Reflections From the Wrong Side of the Tracks

The essays in this collection challenge the predominant image of working class people in higher education by providing a series of analyses and personal commentaries from a wide range of working class academics. Reflections From the Wrong Side of the Tracks imparts a critical and substantial narrative about what it means to be from the working class and work in academe.

In this edited collection of narrative-based, critically situated essays, each contributor explores how class has affected his/her personal and academic lives. The collection is divided into three sections: i) narratives that critique the meritocracy; ii) narratives that trace the effects of middle class cultural capital on relatively new academics from the working class, and; iii) narratives that explore the effects of class on longtime academics from the working class. The effect of the collection will be cumulative. By choosing contributors from multiple disciplines, including both established and emerging voices, the text articulates the pervasiveness of class bias in this country and fleshes out the mechanisms that mask how class and power work. Such a text is critically important, both inside and outside academia, because it demystifies the academic world for those who have been restricted by it, but also engages critically trained academics and academics-in-waiting to understand and respond to the experiences of working class students. Finally, the authors hope this text will encourage other working class students to consider an academic career as an option.

Chapter 1 Happy Accidents: the Unofficial Story of How I Became an Academic
Chapter 2 Working it Out
Chapter 3 Personal, Professional, and Political Paths to the Study of the Crimes of the Powerful
Chapter 4 A Stranger to Paradise: Working-Class Graduate in the Culture of Academia
Chapter 5 Can a Working-Class Girl Have Roots and Wings? White Trash in the Ivory Tower
Chapter 6 Working Class Need Not Apply: Job Hunting, Job Interviews, and the Working-Class Experience in Academe
Chapter 7 Making Class Matter: My Life as a Semi-Earhole
Chapter 8 White, Working Class, and Feminist: Working Within The Master's House and Finding Home Again
Chapter 9 "Gimme That!": The Working-Class Student Meets the Working-Class Subject
Chapter 10 Critique of Domination: The Pain, Praxis, and Polemics of Working-Class Consciousness in Academia
Chapter 11 Working-Class Values and Life in Academe: Examining the Dissonance
Chapter 12 Teaching from the Wrong Side of the Tracks: Challenging Privilege and Authority In the Classroom
Chapter 13 The Meaning of Class Differences in the Academic World
Chapter 14 Trajectory and Transformation of a Working-Class Girl into an Upper-Middle-Class Associate Dean
Chapter 15 Making the Grade: Imposters in the Ivory Tower
Chapter 16 An Unwashed's Knowledge of Archaeolgy: Class and Merit in Academic Placement
Chapter 17 Class Enriching the Classroom: the "Radical" as Rooted Pedagogic Strengths