Crossing the borders of social class: Social mobility as translational experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article suggests that we might conceive of the experience of upward social mobility as a form of translational experience and view the socially mobile individual as both translatum and translator. Acknowledging that the experience of social mobility varies enormously in its specificity, the article’s temporal focus is on upward social mobility in Britain since the expansion of higher education in the early 1990s. It draws on the author’s own experience of social mobility and on the memoirs Hungry by Grace Dent (2021), Respectable by Lynsey Hanley (2017), and People Like Us (2020) by Hashi Mohamed, and relates the socially mobile self to the phenomenon of textual translation. It also theorises the ‘return’ – post-translation communication with the ‘source culture’ or social class of origin – and the process of back-and-forth translation in which socially mobile individuals are constantly engaged.