Solidarity Spaces and Places of Reflection: Working-Class Identity in Higher Education Arts Faculty

This chapter stems from the authors’ experiences hosting a ‘Solidarity Space’ for working-class academics (WCAs). Over the course of these recurrent meetings, certain themes have proven to be persistent: imposter syndrome, language, the class ceiling and career progression, narratives of escape and the sense that a working-class (WC) identity should be left behind in a university setting, and representation, intersectionality and race.#

The authors’ Solidarity Space was a forum for a rotating cast of participants to connect, decompress and share concerns and observations particular to the intersection of WC and academic identity. The authors limited the authors’ call for participants to art schools because of the issues connected to culture, taste and access that are particular to this area. As numerous scholars, including Bourdieu (1997) and Brook et al. (2020) have noted, the arts appear to be a meritocracy, where anyone with talent can be recognised and succeed irrespective of class background. This is a powerful and persistent mythology which serves only to mask the highly classed, gendered and raced realities of access.

For academic staff who may possess fractured learner identities (Reay, 2018) control of the abstract semi-public, semi-private (Lefebvre, 1991) space where knowledge is produced is where the ‘othering’ of WC values, knowledge and experience takes place, and dominance is maintained. Perpetuating narratives of education as a means of ‘escape’ creates an experiential vacuum for WCAs for whom conceptual ‘escape’ often does not coalesce with a lived experience that is still inherently precarious in the context of a neo-liberal agenda.