Abstract
This manuscript was written for a special issue on Reflections on a Pandemic. In it, I write as an emerging scholar from a working-class background. The pandemic has underscored the divergence between my working life as an academic, which is unintelligible to those I love, and their “essential” work, which increasingly renders them expendable. In this essay I struggle with the tensions that other working-class scholars have articulated before me: I am tentatively welcome in a place that asks, or even demands, that I become someone whose work is unrecognizable to my loved ones. Through the use of reflective inquiry and (counter) narratives, I am working to alter social work education, creating space for others from working-class backgrounds who might find themselves in this fine place so far from home.
Highlights
This manuscript was written for a special issue on Reflections on a Pandemic
The pandemic has underscored a fundamental tension in my life: the growing divide between my daily life and the lives of those that I love. Even in this fine place so far from home (Barney Dews and Leste Law, 1995), I am always tied to my working-class identity
When the stay-at-home orders come in mid-March, the collective space of academia erupts in panic and anxiety
Summary
This manuscript was written for a special issue on Reflections on a Pandemic. In it, I write as an emerging scholar from a working-class background. My life has only recently come to resemble that of a “stranger in paradise” (Ryan and Sackrey, 1996): an academic from a working-class background.
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