Reflections from the Wrong Side of the Tracks: Class, Identity, and the Working Class Experience in AcademeC. Vincent Samarco, Stephen L. Muzzatti In this edited collection of narrative-based, critically situated essays, each contributor explores how class has affected his/her personal and academic lives. The collection is divided into three sections: i) narratives that critique the meritocracy; ii) narratives that trace the effects of middle class cultural capital on relatively new academics from the working class, and; iii) narratives that explore the effects of class on longtime academics from the working class. The effect of the collection will be cumulative. By choosing contributors from multiple disciplines, including both established and emerging voices, the text articulates the pervasiveness of class bias in this country and fleshes out the mechanisms that mask how class and power work. Such a text is critically important, both inside and outside academia, because it demystifies the academic world for those who have been restricted by it, but also engages critically trained academics and academics-in-waiting to understand and respond to the experiences of working class students. Finally, the authors hope this text will encourage other working class students to consider an academic career as an option. |
Contents
Slippin through the Cracks WorkingClass Academics | 7 |
Working It Out 235 | 23 |
Personal Professional and Political Paths to the Study | 37 |
Can a WorkingClass Girl Have Roots and Wings? | 61 |
Job Hunting Job Interviews | 69 |
Attacked from Within and Without WorkingClass Academics | 81 |
Working within | 101 |
The WorkingClass Student Meets | 117 |
The Pain Praxis and Polemics | 135 |
Stoking the Fires of Resistance Longtime WorkingClass | 171 |
The Meaning of Class Differences in the Academic World | 187 |
Trajectory and Transformation of a WorkingClass Girl | 197 |
Impostors in the Ivory Tower | 207 |
The Radical | 241 |
| 261 | |
About the Contributors | 273 |
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affiliation American archaeologists asked attend autoethnography become behavior bell hooks career chair challenge class consciousness classism classroom colleagues consciousness context course criminology critical critical criminology Critical Pedagogy cultural dean degree demic discuss earned Eastern Michigan University ences environment experiences faculty feel friends gender Gerontology grade graduate school hard Henry Giroux high school higher education identity ideology institutions kids knew knowledge labor learned literacy lives means mentor meritocracy Miami University middle middle-class narrative never one's parents pedagogy pedigree perspective Ph.D political position practices Presdee privilege professional professor relations role scholars scholarship sense social class society sociological imagination sociologists sociology status story strategies structural talk teacher teaching Temple University tenure things tion transformation undergraduate understand University Press upper-middle-class values women Woodly working-class academics working-class background working-class students writing York