How to become an academic, and alienate people: the working-class academic

“She’ s still at school”. This is how my brother described me to my nephew, when the little boy asked what I did as a job. I was in the last year of my PhD.

“You’re a teacher, right?” My aunt, this time, three years into my first academic role at a UK University.

“You’re still writing essays?” My mother, incredulous, last month when I attempted to describe putting the finishing touches to a chapter I was writing for a book.

I am the working-class academic. Well, I was. Not so, anymore. I’ve been assimilated. I’ve learnt the lingo, I wear the clothes, I’ve changed my accent, and snuck my way into the ivory tower. For a tower it is, and I’m not good with stairs.

This chapter combines autoethnography, ethnographic fiction, and a sprinkling of ‘real’ academic research to present my academic career identity-trajectory. I draw upon my upbringing in a working-class family, my clumsy attempts to negotiate learning what it means to be ‘an academic’, and my identity ‘crisis’ in becoming an academic with a PhD in Art History and Theory working within a Business School.