This paper offers a critical perspective on the relationship between academic disciplines and the development of professional identities in higher education by highlighting the legacies of classed and gendered histories embodied in practice. The analysis centres on nursing education which occupies a space within the academy that is fundamentally shaped by class and gender, which is considered in relation to disciplinary habitus and epistemic positioning. The disruption to nursing education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is used as an entry point into these debates, with data drawn from a qualitative study in North West England with participants recruited as final-year nursing students alongside professional stakeholders. Using a typology of how higher education students may be constructed, there was little evidence of a ‘consumer’ or ‘socialite’ orientation among the nursing students. Instead, they presented a hybrid construction of the ‘citizen-learner-worker’, with a sense of duty to care and who learns most ‘on the job’. This orientation to education and practice was favoured by the participants despite challenges to this amongst the professional community as expressed in the stakeholder interviews. If the learning that is most valued by students and newly qualified nurses is bound to gendered vocational histories, then there are implications for nursing educators and stakeholders to consider the challenges of these occupational cultures. More broadly, the paper provides insights into how the formation of educational/occupational identities is moulded by both epistemic and structural factors, thrown into sharp relief at a time of crisis. © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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