Abstract
This paper focusses on socio-economic class structures, as they relate to the study and practice of anthropology. More specifically, it discusses the ways that working-class or financially precarious anthropologists (students, researchers and teachers) negotiate tensions found within the British university. It is concerned with the current climate of ‘diversity’ in education, and the role that socio-economic inequity plays in these discussions. This paper seeks to make room for class; it asks what we can learn from giving voice to the insidious silence that plagues it, in a context of neoliberal identity politics (Wrenn, 2014), ensuing ethnicist diversity practices (Brah, 1991), and what I would call ‘cursory diversity’ - what Sara Ahmed refers to as a ‘hopeful performative’ (2010, p.200). It is argued that anthropology as a discipline must start attending to the ways that financial precarity and social class impact the subjects that study, not just the subjects of study, by reflecting on the venacularity of the academy and the discipline itself. It achieves this through exploring the vernacularity of the working-class anthropologists’ experiences in relation to the prism of ‘diversity’; how class refracts to produce multiple forms of experience, of assimilation, and of exclusion - as well as resistance to such enclosure.
Highlights
This paper focusses on socio-economic class structures, as they relate to the study and practice of anthropology
Social class has been the site of political struggle, and elsewhere, the site of muted silence (Fairclough, 2002; Steinberg & Johnson, 2004)
It discusses the ways that working-class or financially precarious anthropologists negotiate class tensions found within the British university
Summary
Social class has been a key historical marker through which anthropologists have conceptualised sociality (Evans, 2017). This paper seeks to make room for class, it asks what we can learn from giving voice to the insidious silence that plagues it, in a context of neoliberal identity politics (Wrenn, 2014), ensuing ethnicist diversity practices (Brah, 1991), and what I call ‘cursory diversity’ what Sara Ahmed refers to as the ‘hopeful performative’ (2010, p.200) It is concerned with the movement from theories of diversity to diversity praxisi, in light of ‘enduring “tokenism”’ (Gould, 2020, p.15) experienced by people categorised as minority groups, of the ways that the talking about diversity becomes ‘happy talk’ (Bell & Hartmann 2007), pacifying the call for structural and institutional change. The format of this paper incorporates these small moments; I use my own experiences, as well as snippets of interviews I conducted with fellow anthropologists, represented as italicised vignettes These vignettes work to articulate the banal, quotidian feeling of out-of-placeness of being a working-class academic. I hope that charting the continuing thread of class-centered microaggressionsiii, illustrates how they come into contact with, collide, mould and are diverted by specific subjects; mainly, the working-class academic
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