This book about widening educational participation draws on an ethnographic study of 23 students returning to learning through access courses provided at their local further education college in suburban England. Chapter 1 explains how certain poststructural concepts (discourse, hegemony, deconstruction, and subjectivity) are used as analytical tools to make sense of access students' experiences and autobiographies. Chapter 2 puts the ethnography into context geographically, historically, and politically and by describing access courses at the center of the inquiry. Chapter 3 describes the process of developing collaborative, interactive, and reflexive methodological approaches to research access education. Chapter 4 explores themes of collaboration, interaction, and empowerment in relation to pedagogy. It considers effects of hegemonic discourses on teaching practices. Chapter 5 explores access students' narratives of intimidation, reveals how hegemonic discourses reposition them as inferior, and how participants resist this by creating radical spaces in their access classrooms. Chapter 6 examines participants' desire for self-discovery. It explores how they construct their subjectivity in relation to the multiple contexts in which they are positioned and position themselves. Chapter 7 considers ways in which radical discourses are resisted within access education. Chapter 8 shows collaborative approaches to understanding and developing new strategies for widening educational access are of central importance. Appendixes include a 184-item bibliography and index. (YLB)