The Lives of Working Class Academics: Getting Ideas Above your Station

IPDA England hosted this event on 18th January 2023to celebrate the Launch of Dr Iona Burnell Reilly’s new book: The Lives of Working Class Academics: Getting Ideas Above your Station

About the book

The Lives of Working Class Academics: Getting Ideas Above your Station

In 2020 I began a research project that was titled ‘the lives of working class academics: getting ideas above your station’. My intention was to collect stories from academics who identify as having a working-class background, using an autoethnographic approach. These stories would be an account of their lives, their experiences, and their journeys into becoming a higher education professional, including an in depth look at their educative experiences along the lifespan. McKenzie, writing about her own background, and experiences of the social class structure, comments that ‘Narratives, and storytelling, are important in working-class lives. It is how we explain ourselves, how we understand the world around us, and how we situate ourselves in a wider context’ (Mckenzie, 2017, p6). Rather than writing about working-class academics myself, I asked working-class academics to write about themselves, in their own words.

Autoethnography is a fascinating method of research that allows the author to reflect on their own lived reality and explore their personal, professional, and cultural experiences (in this case their journey and experience of becoming an academic). ‘Autoethnography in its most simplified definition is the study of the self’ (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p.9). However, unlike autobiography and autofiction, autoethnography is a critical study of oneself, and how we understand our relationships to socio-cultural contexts. Byrne describes autoethnography within his own context as a ‘tool with which to understand individual and shared experiences of class in higher education’ (2019, p. 133).

One of the requirements of contributing authors for this collection was to position themselves as being from a working-class heritage. Reay points out that ‘To own an identity as “working class” is, among many other things, to accept one’s social inferiority’ (1997, p.228). Crew explains this point further:

What working class means to everyone looking in at the working class, and sometimes how working-class people see themselves, is that working class means failure, working class means at the bottom of everything. Working class means not being educated, not well read. It always has these really negative connotations. Everything that is about being at the bottom, not good enough (Crew, 2020, p.24).

With each author having self-identified as having a working-class heritage, they discuss what this means to them, sharing their experiences and definitions of social class within the context of their own lives. Although each author has a different context, a different life, and a different story, some similarities, or themes, in their stories began to emerge. The ways in which the authors consciously experience their lived realities, brought about by their social circumstances, create a rich and interesting collection of life stories. Some of the similarities and themes are born out of the effects of their social class and the life chances associated with it. For example, some of the authors share their experiences of being the first in family to go to university; others discuss the effects of a lack of academic role models within the community and social network; some refer to working class values that are sometimes not conducive to educational achievement.

These problematic factors are what makes the lives of working-class academics all the more interesting, rich and powerful. How have they become who they are in an industry steeped in elitism? How have they navigated their way, and what has the journey been like? Do they continue to identify as working class or has their social positioning and/or identities shifted? These questions and more are addressed and answered through each author’s fascinating account of their journey. Byrne notes that ‘Autoethnography, writing ourselves into our work, is a way to give voice to marginalized groups and contribute to democratizing academic culture and writing’ (2019, p.146).

The legacy of elitism remains in HE, inequality and prestige have persisted, and with very little history or class culture in the field of HE to identify with, this can, for some working-class academics, make their experiences fraught and difficult. My aim was to share those fraught and difficult experiences, give voice to and authenticate them, and more importantly, challenge the dominant discourses that maintain and perpetuate elitism and exclusion within higher education.

References

• Burnell Reilly, I. (Ed) (2022) The Lives of Working Class Academics: getting ideas above your station. UK: Emerald Publishing.
• Byrne, G. (2019) Individual weakness to collective strength: (Re)creating the self as a ‘working-class academic’. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 12 (1 & 2), 131-150.
• Crew, 2020 Crew, T. (2020) Higher Education and Working-Class Academics Precarity and Diversity in Academia. London, UK: Palgrave.
• Mckenzie, L. (2017) Getting by: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
• Reay, D. (1997) Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class: Disrupting Notions of Classlessness in Women’s Studies International Forum, 20 (2), 225-233.
• Reed-Danahay, D. (1997) Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social. Oxford, UK: Berg.

Biography

My academic interests are in the field of Sociology of Education where I have been lecturing, researching and supervising for many years. I recently joined the Teacher Education and Training team as Course Leader for the Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. My teaching experience and background is in Further Education, where I taught English Language (ESOL) and Access courses at an inner London college for 10 years before moving into Higher Education. I continue to supervise, examine, research, write and publish on topics related to the Sociology and Psychology of Education.