Gender and Education, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 431–449, 2001 Working-class Men’s Constructions of Masculinity and Negotiations of (Non)Participation in Higher Education LOUISE ARCHER, SIMON D. PRATT & DAVID PHILLIPS, University of North London, UK ABSTRACT This article draws on discussion group data collected with 64 ethnically diverse working-class men who were predominantly not participating, or planning to participate, in higher education. The article identies how the men drew on various discourses of masculinity in their arguments for and against higher education participation, and discusses potential implications of these discourses upon working-class men’s continued underrepresentation in higher education. Analysis also highlights how the men’s various constructions were framed/constrained by their locations within multiple, interlocking systems of inequality. Questions are raised with regard to future widening participation initiatives. Introduction Until the 1970s, issues of masculinity remained largely absent from mainstream academic research (Mac an Ghaill, 1996a). As feminist critiques have pointed out, there has always been research done on men and by men, but interest in men as explicitly gendered individuals is relatively recent. Now, due to the rapid growth of interest in theorising masculinity, ‘that untraversed frontier has become gold rush territory’ (Newton, 1998, p. 547). But, as Sara Delamont (2000) points out, interest in working-class men and their rejection (or, we might suggest, their resistance) to schooling has been evident within the sociology of education over the past one hundred years. Broadly speaking, much research on masculinity has fallen within two main ap- proaches (the celebratory versus the critical), within which a variety of theoretical perspectives have been developed, such as role theory, subcultural theory, psychoanalytic approaches and discursive theories (for reviews see, for example, Coltrane, 1994). This article is written from a perspective in line with recent shifts towards a theorising of masculinity in terms of hegemony and multiple identities (Brittan, 1989), recognising the Correspondence: Dr Louise Archer, Institute for Policy Studies in Education, University of North London, 166–220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB, UK; e-mail: L.Archer@unl.ac.uk. ISSN 0954-0253 print; 1360–0516 online/01/040431–19 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0954025012008177 9