Previous work on working-class academics has highlighted recurring themes, such as micro-aggressions, imposter syndrome, liminality, exclusion, invisibility and habitus. These themes have been encapsulated in a number of metaphors, such as 'the ghost' and 'the phantom-limb', both of which connote absence, silence and marginalisation. Whilst these…

Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of…

As working-class female academics, this paper examines the constructions of our identities focusing on both what unites and differentiates us as working-class women. We focus on the structuring forces in our lives such as our class, our whiteness and our gender, but we also discuss how our experiences have been shaped by space and place as a…

"Class Matters," by Mahony and Zmroczek (1997), was an important collection marking working-class women's contribution to the academy and society. In taking up the question of class, this paper considers the ways in which a partial and particular discourse reflected its author's material circumstances, including her preferred conceptual…

This paper examines the relationship of working-class feminist academics to the Academy. Our paper interrogates tensions between resistance and submission from the perspective of four educationally successful working-class women who have become academics. The paper starts with an overview of the state of the Academy at the beginning of the…

This paper explores how classed identities are constituted through the socio-sartorial inscriptions of a working-class school and community in an Irish city in the twenty-first century. The data of the paper were generated through a wider three-year critical ethnography of a school community. The focus here is upon the identity work of the…

Drawing on my own experience as a working-class academic, as well of that of working-class students in the present, I discuss how the experience for working-class students in elite universities still includes many aspects of classism, even when those students can, and do, do very well indeed and even when policies are apparently in place to…

Previous research exploring how working-class women experience UK Higher Education (HE) work has made evident recurring themes around social segregation and corresponding difficulties with feeling they belong. This paper develops this work by exploring the ways in which UK, HE based working-class women lecturers talk about their sense of…

Despite suspicions concerning the global expansion of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education, the teaching of Chinese is often a mainstay within global citizenship and elite education. With this paradox in mind, the paper draws on theories of classed selfhood and learner identities to explore the possibilities of CFL to influence the…

This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the…

The interaction between doctoral education and social class is under-researched, yet is perceived to play an important part in securing social mobility. Research that does exist tends to focus on issues of access or transition, rather than considering experiences during the doctorate. This article focuses on doctoral students' experiences of…

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class…

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class,…

Whenever gender violence and schooling have been the topic of South African research, the investigations focus on African boys in secondary schools. In contrast, this paper focuses on the ways in which violence is mobilized by African schoolgirls in a working-class primary school context. By drawing on selected elements of an ethnographic study of…