International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

The article Beyond access: Intersectional challenges for Higher Education success in South Africa by Benedicte Brahic (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Nicola Ingram (University College Cork, Ireland), Aradhana Ramnund-Mansingh (MANCOSA/University of Free State, South Africa), Kim Heyes (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Mariam Seedat-Khan (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and Shoba Arun (University of Essex, UK) published in International Sociology was shorlisted for the Annual SAGE International Sociology Best Paper Prize’s 2025 edition (Vol. 40) and is available in Open Access. Read on to know more about the authors’ trajectory and work.

Benedicte Brahic

Nicola Ingram

Aradhana Ramnund-Mansingh

Kim Heyes

Mariam Seedat-Khan

Shoba Arun

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engaged in that research?

B. Brahic: Education occupies a paradoxical position in relation to social justice: simultaneously a social ‘leveller’ and a mechanism of social reproduction. This tension was formative in my own trajectory, shaped by early observations of the disproportionate burden placed on migrant children navigating not only linguistic and curricular demands but the hidden rules of institutional life. Subsequent professional experience – working with newly arrived families in France and, later, in the charity sector across sub-Saharan African countries – confirmed that these dynamics persist across contexts, with Black women among those most consistently failed by both education and employment systems. Higher education reproduces such inequalities, yet also renders them less visible. The HEAPS project, funded by the UK Global Challenges Research Fund and bringing together researchers across South Africa, the UK and Ireland, addresses this research gap, examining how socio-economic background, race, gender, and family dynamics intersect to shape Higher Education trajectories. Understanding these transgenerational patterns of injustice is key to informing more equitable higher education policies.

M. Seedat-Khan: Engaged research was not an abstract intellectual choice for me. It was born out of proximity to institutional power and institutional harm. I began to recognise, early in my academic career, that universities occupy the same paradoxical position as education more broadly. They are presented as sites of liberation, yet they often function as sites of quiet exclusion. I watched students, particularly Black, working-class and first-generation students, navigate not only academic demands but the hidden rules of institutional life. I saw brilliance misrecognised as deficiency. I saw resilience mistaken for compliance. I saw emotional labour become invisible. My work in Clinical Sociology intensified this awareness. When students brought their research on trauma, inequality, gender-based violence, or institutional marginalisation into supervision spaces, it became clear that research could not remain detached. These were not abstract topics; they were lived realities. To treat them as purely analytical objects felt ethically insufficient. The turning point for me was realising that institutional structures do not merely shape knowledge production, they regulate whose knowledge is legitimate. The struggle to build and accredit Clinical Sociology programmes exposed this directly. Resistance was rarely framed as ideological; it was framed as procedural. Yet beneath procedural objections were epistemic hierarchies, what counts as “real sociology,” whose methods are considered rigorous, and which forms of applied scholarship are deemed secondary. At the same time, my engagement beyond the university including work intersecting with health governance and community-based initiatives reinforced that research is never neutral. Communities do not experience inequality as theory; they experience it as daily constraint. If scholarship remains observational, it risks reproducing extractive dynamics where lived suffering becomes publication capital.

A. Ramnund-Mansigh: My academic and professional work has long centred on the intersection of gender, care, and access to opportunity, particularly within higher education systems that claim inclusivity yet often overlook the invisible burdens carried by women. I have been especially attentive to the ways in which mothers navigate economic precarity, institutional rigidity, and disproportionate caregiving responsibilities, and how these dynamics shape the educational trajectories of their children. My engagement with this line of inquiry was further consolidated when Professor Seedat-Khan invited me to join the HEAPS project examining the higher education attainment of children from single-mother households. The project resonated with my interest in gendered household structures, intergenerational mobility, and the subtle ways in which higher education both mitigates and reproduces inequality. Investigating how family configuration, socio-economic context, and gendered responsibility intersect to influence higher education participation is critical to informing policies that move beyond formal access towards substantive equity.

Do you have any video, recorded conference, or online material that you would like us to share with others?

B. Brahic: The project website HEAPS may be of interest.

And Beyond Access - Migration and Interdisciplinary Global Studies (MIGS).

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers?

Dr. Benedicte Brahic is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology and Criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. As co-lead of the Migration and Interdisciplinary Global Studies (MIGS) research centre at Manchester Metropolitan University, Benedicte develops interdisciplinary work at the intersection of mobility, gender, and social inequality across migration, labour, and education as interconnected fields. Her research trajectory has been shaped by a sustained engagement with how global processes produce localised inequalities and how these are lived and negotiated in the everyday. Beginning in the charity sector, she developed an interest in the intersections of gender, mobility, and institutional contexts that carried through into her academic work on migration, bordering processes, and the hierarchies and categories through which migration is differentially valued, regulated, and experienced along lines of race, gender, and class. This interest in how inequality is simultaneously produced and obscured across different institutional settings, combined with a longstanding commitment to widening participation in higher education, led her to co-develop and lead the HEAPS project, extending these questions into the field of higher education.

Prof. Nicola Ingram is Head of the School of Education at University College Cork, Ireland, and a leading sociologist of education. As a Bourdieusian scholar and co-founder of the British Sociological Association Bourdieu Study Group, her work explores intersectional social class inequalities, with a strong focus on educational contexts and youth transitions.

Prof. Aradhana Ramnund-Mansingh’s academic trajectory has been shaped by a sustained commitment to leadership in higher education, research development, and gender-responsive scholarship. She currently serves as the Senior Research Manager at MANCOSA, where she leads research strategy, postgraduate development, and institutional research initiatives. Her previous leadership roles include Business School Manager and Head of the Master of Business Administration programme. She has also served as Co-Chair of the Institutional Ethics Committee and was recognised with the Top Researcher Award in two consecutive cycles. In addition to her leadership responsibilities, she serves as a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, contributing to collaborative scholarship and postgraduate supervision within a broader national research context. Her professional and academic career is grounded in the disciplines of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour, which strongly inform and complement her academic leadership roles. Her scholarship focuses on gender equity, leadership development, digital transformation in higher education, and workforce sustainability. She holds professional membership with the South African Board for People Practices (SABPP), the Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA), and the International Sociological Association (ISA), reflecting her interdisciplinary engagement across human capital development, coaching practice, and sociological inquiry. Over the years, she has contributed to interdisciplinary research initiatives, supervised postgraduate and doctoral candidates, and participated in international research collaborations. Her involvement in research centres and cross-border projects reflects a sustained commitment to policy-relevant scholarship that bridges theory and practice. Throughout her trajectory, her emphasis has remained on advancing inclusive leadership, strengthening institutional research ecosystems, and producing scholarship that informs both organisational practice and higher education policy.

Dr. Kim Heyes started in this project as a Research Associate, and with the support of this wonderful team of women, she has progressed to Reader of Inequalities and Abuse in the School of Nursing and Public Health at Manchester Metropolitan University. She leads the Gender-based Violence research group in the School, and is co-convenor of the Violence Against Women and Girls group for the British Sociological Association.

Prof. Mariam Seedat-Khan: As a scholar working in the Global South, navigating gendered institutional labour I became increasingly aware that engagement is not merely methodological: it is relational and embodied. The emotional toll of institutional resistance, the administrative weight of building new programmes and the invisible labour of mentoring students from marginalised backgrounds revealed that interventionist scholarship is structurally demanding. But it also revealed its necessity. A formative influence in this trajectory was the legacy of scholars such as Fatima Meer, whose intellectual work was inseparable from political commitment. She modelled a scholarship that did not seek safety in abstraction. That example, combined with the daily realities of supervising research grounded in inequality and trauma, made disengagement untenable. I work on engaged research in the Global South because neutrality, in deeply unequal systems, is a form of complicity. I work on it because universities reproduce hierarchies even as they claim transformation. I work on it because students deserve research training that equips them not only to analyse society but to intervene in it. Engaged research, for me, is not activism in place of scholarship. It is scholarship taken seriously. It is an insistence that knowledge production must be accountable, to communities, to institutions, and to the future of epistemic justice in the Global South.

Dr. Shoba Arun: Currently, a trustee of the British Sociological Association (BSA), her research builds on her theoretical and methodological foundations to understand transformative work practices and policies, addressing cultural and intersectional inequalities, including fast-changing effects of global processes. Shoba’s research has a strong international and comparative dimension with expertise on emerging economies such as India and Africa in the nexus of their global work, neoliberal regimes, organisations and labour markets, migration, digital technology and global value chains with a focus on social justice and wellbeing. Her recently completed collaborative projects examine migration and integration policies in educational settings using co-creation and participatory approaches across the UK and the EU; gendered and racialised nexus of education-work transition in South Africa; gender capital approaches to digital inclusion in the labour market and entrepreneurship in India. She is currently leading a UKRI-funded project exploring autonomy in the garment sector workplaces of Leicester and Dhaka. Shoba has received funding from the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation and European Commission’s Horizon 2020. Her work has been published in major journals, such as Work, Employment and Society, Sociology, Feminist Economics, Culture and Education, World Development, Journal of Gender Studies and International Journal of Public Administration. Her monograph Development and Gender Capital in India: Change, Continuity and Conflict in Kerala (Routledge, 2018) uses a feminist Bourdieusian frame of analysis of gender capital to examine gendered issues in the economy and society in the Indian state of Kerala, particularly how social locations shape labour market experiences. Her latest (co) edited volume Global Migration and Diversity of Educational Experiences in the Global South and North, published by Routledge focusses on decolonising migration studies and educational experiences. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and member of the British Sociological Association, European Group on Organisation Studies (EGOS), Global Studies Association (UK) and Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). She is based at the Essex Business School, University of Essex.