What’s class got to do with it?

ABSTRACT

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 support them. With class not being a protected characteristic in the 2010 UK Equality Act, issues of classism tend to be ignored and relegated to the Widening Participation agenda, where serious issues of classism, tend to be ignored. The paper discusses how this the eliding and effacing of class has arisen and what needs to be done to confront it, including the central role of working class academics in the critique of logocentrism and the possibility of a new work towards an ecology of classed relations. The paper asks how a different understanding of class as currently lived might help advance an agenda for the study of class in higher education today and in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• Equalities Act
• higher education
• working class studies
• ecology
• working class academics

Acknowledgment

With very grateful thanks to two generous anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions really helped to improve this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A post-1992 university in the UK is an institution which was formerly a polytechnic or other college that became a university after legislation in 1992.

2 The measurement of this increase has become impossible, because the UK Department of Education has chosen only to measure numbers of 18–19 year olds entering higher education from state versus private schools and between those who received free school meals at school (often used as a marker of poverty) and those without. This has completely occluded the understanding of class in higher education, since many middle class students attended state schools and free school meals mark poverty and not class. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/757897/WP2018-MainText.pdf

3 Interestingly, former working class student officers at LSE have established a campaigning group, Britain has Class, https://britainhasclass.org/

4 I say this in the knowledge that Edward Thompson did understand the working class as emerging from the experience of certain craftsmen, in his The making of the English Working Class (2013), but at the time I was on the ‘discursive’ wing of a debate in which it was impossible to talk about experience, a position discussed by Thompson in his polemic against Althusserians – The Poverty of Theory (1978). Also, while the development of British Cultural Studies owed a great deal to the work of Thompson and to two working class male academics, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, this focus on everyday working class life was soon eclipsed by work on ideology in one form or another.

5 It could be argued that such a field of ‘working class studies’ already exists, by the USA based Working Class Studies Association. While this work is really important, it is not equivalent to the field I am proposing here, as it is not at all confined to work by working class academics or studies from below and thus can be understood as including work ‘on’ the working class as a research object.

6 It is important to note here the important role of oral historians and History Workshop in producing working class histories ‘from below’ though this does not necessarily exactly coincide with the form of work that I am proposing.

7 In terms of the ways that living things are connected into a complex whole.

8 This was particularly important to Guattari (2013) in his The Three Ecologies (Walkerdine, 2014) in which he argued for a profound relationality in the production of subjectivity, arising out of the affective relationalities of caregiver and infant. But it is the specificities arising as they do within the ecologies of classed relations that concerns me here.

9 Hence the. popular working class British expressions, such as ‘wants never gets’ and ‘much wants more’.

10 Middle-class academics are also sorely needed to take part by helping us understand the relational nature of classed experience from their perspective.