Dark satanic mills to ivory towers

ABSTRACT

In this article, Sally R Munt reflects on issues of social class discrimination in higher education in an engaging conversation with Louise Morley, both from the University of Sussex.

KEYWORDS:

• Working class academic
• class mobility
• life-writing
• structures of feeling
• habitus

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Sally R. Munt is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Politics and former Director of the University of Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies. Sally's writing has primarily been concerned with social justice research, and particularly with cultures and identities of otherness. She has published extensively on cultural forms of sexuality, gender, class, narrative, space, religion and spirituality, shame, paranormality, and more latterly in Refugee Studies. She is also, since 2015, the founder/director of the charity Brighton Exiled/Refugee Trauma Service. As well as being an academic, she is a BABCP accredited cognitive behavioural psychotherapist in private practice, and has also trained in Psychiatry. We invited Sally to consider the affective complexities of social mobility in her own life and more widely, for this special issue on social class in higher education.

Louise Morley is Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex. Louise has an international profile in the field of the sociology of gender in higher education, and has published extensively on power, equity and inclusion in higher education. Her research interests include gender and leadership; equity and internationalisation; an intersectional approach to widening participation, and the micropolitics of gender.

Notes

1 See the 2013 CHEER event Robbins Report 50 Years On: Feminist Responses. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/events/archive201314

2 Available at https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/equality-higher-education-statistical-report-2019

3 See further https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7995/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-a-snapshot-of-insecure-contracts-and-institutional-attitudes-Apr-16/pdf/ucu_precariouscontract_hereport_apr16.pdf and https://www.ucu.org.uk/stampout

4 Various news sources cited this extraordinary voting pattern, for example https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/11/04/donald-trump-joe-biden-lgbt-votes-2020-2016-election-edison-research-national-election-pool/ Accessed 9 November 2020. We urgently need more research to investigate such contra-indicative voting trends, but please see also Munt (2019) for understanding how gay shame gets transferred into racism.