This book is a twist on the current discourse around ‘inclusivity’ and ‘widening participation’. Higher education is welcoming students from diverse educational, social, and economic backgrounds, and yet it predominantly employs middle-class academics. Conceptually, there appears, on at least these grounds alone, to be a cultural and class mismatch. This work discusses empirical interviews with tenured academics from a working-class heritage employed in one UK university. Interviewees talk candidly about their childhood backgrounds, their school experiences, and what happened to them after leaving compulsory education. They also reveal their experiences of university, both as students and academics from their early careers to the present day. This book will be of interest to an international audience that includes new and aspiring academics who come from a working-class background themselves. The multifaceted findings will also be relevant to established academics and students of sociology, education studies and social class.

This book examines how a working-class habitus interacts with the elite culture of academia in higher education. Drawing on extensive qualitative data and informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the author presents new ways of examining impostor syndrome, alienation and microaggressions: all common to the working-class experience of academia. The book demonstrates that the term ‘working-class academic’ is not homogenous, and instead illuminates the entanglements of class and academia. Through an examination of such intersections as ethnicity, gender, dis/ability, and place, the author demonstrates the complexity of class and academia in the UK and asks how we can move forward so working-class academics can support both each other and students from all backgrounds.

In this second edition, twenty-four college professors, with roots in the working class, discuss the experience of significant upward mobility and the problems of adjustment to life in the academy. This collection of stories provides revelations about the social class system and academic life in the United States.

A collection of autoethnographies written by academics who self-define as being from a working class heritage. Each one is an account of their lives, their experiences, and their journeys into becoming a higher education professional, in an industry still steeped in elitism.

A collection of autoethnographies written by academics who self-define as being from a working class heritage. Each one is an account of their lives, their experiences, and their journeys into becoming a higher education professional, in an industry still steeped in elitism.

My mother still wants me to get a 'real' job. My father, who is retired after 44 years in the merchant marine, has never read my work. When I visited recently, the only book in his house was the telephone book.

More students today are financing college through debt, but the burdens of debt are not equally shared. The least privileged students are those most encumbered and the least able to repay. All of this has implications for those who work in academia, especially those who are themselves from less advantaged backgrounds. Warnock argues that it is difficult to reconcile the goals of facilitating upward mobility for students from similar backgrounds while being aware that the goals of many colleges and universities stand in contrast to the recruitment and support of these students. This, combined with the fact that campuses are increasingly reliant on adjunct labor, makes it difficult for the contemporary tenure-track or tenured working-class academic to reconcile his or her position in the academy.

Affecting stories of faculty and graduate students from working-class on their struggles in academia.

"We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the 'new economy' whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class."—from the Introduction In John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon's book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class life.

This text focuses on the theory of class as it relates to women. It debates questions such as: how do women define themselves in terms of social class and why?; is definition important or not?; what part does education play in our understanding of class?; and how does class affect relationships?