Notions: The Lives of Irish Working Class Academics

In Ireland, it is said that people with notions are acting above their station and with a misplaced sense of their own importance. Certainly, working-class academics often feel out of place at work, caught somewhere between where they come from and where they are now. To be at once working class and an academic is seemingly paradoxical, since the career assumes a moving away from one’s origins. That transition, if it is made at all, is seldom straightforward.

A series of autoethnographies from Irish academics, both at home and abroad, all of whom have a working-class heritage, these are stories of people negotiating not only class in the context of higher education, but on occasion the experience of colonialism and diaspora. Notions is a fascinating insight into the journey of working-class people through an elite and professional environment that is ill-prepared to received them, despite institutional and sectoral claims to equality, diversity and inclusion. These stories of working lives that have required struggle, resilience and ingenuity, offer important lessons for the future of a higher education sector at a watershed moment.