We make this path by walking: The practices and principles of the First International Working-Class Academics Conference

The values of an academic conference might best be defined by the themes of that conference, the disciplines covered and the intended level of delegation. In almost every case we had experienced as a working-class academics organizing group, these were only surface changes, and the entire conference process remained the same across disciplines. Such academic process and practice appear rooted in an archaic series of expectations and conventions that insist on a certain way of being in the Academy. To create an inclusive space in practice and process that goes beyond inclusion as merely themes, but exclusion as actual practice, took reimagining. This article outlines the ways in which we attempted to shift beyond the conventional to create an alternative conference approach that challenged exclusion, actively sought meaningful inclusion and disrupted a culture of conformity. Our focus was on working class academics, as a body of people huge in number, diverse in background but continually obscured in language, policy and practice.

Them and Uz: Harrison and me

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

A working-class artist is something to be

The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them. It takes as its focus the filmmaker Alan Clarke and the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who were at the height of their success in the 1980s. It also considers the writers Darren McGarvey and Nathalie Olah, whose work has achieved prominence in recent years. It is through this focus I hope to demonstrate the long continuum of challenges for working-class creatives. This article also considers how, on the occasions when they are allowed the space they deserve, working-class artists have created powerful shifts in cultural production. Finally, it details some of the changes needed for working-class people to be able to take their rightful place in contributing to cultural life and the societal risks involved if they are denied that place.

Nation, Class and Resentment: The Politics of National Identity in England, Scotland and Wales, Robin Mann and Steve Fenton (2017)

Review of: Nation, Class and Resentment: The Politics of National Identity in England, Scotland and Wales, Robin Mann and Steve Fenton (2017) London: Palgrave MacMillan, 249 pp., ISBN 978-1-13746-673-0, p/bk, €93.59

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth, Selina Todd (2021)

Review of: Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth, Selina Todd (2021) London: Chatto and Windus, 448 pp., ISBN 978-1-78474-081-8, h/bk, £25.00

Intersecting oppressions; intersecting struggles: Race, class and subalternity

This article offers intersectional theories of racism another way to think about Gramsci’s work; it will explore how Gramsci operationalizes the category of subaltern groups. It begins by briefly reviewing how Gramsci’s work is discussed in contemporary theoretical approaches to racism in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Michael Omi and Howard Winant and Stuart Hall. It will stress important similarities regarding the relationship between structural and social forces, political ideologies and consciousness. It will note how both ‘intersectionality’ and ‘articulation’ (one variant of this concept discussed by Hall) show how racism can be amplified through the overlapping or overdetermination of identities, representations and societal effects. It continues by exploring how racism was overdetermined in the Italian national context during the time that Gramsci had lived (and relates it to contemporary theoretical frameworks that organize our understandings of race, racialization and racism). The article then explores how subalternity has been theorized away from the context in which Gramsci employed the term and interpreted, instead, from the twin perspectives of absolute domination and radical autonomy. The article concludes by reading subalternity alongside of race, class and as a substantive cultural question and, in addition, a question of strategy and political organization.

The decline and fall of a working classicist

Although the academy tends not to recognize it, scholars and students from working-class backgrounds are automatically at a disadvantage. To demonstrate both sides of the university experience, I provide here a detailed, personal account of my journey from undergraduate to postgraduate to post-Ph.D. researcher. I pay special attention to my chosen subject of classics and ancient history, an area of study with its own set of class-based problems – for while those from working-class backgrounds might be (and are) subject to classism in any discipline, the seemingly inherent elitism of the classics and ancient history field makes it doubly hard for the underprivileged to succeed. I begin by illustrating how ‘working-class knowledge’ of popular culture granted me access into an otherwise closed, exclusionary set of subject materials and go from here to detail how such work is undervalued by the field, before ending on the violent effects that the all-too-familiar casualized employment structure has on those would-be academics who lack access to family wealth, savings and freedom of opportunity/action. Ultimately, I try to show how that – no matter how hard you try – if you are from working-class background, you are highly unlikely to succeed in the modern-day academic system.