Navigating Academia in the ‘Welfare-class’

Abstract

The growing field of working-class studies provides a valuable narrative of the experiences of working-class academics, illustrates commonalities among such experiences and provides a space for dismantling the structural class-based disenfranchisement which proves detrimental to working-class scholars’ careers. Recent articles in The Journal of Working-class Studies have identified and named the specific experiences of alienation faced by working-class scholars, which include issues of financial disenfranchisement, issues of taste, accent, and ‘respectability’ (Attfield 2016), issues of ‘passing’, the imposter syndrome, and feelings of class betrayal (Warnock 2016). However, as Nicola Wilson (2016) and others have noted, ‘working-class is a fluid category and grouping’. For many scholars living in or emerging from a background of poverty, the term ‘working-class’ is limited. The term ‘welfare-class’ more appropriately describes the experience of some poor and welfare-reliant scholars. Considering the welfareclass as a distinct category within the working or poor classes, this article documents some of the specific experiences of alienation which pertain to being welfare-class in academia by focusing on the lived experiences of the authors, two academics at postgraduate and postdoctoral level. The article aims to contribute to the representation of poor and welfare-class academics among the growing body of autobiographical and autoethnographic knowledge (Warnock 2016) in working-class studies.

Introduction to the Special Issue—A Class of Our Own: Teaching Sociology by, for, and about First-Generation and Working-Class People

“…People from FGWC backgrounds are also more likely to represent other groups and identities that have historically been marginalized in higher education, and it is in those contexts that perspective, skills, and experience are built (Chen and Dennis 2005;Hurst and Nenga 2016;Jehangir, Stebleton, and Deenanath 2015). Substantial scholarship has analyzed and reflected on the experiences and contributions of faculty who navigate social class mobility through their careers (Grimes and Morris 1997;Łuczaj 2023b;Penney and Lovejoy 2017;Ryan and Sackrey 1996). While early research and programming for students from FGWC backgrounds often focused on deficits, more recent research makes clear that without our experience and perspective, sociology, and higher education more broadly, would be lacking (Casey 2005;Guzmán, Miles, and Youngblood 2021;King et al 2017;Łuczaj 2023a;Roscigno et al 2022;Warnock 2014;Yosso 2005).…”