"It’s not just about me"

Abstract

This thesis explores how the experience of pursuing a humanities degree contributes to shifts in students’ identities. Located at Rhodes University in South Africa, the study is situated within a higher education context marked by ongoing structural inequality, slow institutional transformation, and emerging responses to the challenges raised during the #MustFall movements. It draws on Margaret Archer’s Social Realism, using her concepts of reflexivity, agency, and identity to understand how students navigate the structural and cultural conditions that shape both their pre-university lives and their experiences within higher education, and how these conditions influence their internal conversations, decision-making, and identities. Using narrative inquiry, the study engages with the conditions that contribute to identity formation during the course of a humanities degree. Through in-depth interviews with 15 postgraduate humanities students within the Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science and International Studies, and Philosophy departments, it traces how students make sense of their decisions to enter university, their expectations of what a degree will offer, and how these expectations shift over time. The research focuses on students in the humanities, a field often undervalued within an increasingly market-driven global higher education context, and shows how their experiences are shaped by socio-economic constraints, family and community responsibilities that emerge from Black Tax, and broader cultural ideas of success. The findings suggest that while students often enter university with clearly defined goals centred on financial stability and social mobility, the humanities disciplines provide opportunities for critical engagement, self-reflection, and new ways of thinking about the world and their place in it. These shifts in identity are complex and layered, as students work to align the changes they experience with social and cultural expectations, familial responsibilities, and the realities of life after graduation. By foregrounding student narratives, this thesis shows that identity formation is not a secondary outcome of higher education but a central, situated process through which students navigate cultural obligations, structural constraints, and institutional expectations, revealing both the potential and limits of the humanities as spaces for personal transformation.