‘A little one among giants’: First-generation students transitioning to university in Italy, before and beyond the pandemic

Research on first-generation students (FGS) has grown in recent decades and has provided an insightful 'new zone of looking' to address inequalities in Europe and beyond. Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study conducted in Italy, this paper explores how a group of FGS lived, experienced and crafted their transition from school to university. By focusing particularly on FGS with less conventional secondary school pathways (i.e. who came from vocational or technical schools), our aim is to highlight the oft-unnoticed mechanisms of exclusion/inclusion that permeate social interactions, routines, taken-for-granted assumptions and the distribution of social worth at university. The paper enriches the literature on FGS in two ways. First, by combining different conceptual tools (Bourdieu and intersectionality), it avoids a widespread tendency to represent FGS as monolithic and deficit-based. Instead, it offers a nuanced understanding of the transition to university for FGS by showing both the mechanisms of exclusion that shape it, but also the resources they mobilize to negotiate the university environment. Second, the paper shows how changes to academic routines due the COVID-19 pandemic opened up new spaces of negotiation with the university field and how these spaces are reshaping how at least some FGS experience university life.