Abstract
Working in Class is a book about a ghost, the one who is not in the conversation, the inequality that dares not speak its name. This edited volume is a collection of essays about the insidious ways we do not attend to differences of social class in our teaching, research, and service in the university. The essays are written by academics in a variety of disciplines, mostly teaching or having taught in southern universities.
Most of the essays in the collection are grounded in the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu; most are by scholars in the social sciences and the humanities situating their essays in the theory of habitus, or the cultural experience of life in particular class locations. Their definitions of class draw on Bourdieu’s assertion that class is defined by the fact that each member “is more likely than any member of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for the members of that class,” (p. 4). Throughout the book, this cultural-interactive definition of class prevails. It is only in the final section, focused on university administration, that a more structural and Marxist framework is used.
The book is decidedly interdisciplinary and includes contributions from scholars in language, literature, religion, education, psychology, and sociology. Across these disciplines, the essays ask how class is present or, more often, absent in structuring all three domains of academic life. Class is misunderstood and under-analyzed in the research domain, for example, in the presumed classlessness of research subjects in experimental psychology (Irene López and Olivia Legan, pp. 23–34). Class is an awkward presence in the schoolroom as most of the authors in Section Two, scholars in the field of education, demonstrate. Even when educators are sensitive to and intentional about bridging class differences, they nevertheless reproduce them in their comfort with the standard “great book” texts, with their experience of international travel, and in handing out well-meant but impossible-to-follow career advice to the students they struggle to serve. Finally, in the section on university administration, Gretchen Braun’s work invites us to“think structurally and act collectively,” (p. 168ff). Here we get a systematic examination of the use and misuse of adjunct faculty in the university—an analysis that defines class as one’s position not in a system of cultural life, but in a system of production.
While the book is rich in multi-disciplinary authors, the collection of essays is not highly intersectional and pays relatively less attention to class differences in communities of color. A notable exception is the work of Jessi Streib (p. 75), who reports in her essay on boundary-crossing that students and teachers of the same race are presumed to connect effortlessly because of racial identification, while social awkwardness between white teachers and black students arises both from racial and possibly from class differences, the latter often going undetected.
There are two areas of discussion in which the book could have been strengthened. All the early and best-known work on intersectionality (e.g., Collins 1990) focuses on the ways that race, class, and gender interact and mutually co-define one another. The authors of these essays are mostly junior faculty, and hence they might have commented on age/career stage as yet another (largely underdeveloped) area of intersectionality research. Further, given their emphasis on class differences as a cultural script, they also might have paid more explicit attention to regional differences, specifically how southern ideas of culture and community form the background to most of their observations.
Most of the essays in this collection employ the method of auto-ethnography to a greater or lesser extent. We read about young scholars discovering the lack of attention to class in their own circumstances, often with poignant anecdotes. Sara Appel refers to her sense of marginality that arises because she has, for middle-class and more privileged colleagues, too much interest in her “rural heartland hometown” with its high school sports heroes and too little appetite for international and cosmopolitan experiences (p. 16). Similarly, Lynn Arner explores the lived patterns of interaction that give rise to the broader finding (p. 51) that cultural pedigree outweighs scholarly productivity as a predictor of academic hiring patterns.
For scholars, this book will be valuable as an interdisciplinary exploration of the inattention to social class differences in the university. Sociologists will have to decide for themselves whether the broad range of intellectual efforts here compensates for the inexplicable lack of references to some of the primary disciplinary scholarship on class differences. Perhaps, for example, being introduced to the fiction of Chimamanda Adichie, Dorothy Allison, and Sandra Cisneros is worth missing references to Patricia Hill Collins, Michael Eric Dyson, and Betsy Leondar-Wright.