Chapter 6: On Not Getting Found Out: A Fugitive Class Identity in the Cultural Geography of Irish and British Higher Education

Fugitive has at least three meanings: an escapee from something, usually prison or a place experienced as a form of confinement; someone in hiding, fearing discovery and exposure; and something sought but elusive, beyond reach. This chapter uses all three senses to think through the author’s complex lived experience of social class in higher education. It spans 1980s Ireland, 12 years as an emigrant in England and then a return to Ireland from the 2000s onwards. It explores how the trajectory from borderline lower middle-class/working-class origins in a poor Dublin suburb through higher education as student, lecturer and researcher was symptomatic of the (limited) democratisation of access to Irish higher education. It considers how an interdisciplinary education in ‘communication’ and ‘cultural studies’ facilitated critical reflection on the intersections, of class, culture and geography in Dublin and Ireland; and, in turn, aspects of class, gender, national and racial identity in research on media and popular cultural forms in Irish and British contexts. However, drawing on Bourdieusian and related perspectives on class, culture and education, it reflects on the author’s embodied academic limitations and how they relate to: the transgenerational legacy of both parental shame at material poverty and cultural investment in the individualistic affordance of ‘escape’ through higher education; the invisibility of class as a conceptual frame within higher education and the sense of ‘fugitive’ identity in this context; and the author’s patchy, fugitive attempts to engage with the materiality and cultural aspects of class through research.