Addressing the Knowledge Divide: A Capability Approach to Digital Access Inequities in Graduate Education

My MSc dissertation explored how digitisation reshapes access to knowledge in Higher Education, focusing on graduate students’ experiences of digital access within one institution. Using Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and his framing of poverty as capability deprivation, I developed the Poverty of Access (POA) concept to theorise the structural injustices embedded in digital education. As digitised knowledge increasingly becomes the norm, the research examined who is excluded from this shift and how such exclusions constrain academic capabilities. POA offered a framework for understanding these exclusions as systemic, not incidental, calling for reparative responses. Crucially, conducting this research fundamentally altered how I think about qualitative methods. Working with drawings as part of the study prompted a deeper engagement with creativity, embodiment, and the non-verbal dimensions of knowledge. It made me reconsider what counts as valid data and whose ways of knowing are legitimised in research. These methodological reflections became pivotal, shaping the foundations of my doctoral project with primary school children.

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