Full Description
In Ireland, it is said that people with notions are acting above their station and with a misplaced sense of their own importance. Certainly, working-class academics often feel out of place at work, caught somewhere between where they come from and where they are now. To be at once working class and an academic is seemingly paradoxical, since the career assumes a moving away from one's origins. That transition, if it is made at all, is seldom straightforward.
A series of autoethnographies from Irish academics, both at home and abroad, all of whom have a working-class heritage, these are stories of people negotiating not only class in the context of higher education, but on occasion the experience of colonialism and diaspora. Notions is a fascinating insight into the journey of working-class people through an elite and professional environment that is ill-prepared to received them, despite institutional and sectoral claims to equality, diversity and inclusion. These stories of working lives that have required struggle, resilience and ingenuity, offer important lessons for the future of a higher education sector at a watershed moment.
Contents
Chapter 1. 'Confin'd within the Verge of their Occupations': Sectarianism, Class and the Contraction of Political and Intellection Horizons in UK's Higher Education Industry; Stephen Baker
Chapter 2. Tracing Threads of Precarity: Working-Class Lives, Academic Insecurity and the Labour of Belonging; Vicky Brady
Chapter 3. Middle Class Values Trapped in a Working-Class Academic; Kieran McCartney
Chapter 4. Belonging and Solidarity in Working Class Research; Sorca Mc Donnell
Chapter 5. Not Knowing Our Place: Social Class, Structural Division and Hegemonic Control in Northern Ireland; Aaron Edwards
Chapter 6. On Not Getting Found Out: A Fugitive Class Identity in the Cultural Geography of Irish and British Higher Education; Marcus Free
Chapter 7. "You Use your Education Against me": Familial Dislocation as an Effect of a Higher Education; Sheila Gaffney
Chapter 8. Clay-Footed and Curious: A Journey of Becoming; Declan Mc Kenna
Chapter 9. A Class Negotiation through the Lens of Education: Exploring Social Class and Inequality; Michelle Kinsella
Chapter 10. Seen Butt Unseen; Keith Murphy
Chapter 11. Double the Diaspora: On Being Second Generation Irish and Working Class; Deirdre O'Neill
Chapter 12. Epilogue: The Change-Makers: How Irish Working-Class Academics are Challenging and Disrupting Dominant Discourses in Higher Education; Iona Burnell Reilly
