relatively autonomous, the rules and hierarchies emulate the rules and hierarchies of the wider society (Di,Maggio, 1979, p. 1462). If we understand education as a social field, university is also part of this field and is subject to its own rules. This is how the “culture of higher education” can be defined in an empir-ically observable fashion. The culture of academia arises in a social field of education that has set rules for the relation between agents and the actions of agents. If students don’t know these rules because they did not acquire this form of cultural capital from their family, it may leave them feeling like the odd one out or not belonging in this field, as described in the introduction. It be-comes crucial to not only learn the rules but to adapt to them and make an effort to “pass” as

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someone who knew the rules all along. This process that Sara Ahmed described as passing, Bour-dieu would label as an adaptation of habitus, changing the way objective structure is manifested in one’s subjective body, or at least pretend to have changed. Cultural capital is of course not only inherited by the family, but also acquired through education. Nevertheless, cultural capital of the family can become important, as we have seen earlier, when considering the language abilities students bring into the classroom. Studies have also concerned themselves with the effect of pa-rental engagement in school with children’s success (Lareau, 1987). Annette Lareau found in her study on two different elementary schools in the United States that mainly attracted either children from working-class or middle-class families, that teachers considered parental engagement as ben-eficiary to students’ success and interpreted the lesser involvement of working-class parents as them not valuing education. This is a conclusion one could reach if we think of the habitus as incorporated structure, that people with less capital will aim for different things, or value different things. But the truth was that both groups of parents valued education, but the working-class par-ents saw it as solely the responsibility of teachers to educate them, while middle-class parpar-ents considered it a shared effort that also required their own involvement. We can derive from this that habitus does not necessarily mean different or lesser ambitions or values, but a difference in im-aginations of how one can achieve one’s goals.

2.5 Racialized First Generation Students at University: Previous Research

The experiences of ethnically marginalised students at European universities are unfortu-nately not well researched. But at the University of Amsterdam, we are in a very lucky position, as the report of the diversity commission (Wekker et al., 2016) offers important insights into this matter. Alongside valuable information about the student composition of the university, the report also gathers data from a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews with students and staff.

The report mentions students complaining about teachers who use derogative terminology, complaints about eurocentrism from students and staff, and other forms of discrimination observed by students and staff (more observed by staff than by students). In the qualitative part of the study, the commission concludes with six narratives of Othering: explicit Othering and exclusion, micro-aggression and violent humour, outing as Other, underrepresentation and denial, silencing and intimidation, and inaccessibility and other everyday exclusions.

Like mentioned before, the diversity commission specifically looked at discrimination and exclusion of Students of Colour at the University of Amsterdam. My aim is to gain a more holistic understanding of experiences of Students of Colour, who are first-in-family university students in the city of Amsterdam

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While already conducted in the mid-nineties and specifically focused on white working class university students in North America, Barker’s (1995) study can help to get an idea of the areas of life that are affected, and the scope of experiences of students. Her study found that finan-cial issues, family support, middle class culture on the university campus and consequent gender role expectations, the invisibility of the working class, struggles with stereotypes about intelli-gence, and the need to not forget about ‘one’s roots’ after being socially mobile are main issues for her participants. Barker contrasted these experiences to experiences of female Students of col-our to show how their experiences sometimes contradict the experiences of her interview partici-pants. The issue of invisibility, for example, does not apply to Women of Colour on campus. Since their presence is an out of the ordinary occurrence, they become hyper-visible.

Barker’s study group doesn’t fully overlap with my intended group, but insights into how the struggles of being a first-generation Student of Colour at the university can reach into the private family and social lives of students is very valuable. Her study shows that a more open and less racism and micro-aggression focused research is necessary to fully understand the experience of first generation Students of Colour.

Shirin Shahrokni’s (2015) research into the experiences of French students of North Afri-can decent at the grande écoles of France, also delivers important insights. Her students are aware of the uncommon nature of their presence at these prestigious universities. The existence of inter-national students from North African countries doesn’t alleviate their observance of underrepre-sentation, as they realise that these students are usually from more affluent backgrounds and cannot relate to their experiences of growing up in France in socially disadvantaged circumstances. The study participants also realise that there is a right way to be a student at their university, and that one needs to change speech patterns, join the right clubs, and attend student parties. While they deem it important to form friendships with people whose class and racial/ethnic background is different to theirs, building friendships with students with similar trajectories is crucial to deal with their “mobility-associated difficulties” (Shahrokni, 2015, p. 1060). These difficulties are some-times caused by racism, and students appreciate these friendships that make it easier to deal with instances of racism. For female students, these difficulties also reach into their dating life and romantic prospects. As one interviewee “admits that this intimate sphere of her life is paradoxically far from being a strictly personal matter: while dating a ‘Franco-Français’ would symbolically translate into moving away from her Moroccan and Islamic roots and displaying disloyalty to her family, choosing an ‘Arab’ partner would signify to her colleagues, predominantly of the majority group, an inability to ‘integrate’” (ibid.). The study also finds three ways of associative

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engage-ment the students partake in: they either join clubs that reflect their class and/or racial/ethnic back-ground, found clubs in which the lives and backgrounds of “atypical” students are appreciated, or retreat to engagement in home-based associations, that connect them back to their home environ-ment.

These associative engagements offer a valuable link to theories of social mobility and how racially/ethnically marginalised people deal with economic mobility. A theoretical tool can be found in studies of immigrant integration. As a development from segmented assimilation theories (Portes & Zhou, 1993), the minority culture of mobility emerged (Neckermann et al., 1999). Neck-ermann et al. argued that upwardly mobile immigrants and their descendants don’t just have two options: either assimilate to white middle-class culture or assimilate into an ethnic minority lower class; they argue that upwardly mobile immigrants can also integrate in a minority middle-class culture. They develop strategies in response to structural disadvantages and discrimination (Val-lejo, 2012).

These strategies result from two distinct sets of experiences of minority middle-class peo-ple: interactions with the white majority and contacts with minority group members with lower class status (Neckerman et al., 1999, p. 946). These strategies can range from adapting speech patterns while talking to white middle class people, to forming professional associations. Vallejo shows in her study of upwardly mobile Mexican Americans that these associations function as a refuge from the white middle-class workplace and teach its members the codes of the middle class. In the specific case of Mexican Americans in Southern California it is to learn golf to “build mid-dle-class cultural capital to gain access to corporate rituals that they believe will lead to career advancement” (Vallejo, 2012, p. 676f.)

2.6 Implications for Empirical Study

The theory so far makes it seem like society is a never changing, self-reproducing machine that cannot foster social mobility. Like a lot of answers to sociological questions, it is a “well, yeah no”. In the Dutch education system, reproduction of inequality is happening through the common trajectory of racialized students continuing secondary education in preparatory secondary voca-tional education schools (MBO). The early selection in the Dutch education system channels ra-cialized students to manual and applied professions (reproduction) but there are obviously also students who go to university, whether an applied university or a research university. This can be considered a moment of social change and individual social mobility. As there are structural forces making the second path difficult, it is interesting to find out how students understand these forces and how they navigate social mobility.

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From Pierre Bourdieu’s theories about social fields and habitus we can derive that non-compliance to the rules of a field and “unfitting” habitus could lead to policing of behaviour by others and by oneself in order to pass in an institution or in academic spaces in general. I am interested in these efforts to pass, whether students resist, give in, or re-negotiate them, and what these processes look like in the Dutch context.

Participants for the study all self-identify as belonging to a racially/ethnically marginalized group in the Netherlands. Another criterion for the selection of participants was the education level of their parents. I specifically looked for people, whose parents did not receive higher education and who were first-in-family students. I chose to operationalize class this way because of the im-portance cultural capital plays in education, and because it is a quick and more sensitive way of approaching this topic with strangers, who might not freely share information about income, sav-ings, life-style choices etc. I also chose to interview in-family students, as opposed to first-generation students, because I know from my own experience, that having a sibling blaze the way into higher education offers an advantage to future students in the family.

The theoretical contemplations in this chapter have lead us to studies about student expe-riences in North America and Europe. The report of the diversity commission of the University of Amsterdam (Wekker et al., 2016) shows that underrepresented students are confronted with dif-ferent mechanisms of exclusion, ranging from explicit Othering to silencing of their voices. The study about students of North-African descent at prestigious universities in France (Shahrokni, 2015) also helps us answer the first question of how theory and research can shine light on the experiences of underrepresented students. It shows that the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and higher education not only affect situations in classrooms or on campus, but also involvement in campus life, friendships, romantic partnerships, and voluntary work. The practices of the stu-dents in this study are put into the context of the minority culture of mobility (Neckermann et al., 1999), which may, on first glance, not seem applicable to this study, but offers an idea of managing upward mobility and shows strategies of the upwardly mobile. The engagement in associations of French students supports this theory. In the Netherlands, where student and study associations are a visible part of university and campus life, this theory becomes even more important. Student associations and the decision to join or not join them was a topic that came up regularly with students in my study. These associations represent both a moment of disconnection and reconnec-tion for the study participants. I will look at these themes in the next chapter.

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3 “Sometimes it’s the way they look at you, it’s the way they

don’t talk to you”

3.1 Empirical Findings - Outline

The interviews I conducted with students and recent graduates in Amsterdam show a big range of perceptions of university and academia. One end of this range is represented by Isabel who we had already met in the introductory chapter, and who’s a current student at the University of Amsterdam:

I felt mostly like in a cage. I felt like, school was the ugly dark place that I didn’t want to go to. It became that. My life outside of school was fine, you know, I had friends I could go out with, they were also Antillean friends, they’re not Dutch. Outside of school, my life was ok.

While she is currently a master’s student at a research university, her experiences at the University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam were the main topic she wanted to talk about and that shaped her experience in higher education. As the quote above indicates, Isabel had many experiences of micro-aggressions and overt racism that lead to her disliking her study experience during her un-dergraduate studies. On the other end of the range, we can see Mary, a Business and Economics student at the University of Amsterdam, who had a hard time adapting to the Netherlands and to university in her first year, but turned things around and now enjoys her studies and studying:

But university is like a very calm place for me. I’ve never gotten angry at university, or been sad, or just, you know; I just go there. I learn knew stuff, and I’m actually very happy, because I’m interested in them, and yeah. Sometimes when exams get around, it can get stressful but that’s it. It’s not like I get angry, or sad, or extremely happy, or that sort of stuff. It’s just school I guess.

These two quotes demonstrate that experiences – or at least the individual perception of them – vary greatly between my study participants. It is not possible to clearly say they “like university” or “dislike university”. My goal in this chapter is to merely present some of the topics that would come up frequently in interviews, topics that the participants could talk freely about. The ways certain topics were brought up and the context in which they became relevant, did expose patterns that are related to structural circumstances in general society. But the frequency of topics is not necessarily a useful benchmark for a qualitative study like this. I conducted eleven inter-views, two of which were structured and nine of which were semi-structured, with students from three different institutions of higher education in the city of Amsterdam. The experiences voiced in these interviews may not be generalizable, but this is not the aim of this study. My aim is to get

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an understanding for the scope of experiences, to explore the different realities of my study par-ticipants. My guiding question for this empirical research was how first-in-family Students of Col-our experience academic education and academic spaces. By looking at the way my study partici-pants voice their urgencies, I inferred which experiences are relevant to their perception of their position in academia. To answer this research question, I started with close-reading the interview transcripts and later used the method of open-coding, which lead to two rounds of coding, produc-ing five major codproduc-ing categories: terminology of race/speakproduc-ing about oneself, hierarchy of institu-tions, diversity work at university, disconnecinstitu-tions, and re-connections. I will discuss these catego-ries in this and the following chapter.

Each section in this chapter will focus one of the first four coding categories. In the previ-ous chapter, I analysed the difficulties of talking about race in the Netherlands. These difficulties have in a way shown themselves in the interviews as well. The first section of this chapter will focus on language and terminology when positioning oneself within the discourse. Later, I will analyse the apparent hierarchy of universities in Amsterdam and in the Netherlands in general, and how participants made their choice to attend their respective institutions. The subsequent sections will deal with many different forms of disconnections the students have experienced or are still experiencing due to their status as university students. These disconnections will be dealt with in terms of disconnections from family, fellow students, and from university and the academic canon.

3.2 Terminology of Race/Speaking about Oneself

Various terms, some of which had been mentioned in the previous chapter, are employed by the participants to refer to themselves or people who share similar backgrounds: ethnic minority student, students with ethnic background, immigrant background. Nevertheless, a very common way to refer to themselves for many of the participants, is to use their “background” nationality as an additional descriptor: Turkish Dutch, Tunisian Dutch, Ghanaian Scottish etc. Many times, these additional descriptors also become the sole descriptors participants’ friends are described with (“Tunisian”, “Turkish”, “Moroccan”, “Surinamese”, or “Dutch”).

In some interviews with participants who have grown up in the Netherlands and have gone through the Dutch education system, “Dutch” is the descriptor for people whose experiences and behaviour contrasts with theirs. While they describe themselves with additional information about their background, the Other stays largely unmarked. This way Dutch-ness is portrayed as an un-marked identity and becomes conflated with whiteness. There are only seldom additional de-scriptors for white Dutch students or white Dutch people. “Dutch students” are described as white

The good, the bad, and the exhausting : the experiences of first-in-family students of colour at Amsterdam's institutions of higher education

Master Thesis