Confronting myself

Paula Stone

doi:10.3384/rela.2000-7426.ojs1346

Abstract

In this paper I illustrate how auto/biography, drawing on feminist research methodology, enabled me to chronicle and theorise the lived experience of class relations in the academy. I explain how auto-diegetic auto/biographical doctoral research has provided me with ‘both a mode of representation and a mode of reasoning’ (Richardson, 1997, p. 28) which was therapeutic, reflexive, as well as agentic to help me understand the sense of displacement in the academy and how I used my doctorate to redress that.

Highlights

I am an academic; a ‘supreme classifier amongst classifiers’ (Bourdieu, 1988, p. xi)
I argue that my analysis of my own class transition reaches beyond my personal experience to present a ‘collective story’ ‘a story which tells the experience of a sociologically constructed category of people in the context of larger socio-cultural and historical forces’ (Richardson, 1997, p. 14); in this instance academics from the workingclass
This is not a position I face in isolation; over the past four decades, workingclass academics have been writing about the ‘cruel duality’ (Law, 1995, p. 1) of being a working-class academic in higher education

Summary

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Introduction

Introducing my theoretical friends

Illegitimacy and integration fatigue

To conclude