Chapter 15: The Search for a ‘Realistic Utopia’: Reflections on Being an ‘Insider/Outsider’ in Higher Education

This chapter is a personal, philosophical and professional reflection, offering an auto/biographical lens on what it means to the author to be a contemporary academic from a working-class (WC) background. It considers how these reflections are manifested in the ways in which the author has sought to work, write and think within a university setting, through the medium of the author’s own research in emancipatory adult education, through interviews and personal testimony and through a research methodology based on dialogue and narrative. The author argues that academia has had a long and complex relationship with class issues and often leans too heavily on an intellectualised conception of the WC, which can deify, delimit or denigrate WC people, acting as a means of keeping us securely at arm’s length, without honouring our stories, our struggles to create a better world and without offering genuine access to the academy. Here, the author seeks a collaborative methodology to help bridge this conceptual divide and uses the work of Bourdieu and Raymond Williams to bring disparate psychosocial and theoretical elements in the author’s own life and the world of adult learning together with a notion of praxis or transformative action on the world.