This article examines how first-generation commuter students from two working-class South African towns rhythmically negotiated the uneven spatial and temporal infrastructures shaping their educational engagement at a Cape Town university of technology. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial and temporal analytics, we used a spatial-rhythmic lens alongside a blended, retrospective, multi-sited ethnographic design, ethnography on the move to trace the complex, nonlinear educational trajectories of these students and show how mobility, space and time converge in shaping educational persistence. Excluded from residence through rigid accommodation policies, these students navigated fragmented transportation systems, unfamiliar university terrains and materially constrained home environments through adaptive bodily, temporal and relational practices. Commuting thus emerged not merely as a logistical constraint but as a central rhythm organising students’ educational life. By repurposing arduous journeys for study, cultivating peer networks and crafting self-directed academic routines, participants became rhythmic actors who developed situated, practical strategies for connection, persistence and academic success.
By foregrounding the spatial-temporal negotiations shaping working-class students’ educational trajectories, the article reframes commuting as a productive rhythm of engagement and argues that meaningful institutional transformation requires time-sensitive, mobility-attuned pedagogies that recognise the differentiated rhythms through which students inhabit and reshape the infrastructures of learning.
Commuting is now a structural feature of contemporary higher education (Thomas
In South Africa, spatial and economic inequalities render off-campus living and daily travel the norm rather than the exception for working-class students; time scarcity and uneven mobility patterns shape when, where and how learning unfolds. Deficit readings portraying first-generation students (FGSs) as underprepared overlook the inventive spatial, temporal and relational practices through which they negotiate educational participation. This article advances a different reading. Integrating Lefebvre’s trialectics of space (
Empirically, this article draws on a blended, retrospective, multi-sited South African educational ethnography, ethnography on the move (Fataar
The analysis reveals that commuting is not merely a logistical burden but a constitutive rhythm of educational life. Students repurposed transit time for study and recovery, anchored themselves in resource-rich campus nodes, cultivated peer synchrony within compressed days and scripted personal academic routines that translated dissonant tempos into workable sequences. These findings unsettle generic models of the ‘engaged student’ (Zepke
The article contributes on three fronts. Conceptually, it rethinks student engagement as a spatial-rhythmic practice. Empirically, it offers fine-grained accounts of commuter lives in a deeply unequal setting while speaking to global patterns of mobility. Practically, it reframes commuting as a productive rhythm of engagement, arguing for time-sensitive, mobility-attuned pedagogies and an institution-wide retiming of structures and supports, which we term rhythmic equity The discussion proceeds by situating the study within the literature on commuting and engagement, outlining the methodology and presenting five interlocking themes that trace how first-generation commuter students compose eurhythmic alignments across city, campus and home.
The enduring spatial and social legacies of apartheid continue to structure how working-class youth in South Africa access, experience and succeed in higher education. Although equity-oriented reforms introduced after 1994 sought to redress historical injustices, the institutional and spatial landscape of higher education remains uneven (Cross
Proximity to campus has long been recognised as a key factor enabling academic persistence and success, largely because it facilitates social integration and access to academic infrastructure (Mugambiwa & Kwakwa
In the South African context, the commuter student is frequently also the first in their family to access university (Joorst
Within the Western Cape, where this study is situated, these inequalities are further intensified by a fragmented public transport system. Students travelling daily from peripheral towns endure long commutes that compromise punctuality, attendance and access to vital campus spaces and academic support infrastructure (Joorst
Although commuting shapes the daily realities of millions of students globally, higher education research seldom attends to its spatial and temporal implications. Consequently, engagement scholarship often overlooks how these inequalities impact and configure the participation of working-class commuter students. The concept of engagement has occupied a central place in higher education research since the 1930s (Kuh
This article argues that dominant theories of student engagement overlook the structural, spatial and socioeconomic conditions that shape commuter students’ capacity for full participation, as well as the inventive spatial and temporal practices through which they construct meaningful educational lives from the periphery. Such theories implicitly assume proximity, temporal flexibility and institutional familiarity, conditions seldom available to first-generation commuter students. By privileging campus-based participation, they obscure the lived practices through which working-class mobile students negotiate space, time and belonging on the move.
This omission narrows our understanding of how engagement is cultivated beyond the formal boundaries of the university and under conditions of spatial and temporal constraints. Mainstream frameworks typically centre the individual student’s motivation and the institutional environment, without adequately accounting for the socio-spatial conditions that mediate this relationship. Addressing this conceptual gap, the article rethinks student engagement through a spatial-temporal lens. It frames commuting as a constitutive rhythm of educational becoming, foregrounding how engagement extends beyond student motivation and institutional provision. This study conceptualises engagement as a rhythmic practice, an ongoing negotiation of time, space and energy through which students synchronise their movements, study routines and social relations with the often-dissonant rhythms of university life. In doing so, it contributes to emerging debates calling for a more situated, embodied and temporally attuned understanding of student engagement in contexts of inequality.
This article employs Henri Lefebvre’s spatial and temporal analytics to illuminate how everyday mobility practices intersect with university engagement, shaping the educational trajectories of first-generation commuter students from geographically peripheral working-class contexts. Lefebvre’s work offers a means to extend dominant conceptions of student engagement by situating students’ participation within the rhythms, infrastructures and relational spaces that structure higher education.
Lefebvre (
Extending this spatial lens, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (
Together, the spatial triad and rhythmanalysis form a spatial-rhythmic framework that reimagines engagement as a situated, embodied practice. Engagement becomes the ongoing work of aligning one’s rhythms with the shifting tempos of university life, rather than a fixed set of campus-bound behaviours.
This article draws on a doctoral study that examined how working-class FGSs navigated the spatial and temporal architectures of higher education at a South African university of technology (Davids
A qualitative design generated thick, context-rich descriptions of how graduates cultivated educational lives across intersecting home, community, transit and university spaces (Scotland
Ethnography on the move (EoM) integrates several ethnographic genres. Drawing on retrospective ethnography (Sandberg
A purposive sample was drawn from graduates who had completed diploma qualifications while residing with their families in towns approximately 55 km from Cape Town. Five first-generation graduates participated: Lana (34, Environmental Management), Ryan (36, Textile Technology), Jenny (27, Accountancy), Connor (25, Retail Business Management) and Jade (25, Hospitality Management). Lana, Ryan and Jenny lived in Aspeling, an apartheid-era industrial town established in the 1970s for people classified as ‘Coloured’, while Connor and Jade were from nearby Moravia, a rural town historically and economically tethered to Aspeling through shared educational and transport infrastructure. A sample of five participants was appropriate for this multi-sited, longitudinal ethnographic design, enabling depth, temporal layering and fine-grained analysis across the different spaces students inhabited.
Data were generated as part of the broader doctoral project over a 24-month period (May 2023–May 2025) through multiple in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Each participant engaged in approximately eight sessions lasting 45 min – 60 min. Given the study’s retrospective, trajectory-focused nature, in-depth interviews were the most appropriate method for accessing participants’ longitudinal spatial–temporal reflections across home, transit and campus. Interview prompts were developed to explore commuting routines, engagement strategies and the influence of mobility and distance on academic and social participation. Field notes and reflective memos documented contextual details and emergent analytical insights.
All interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s (
Trustworthiness was ensured through several strategies. Member checking allowed participants to verify transcripts and comment on interpretations (Tracy
As co-authors, we acknowledge that our distinct positionalities shaped this inquiry in different but complementary ways. The primary researcher, Lauren, is a woman who grew up in a working-class community in Cape Town and works as an academic developer at a university of technology. Her childhood in a family of educators who taught in under-resourced schools similar to those in Aspeling, and her own years of daily commuting to schools and later to university, attuned her to the socio-spatial and emotional textures of the participants’ accounts. These experiences positioned her as a partial insider, sensitised to the rhythms of movement, constraint and aspiration that animated the students’ narratives.
The second author, Aslam, supervised the doctoral study from which this article emerges and contributed an external, theoretically informed perspective grounded in scholarship on educational pathways, mobility and spatialised learning. The resulting co-authorship reflects the scholarly and supervisory collaboration that characterised the doctoral project. His role involved providing conceptual guidance, interpretive distance and critical challenge to Lauren’s emergent analyses, thereby deepening reflexivity and expanding theoretical coherence.
Together, we adopted a reflexive interpretivist stance, recognising knowledge as co-constructed through dialogue, supervision and relational trust rather than produced from a detached position. Regular supervisory engagements, peer discussions and reflective field notes functioned as shared reflexive checkpoints, enabling both authors to interrogate how assumptions, emotions and professional commitments shaped the interpretations presented in this article.
The Research Ethics Committee: Social, Behavioural and Educational Research, from Stellenbosch University, granted ethical clearance (REC: SBE-2022-25520) to conduct the study. Participation was entirely voluntary. Prospective participants were provided with a detailed information sheet outlining the purpose of the study, the nature of their involvement and their rights as research participants. Written informed consent was obtained prior to the commencement of interviews, and participants were reminded of their right to decline to answer specific questions or to withdraw from the study at any stage without penalty. All data were anonymised through the use of pseudonyms, and identifying details of individuals and institutions were removed to protect confidentiality. Institutional permission to conduct the study with alumni of the university was obtained, where required. All digital recordings and transcripts were stored on password-protected devices and encrypted university servers accessible only to the research team.
The participants’ daily journeys from Aspeling and Moravia were patterned by spatial inequity and infrastructural fragmentation. Through Lefebvre’s spatial-rhythmic lens, five interlocking themes emerge, tracing how students continually tuned their practices across perceived space (material infrastructures and institutional timetables), conceived space (policy imaginaries and tacit academic scripts) and lived space (embodied, affective and relational improvisations).
The analysis is organised around five interrelated themes: (1) unequal commutes and arrhythmic mobility, (2) embodied tactics of commuting, (3) re-mapping campus space, (4) peer synchrony and relational rhythms and (5) self-directed academic rhythms. These themes were generated through iterative cycles of inductive coding and relational clustering of recurring spatial–temporal tensions across participants’ narratives. Movement between open coding and Lefebvre’s spatial-rhythmic concepts enabled the identification of patterned alignments and disruptions that structured participants’ educational trajectories. Together, these themes illuminate the polyrhythmic nature of first-generation commuter students’ educational lives, shaped by the intersecting tempos of transport systems, domestic routines and university schedules that frequently collide to produce recurrent arrhythmia. Viewed through Lefebvre’s spatial-rhythmic lens, students emerge not as passive subjects of structural inequality but as rhythmic actors who continually compose situated eurhythmic alignments, understood as moments of temporal and spatial synchronisation that sustain their connection, participation and persistence in higher education.
Lefebvre (
For the participants, commuting was not a choice but a structuring rhythm of everyday life. University residence policies excluded students living within a 60-km radius, rendering mobility an unavoidable precondition for educational mobility. Despite the introduction of the MyCiTi bus rapid-transit (BRT) system, the public transport network remained fragmented, costly and unreliable. Connor recalled the frustration of ‘waiting at the bus stop in Moravia since 06h00 … arriving in Cape Town after 08h20, and then walking 20 minutes to campus and arriving late for the 08h30 class’ (Connor, 25, Retail Business Management). These repeated delays produced arrhythmic collisions between transit time and institutional time. Connor further described being denied entry to class on multiple occasions because of late arrival, illustrating how rigid academic tempos amplify the inequities produced by the city’s fractured mobility rhythms.
Most participants routinely left afternoon classes early to catch direct buses before peak traffic. Even after negotiating early departures with lecturers, bus schedules remained unpredictable, often changing at the discretion of drivers or being disrupted by mechanical failures. Systemic disruptions further deepened these arrhythmias. Jenny described how a prolonged taxi strike immobilised her community: ‘I couldn’t attend class for three weeks, it was very dangerous, and the roads were blocked, and buses stopped. It really affected my preparation for the June exams’ (Jenny, 27, Accountancy). These episodes underscore the impact of infrastructural instability and uneven transit rhythms on students’ attendance, academic performance and emotional well-being.
Such arrhythmic encounters exemplify how the city’s uneven infrastructures and institutional rigid schedules impose dissonant tempos on those at its margins. Within this unequal spatial production, late arrivals, absences and early departures are misread as disengagement rather than the students’ tactical attempts to reconcile discordant temporalities across transport, domestic and university spaces. Yet within these disruptions, the students devised everyday tactics to cultivate moments of eurhythmia, temporary alignments between mobility and institutional time that made educational participation possible. These disruptions were not merely obstacles but constituted contexts through which students developed embodied, tactical responses, which form the focus of the next theme.
Nespor (
For most participants, the act of pre-emptively organising belongings the night before illustrates how commuting rhythms extended into the domestic sphere, beginning well before participants boarded the bus. Early rising, often before 5:00, was a response to hurried mornings shared with large families and limited household facilities. Skipping breakfast or eating discreetly on the bus or in the first morning class reflected how participants recalibrated bodily routines to maximise limited time and energy.
Walking to bus stops in darkness was a daily rhythm infused with risk. Quiet, isolated roads marked by unpaved walkways and defective streetlights required participants to continually weigh time, distance and safety. Connor explained how he avoided the nearest bus stop despite its proximity: ‘I chose to walk to the busier stop further down for safety; many people were robbed on the shorter route’ (Connor, 25, Retail Business Management).
Weather changes demanded further adaptation. Jade’s reliance on her sister’s rain gear illustrates how mobility was sustained through extended family resources: ‘My sister received proper rain protection from her company…I used to borrow it during winter to protect my shoes, clothes and bag’ (Jade, 25, Hospitality Management). Layered clothing and functional footwear were essential for enduring the discomfort of leaking buses, poor ventilation and overcrowded vehicles.
Securing a seat on overcrowded buses reduced strain during long rides. Tactics included catching an earlier lift to board at quieter stops (Lana), choosing seats that accommodated height (Connor) or reserving a back-row spot for a bulky toolbox of culinary training supplies (Jade). The seemingly mundane act of sitting thus became a site of daily embodied negotiation, a choreography shaped by infrastructure, bodily difference and disciplinary expectation.
While commuting entailed personal risk for all participants, gender shaped their safety strategies. For Lana, Jenny and Jade, sparsely populated buses posed a greater risk, prompting them to choose more crowded routes as protective measures. In contrast, Ryan and Connor cultivated bodily performances of toughness as deterrents. ‘You just have to look tough’, Connor (25, Retail Business Management) explained. ‘If they [
Over time, participants cultivated spatial–temporal sensibilities that enabled them to navigate movement across uneven cityscapes. Through repetitive bodily and temporal practices, they attuned themselves to the city’s dissonant rhythms. These embodied tactics illustrate how students created situated eurhythmia, brief moments of alignment within otherwise unstable mobility rhythms. They conditioned how students learned to read and remap institutional space.
Nespor (
For the participants, entry into university was marked by detours and improvisation. As Lana (34, Environmental Management) reflected, ‘There wasn’t a path I could follow’. Jade, unable to enter teaching or nursing at her preferred university, followed her mentor’s advice and pursued Hospitality Studies. Ryan shifted from Law to Textile Technology when the factory where he worked offered a bursary. After illness forced Lana to drop Pure Mathematics, narrowing her options in the science discipline, she secured a private bursary to pursue Environmental Management. These accounts illustrate the fractured and non-linear pathways through which FGSs navigate higher education, already revealing a rhythmic negotiation between opportunity and constraint.
Although all five participants studied at the same institution, they encountered campuses with distinct spatial layouts and disciplinary cultures. Jade’s compact Hospitality campus was tightly regulated, with dress and conduct codes shaped by industry norms, while the central city and northern suburban campuses were sprawling, socially mixed and institutionally complex. Early encounters within these spaces often involved trial, repetition and observation. Connor recalled: ‘I discovered shortcuts which were important during student unrest, and we had to safely find alternative exits quickly’ (Connor, 25, Retail Business Management).
The unfamiliarity of campus terrains initially produced arrhythmia, as students’ bodily movements and temporal routines collided with institutional design, security protocols and spatial hierarchies. The scarcity of lockers meant that participants often left heavier and more expensive textbooks at home, while precautionary routines, such as concealing valuables or limiting laptop use, became protective adaptations to the social realities of campus crime. These practices reveal how participants, as commuter students, gradually learned to read and remap institutional space through observation, repetition and embodied adjustment.
Amid these spatial and temporal instabilities, institutional spaces such as libraries and information technology (IT) centres emerged as anchors of eurhythmia. Ryan (36, Textile Technology) described the campus as a ‘refuge of quiet’, sharply contrasting with the noise and overcrowding that characterised Aspeling and daily commuting. For Connor, the air-conditioned library represented an infrastructural privilege absent from community facilities. These resource-rich nodes provided moments of stillness and predictability, enabling concentration, restoration and routine, temporary synchronisations within the otherwise fractured rhythms of commuting, study and survival.
Yet engagement with formal academic support services remained minimal. For most, long commutes and tight schedules curtailed participation. Jade explained:
‘I had classes every day from 07h30 till 15h00 … I didn’t stay on campus anything later than 15h00, so I didn’t use any campus support that was available to me at that time. I was just thinking about having to commute from the campus to town by bus, then take a bus from town to my home.’ (Jade, 25, Hospitality Management)
Others were unaware that such support existed. Ryan discovered only during postgraduate study that there had been a Writing Centre on campus. Lana’s sense of self-reliance, cultivated in under-resourced schooling contexts, reinforced her detachment from institutional support: ‘I’ve never needed formal academic support, even in high school. I’ve always worked on my own’ (Lana, 34, Environmental Management). These accounts highlight a mismatch of rhythms between students’ lived temporalities and the university’s institutional time. Formal support structures operated according to fixed rhythms that were largely inaccessible to those whose daily schedules were determined by transit tempos.
Despite these misalignments, participants valued the material and sensory quality of university spaces. Teaching venues were well equipped compared to the overcrowded, resource-constrained working-class schooling landscape in Aspeling. Ryan admired the advanced textile machinery, while Lana found pride in conducting experiments in fully stocked laboratories. Aesthetics also mattered: Connor (25, Retail Business Management) recalled the ‘view of Table Mountain’, while Jade (25, Hospitality Management) described the Atlantic Seaboard campus as ‘beautiful’. Such moments fostered a sense of spatial privilege that contrasted sharply with their everyday experiences of marginality and exclusion.
However, pedagogical spaces were also fraught with linguistic and affective challenges. Having attended Afrikaans-medium schools, most participants initially experienced English-dominant classrooms as intimidating and exclusionary. As Connor explained, ‘There were big language barriers … I didn’t have the confidence to raise my hand and speak in class’ (Connor, 25, Retail Business Management). These classrooms became sites of arrhythmia, where the institutional tempo of monolingual English discourse disrupted students’ embodied rhythms of participation, producing moments of silence and hesitation. Over time, however, participants developed adaptive practices that helped them gain linguistic confidence. Many chose to speak only English with friends at university, using peer interaction as a space for linguistic practice. Some also used digital resources, such as YouTube, to enhance comprehension and master specialised disciplinary terminology.
Viewed through Lefebvre’s spatial triad, universities are not neutral sites of learning but uneven terrains that demand continual rhythmic negotiation. Participants cultivated spatial–temporal capacities that enabled them to navigate the physical, linguistic, cultural and pedagogical dimensions of campus life. These embodied practices reveal the often-overlooked rhythmic labour of accessing, inhabiting and sustaining engagement in the university while remaining in perpetual motion. Such spatial negotiations were sustained not individually but through relational synchrony with peers.
Drawing on Massey’s (
Tight transit schedules, safety concerns linked to late travel and the costs and logistics of after-hours engagements emerged as key barriers to social integration on campus. As Lana (34, Environmental Management) explained, ‘There isn’t extra money for socials or eating out with friends’. Connor added:
‘I was keen to join campus rugby, but most practices were in the evenings at a different campus, and there were no buses after 20:00 to take me home to Moravia.’ (Connor, 25, Retail Business Management)
These accounts illustrate how commuting rhythms and material constraints limited opportunities for participation in the social dimensions of campus life.
Nonetheless, participants carved out time throughout the day for social connection and collaborative academic work. Jade highlighted how arriving early in the morning, before classes began, transformed vacant classrooms into informal social hubs. Similarly, Connor recalled how unexpected free hours created by lecture cancellations became opportunities to socialise. For Lana, such unstructured time enabled her and her peers to work on specialised software in the computer labs. These improvised uses of institutional time reveal how participants cultivated a dual tempo of sociality and academic engagement within compressed daily schedules.
Spatial choices were central to these peer rhythms. Rather than congregating in noisy cafeterias, participants gravitated towards outdoor green spaces for informal social interaction, while academic collaboration was anchored in library settings. Most noted that securing library meeting rooms in advance offered privacy, continuity and sustained collective focus. By contrast, relying on empty classrooms proved unreliable, as frequent venue changes disrupted the continuity and rhythm of peer collaboration.
For commuter students, group work demanded rhythmic synchronisation, the continual alignment of temporal schedules, transit systems and peer commitments to sustain collective academic harmony amid logistical constraints. When daytime meetings proved impossible, participants reconfigured their transit routines to preserve collaborative momentum. This often meant delaying their return journeys, taking later buses or, at times, staying overnight in the private student residences or homes of peers to work through tasks. These adjustments exemplify how students actively re-composed their bodily and temporal rhythms to remain academically in sync, demonstrating small but significant acts of eurhythmia within the wider arrhythmic conditions of commuter life.
When physical proximity was not possible, digital tools became crucial in sustaining these collaborative rhythms and enabling learning to transcend traditional campus boundaries. ‘We used to do video calls, send voice notes and take pictures of our class notes’, Jade (25, Hospitality Management) explained. Such practices illustrate how peer networks functioned as immediate, relational and iterative modes of learning, particularly valuable for students navigating commutes, linguistic shifts and unfamiliar institutional conventions.
Peer networks also operated as sites of technical and material support. When personal devices malfunctioned, students turned to one another for help. To offset textbook costs, groups pooled resources, copied materials or split purchases. ‘From the second year, we decided together to split up the list of compulsory textbooks … then we shared the copies of the material’, Connor (25, Retail Business Management) explained. These collaborative hacks demonstrate how peer networks compensated for material constraints through collective inventiveness.
Peer rhythms were not always harmonious. For some participants, digital-only collaboration strained relationships and stalled progress. Connor (25, Retail Business Management) noted, ‘People were less serious online’. Arrhythmia also surfaced in response to life events and uneven participation. Lana (34, Environmental Management) recalled a high-performing friend who ‘started to lag behind and eventually dropped out’, as she silently navigated an unplanned pregnancy. Thinning participation and personal crises revealed the fragility of peer synchrony and the ongoing labour required to sustain it.
Overall, peer networks operated as dynamic, student-led platforms for connection, collaboration and mutual academic development. Sustaining harmony within these networks required continual spatial, embodied, relational and temporal coordination. When arrhythmias emerged, participants responded with deliberate efforts to re-align collective rhythms. Their reflections reveal that imagined ideals of commitment, reliability and reciprocity shaped peer relationships. Alignment with like-minded peers who mirrored their academic seriousness proved especially productive, reinforcing the centrality of peer synchrony in navigating the challenges of commuter student life. These peer alignments ultimately fed into the self-directed academic rhythms that sustained educational momentum.
Lefebvre’s (
Although long hours in transit generated unavoidable temporal pressures, participants did not perceive these intervals as wasted or dead time. Instead, they repurposed them for study, rest, social connection and personal enrichment, effectively rendering their commutes productive. Through such improvisations, students sustained focus and motivation amid continual temporal constraints. Connor illustrated how transit became an extension of his academic life:
‘Besides making time in between classes for academic work, like looking for a space in the many computer labs or working at a bench in the corridors, I would also use the time on the bus to either revise my notes or make summaries in my book and this really helped me to remember my work.’ (Connor, 25, Retail Business Management)
Similarly, Lana used music to manage motion sickness while revising notes during assessment periods, and Jade transformed her daily commute into moments of literary immersion that nurtured her long-standing love of reading. Short naps on the bus conserved energy for evening study after completing household duties. These acts of temporal repurposing exemplify how students converted dead time into productive, self-regulated rhythms, creating moments of eurhythmia within the city’s otherwise dissonant mobility patterns.
At home, institutional and transport rhythms intersected with the temporalities of domestic life. Evening chores, caregiving responsibilities and religious commitments compressed participants’ study hours, producing overlapping polyrhythms that demanded constant negotiation. Jenny, a single mother, balanced childcare routines and assignments after long commutes, while choir rehearsals and church activities punctuated Lana’s weeknights. Jade assisted her family in their home-based tuck shop, selling spices, cold meats and groceries to neighbours to supplement household income. These intersecting rhythms reveal the tension between institutional demands and domestic obligations. Yet within this dissonance, participants sequenced tasks, reorganised time and sustained their studies amid the continuous hum of household life.
Material constraints further shaped academic rhythms, often intensifying temporal pressures. Limited access to personal devices and reliable Internet required inventive solutions. Jade negotiated access to Wi-Fi in Moravia by sharing her laptop with her cousin, while Ryan relied on late-night study sessions in the kitchen, typically between 22:00 and 2:00, when the household was finally quiet. Lana used visual tools, such as calendars and a small whiteboard, to track deadlines and alert family members to her study schedule, particularly when assessments clashed with church or choir commitments. These strategies reflect ongoing efforts to synchronise study rhythms with domestic time, resisting interruption while remaining embedded in family life. In Lefebvrian terms, this ongoing and hidden labour operates within lived space, where students cultivate mediating practices to actively respond to arrhythmic conditions, making learning possible amid unequal spatial-temporal terrains.
Taken together, these five themes demonstrate how space and time continue to structure the educational experiences of first-generation commuter students. Mobility is not a matter of choice, but a condition of access, enforced through decontextualised residence policies, fixed class schedules and inflexible academic support systems that frequently collide with fragmented transit networks and domestic routines. Engagement, therefore, is less an outcome of intrinsic motivation or participation in university-sanctioned activities than an exhausting, often invisible choreography between the tempos of self, university, transport, family and peers. Far from passive subjects in educational settings, students emerge as agentic rhythmic actors who develop intricate spatial–temporal literacies of the multiple spaces and dissonant tempos they inhabit and traverse. By domesticating transit time, anchoring themselves in resource-rich campus nodes, cultivating reciprocal peer networks and scripting personal study routines, they compose situated eurhythmic alignments that keep study in motion. Yet these alignments are never final; they require continual retuning as the rhythms of transport, home, peer and campus shift. In this sense, the educational becoming of commuter students can be understood as rhythmic labour, involving the ongoing, embodied work of synchronising their lives across uneven and intersecting spatial–temporal terrains.
This article has illuminated how first-generation commuter students from geographically peripheral, working-class contexts rhythmically negotiate the uneven spatial and temporal architectures of higher education. Their educational becoming unfolds within enduring social, spatial and economic inequalities that generate persistent arrhythmia in daily life. Through a Lefebvrian spatial-rhythmic lens, the study has shown that becoming a graduate is not merely a matter of academic integration or individual motivation. It entails sustained spatial, temporal, bodily and relational labour. These are forms of effort that remain largely unrecognised in prevailing access and success discourses. Recognising these rhythmic practices challenges deficit framings of commuter students and foregrounds instead their adaptive capacities within structurally uneven terrains. The findings carry clear implications for institutional transformation. Mobility should not be treated as an external constraint to be accommodated through ad hoc support, but as a core dimension of curriculum design, timetable structuring and student support policy. In massified systems operating under fiscal constraint, transformation need not depend on wholesale structural overhaul. Rather, deliberate recalibration within existing frameworks can yield meaningful impact. Recorded lectures with guiding questions, recap resources, extended discussion forums, scaffolded online materials, structured pre- and post-class tasks and asynchronous consultation windows can mitigate arrhythmic pressures while remaining scalable across programmes. Such measures represent institutional retuning rather than individualised accommodation, embedding mobility-sensitivity within mainstream pedagogical design. More broadly, the rhythmic misalignments documented here reflect intensified institutional time regimes associated with neoliberal performance cultures and massified expansion. Engagement frameworks that individualise the assessment of persistence risk, obscuring the spatial and infrastructural conditions that shape participation. In postcolonial urban contexts structured by classed and racialised spatial inequality, access to higher education is inseparable from mobility infrastructures and inherited geographies of marginality. Policy approaches to transformation must therefore extend beyond enrolment equity to address the temporal and spatial architectures that organise participation itself. Advancing transformation in unequal contexts requires cultivating what this study terms rhythmic equity: an institutional recognition that students inhabit higher education through differentiated temporalities and mobilities. Aligning curriculum policy, timetable design, digital strategy and support provision with these realities moves transformation beyond symbolic inclusion towards infrastructural responsiveness. Designing for differentiated rhythms, rather than assuming a singular institutional tempo, offers a practical and policy-relevant pathway towards more socially just participation in higher education.
A word of appreciation is sent to the five graduates who participated in the doctoral study. This article is based on research originally conducted as part of Lauren O. Davids doctoral thesis titled ‘From aspiration to attainment: Exploring the university access pathways of first-generation graduates from a West Coast town’, submitted to the Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University in 2025. The thesis was supervised by Aslam Fataar. The thesis was reworked, revised and adapted into a journal article for publication. The original thesis is available at:
The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.
Lauren O. Davids: Conceptualisation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding Acquisition, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Aslam Fataar: Conceptualisation, Supervision, Writing – original draft and Writing – review & editing. All authors reviewed the article, contributed to the discussion of results, approved the final version for submission and publication and take responsibility for the integrity of its findings.
Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from Stellenbosch University and Social, Behavioural and Education Research Ethics Committee (No. [SBE-2022-25520]).
The data that support the findings of this study are not openly available and are available from the corresponding author, Lauren O. Davids, upon reasonable request.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency or that of the publisher. The authors are responsible for this article’s results, findings and content.