A compelling and refreshingly innovative account…Finn and Holton carefully elucidate and marshal their framework of “everyday mobile belonging” across a series of richly textured ethnographic chapters that reveal how a diverse range of contemporary UK higher education students move, stay, interact with space and negotiate belonging in a landscape shaped by the massification and marketization of 21st-century higher education. Alongside this exceptional ethnography, Finn and Holton also mount a nuanced critical scoping of higher education as both a sector and a scholarly field, and engage in thought-provoking ways with questions of method in mobilities research that are in themselves a crucial contribution.

Shanthi Robertson, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia

An important contribution to existing insight through comprehensively drawing together understandings from the theorising of mobilities with the particular everyday lived experience of being a higher education student today. Chapters draw out the ways in which this experience is pivotally spatially and temporally contingent upon the specifics of space, place and locale, with a nuance that recognises the emergent risks and challenges for young people relating to wider changes in the contemporary educational and socio-economic landscape.

Tamsin Hinton-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Higher Education, University of Sussex, UK