‘We tell stories in order to live’: Working-class existence and survival in the academy

Abstract

How does it feel to be of working-class heritage and to work as an academic in the UK? This paper takes an autoethnographic approach in order to think this question through. Its focus is on the ways in which social class becomes internalised through the subtleties of affect and the enactments of symbolic violence over the life course. I suggest that the elite environment of the academe is a particularly painful place to be, especially when held in tension with one's working-class past and present. I suggest that the split at the heart of the cleft habitus is not singular, but the result of multiple fractures and tensions as one moves through different social contexts and locations. The academe is the place where this split can no longer be sutured and in fact becomes an open wound of class.