Transcript

This story was created using a mix of verbatim extracts from the transcripts and text created by members of the group.

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I’ve read that memory is both a blessing and a curse; a beloved thing, while also causing flickers of discomfort as painful recollections disrupt our efforts to seek everyday stability.

 

For me, I have proud memories, happy ones and sometimes troubling ones. Memories of family and growing up provide a comforting sense of everyday continuity. These bring comfort at times of emotional unease, as I search for spaces of belonging in an Academy not necessarily created for me.

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I’m not sure where class fits into these memories, or more to the point a sense of working-classness. Am I working class; was I ever? I don't know if I've ever seen my background of being “oh yes! I'm proud to have been working class.”

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What I am proud of, however, is that my parents just kept on going. And worked really hard. To get where they were. Get where they are today.

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My Dad was a joiner, you know. He worked on building construction sites for most of my childhood. And that's kind of how I see myself. Not anymore, now I’m an academic. But that's my background. That's where we came from.

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I don't think I even knew what class was growing up because we were all pretty much the same where I grew up.

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I didn’t notice it because we were just; everyone was just getting by and everyone's parents had kind of labourer-type jobs, working-class jobs.

 

I think I didn't notice it until I got to university and I didn't understand why nobody else had part time jobs or had to have part time jobs. I just didn't get it.

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And because I didn't study sociology at that point, it took a while to really realize what was going on and what class really was.

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I worked the whole way through university. I paid my undergraduate fees and I worked, which wasn’t what everyone was doing.

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I was the first year with these fees, but they were you know they were £1000 and I remember like that was my years two years of savings from the fast food restaurant I worked in. I was like, I had to pay my way because my parents, couldn't pay, they couldn't pay.

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When I started my PhD, I worked through that as well. I worked in a supermarket, temping agencies and in a football club to make ends meet. All this while studying for my doctorate.

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I worked hard to stay afloat, which took its toll on my studies; the culmination of my sufferings felt acutely during my first Viva.

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It brings me little comfort that I’m not alone in experiencing an emotionally turbulent Viva. It’s a memory that still haunts my waking moments, bringing tremors of distress.

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I remember it as a time in my life I felt alone and excluded. There was little compassion or understanding from the examiners as to why I had to work through my PhD.

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I had to have two external examiners rather than an internal one because I was working for the university at that point and both externals focused constantly on the fact that in the 7 years it took me to do my PhD, I was a part-time student, that I had spent too much time working.

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I remember, coming out of that PhD viva feeling pretty worthless and that I did not belong because I'd had to pay my way through my undergrad, through my masters and then through the PhD. And that people who had to do these extra jobs on a side didn’t belong in this field.

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The month or so after that was a real process of working out my place in the world and working out whether this is the career that I really wanted to be a part of. Whether it is the field, the area, the field of people that I wanted to be a part of.

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I'm glad I had that period of reflection because in the end, I mean there was all sort of issues with that Viva, in the end the Viva was void and I got to do it again with different externals and I passed.

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It was really good experience, but I hardly remember that one; I always hone in on the fact that I had to have these three hours that I spent and it was constantly about these jobs that I'd had to do and I just hadn't any choice.

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That was what I'd had to do. There was no money coming from parents; my partner was pretty much covering all our living costs with his job and in order for me to pay my fees, I had to just keep on working.

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So much time is given over to discussing belonging and inclusion. Yet, in that instance, I felt neither like I belonged, nor like I was being heard.

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No one was taking any notice of my situation. No one was asking me about the emotional, economic and physical demands of working and studying at that level. No one was asking about my anxieties about keeping my head, and that of my partner’s above water.

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It felt like I, and countless others like me, were invisible to the examiners; our experiences incomprehensible to them as they hadn’t had to feel and live them. I reasoned if they had, they’d have been more empathetic and understanding towards me.

 

I can’t begin to explain the frustration of not being heard; not being able to name your situation because those in power don’t recognise it as legitimate. It feels like a testimonial wounding not being able to share your story in a way which makes your situation real.

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I try not to let this experience define my work today; but there’s always a lingering sense that I don’t belong, and never will.