This is the final day of the #UCUStrikesBack action and I haven’t tweeted about it all, though I’ve picketed a bit and thought about it a lot. Terrible things have been happening in the world beyond the strike too, which has made me think and rethink this funny career.
I recognise that my job is hugely privileged and hard to explain. I teach things to people who have chosen to learn about them. There is no uniform. I research social issues that I find important, or confusing, or unseen. I can sometimes do this bit of the job in pyjamas.
I have a permanent contract and earn a reasonable salary compared to some of my friends who are on much lower incomes, doing just as valuable work. However I also earn an awful lot less than friends of my age working in other areas. But my position ain’t bad.
However. I am from an academic family. I have no student debt. I was funded through my PhD because I could move to Germany to complete it. I look right, speak proper, and have enough money in the family for it to be ok that I didn’t start pension contributions until I was 27.
My parents understood my decision to study and made sure I was debt free and had time and a quiet room in which to work. What I’m saying is that I am profoundly middle class, and that I think my security as an early career lecturer is based almost entirely on my class position.
What troubles me is that so much of my cultural and financial capital was necessary to get me this far, and the implications of that necessity. I am reflexive and try to question my position but I am bound, I think, to reproduce my bounded middle class horizons in my research.
Also read:
- Brexit means Racism | By M. Raza Hussain
- My Hopes For A Brighter Future For The Young Have Driven Me Into Politics | By Tim Walker
- Centrists Should Stop Trying To Be Britain’s Macron | By Jason Reed
We need different voices in research more than anywhere! We need routes into this privilege for people of minority and oppressed backgrounds in order to break the white middle class hegemony on knowledge. It needs to be funded. Jobs need to be stable. Careers must be possible.
So I have used my permanment position, my savings and my time to strike and to picket. Not because my personal position is untenable. But because it is tenable only due to my inherited privilege, and because it doesn’t have to be that way.
I want to see any of my brilliant students succeed through MA and PhD study to find positions that offer them security enough to put down roots in the Academy, and to challenge it. I want them to be from different walks of life than me. I want to hear and see their research.
Maybe their questions and findings will be the same as mine. Maybe class won’t turn out to be such an important variable in explaining social difference after all. But unless we can make this a career option open to all, we will never know.
This is why pay is important. This is why casualisation is wrong. This is why I strike #UCUStrikesBack
______________________________________________________________________________
Dr Alison Lamont is a lecturer in sociology and criminology at the University of Roehampton, London. Twitter: @am_lamont
