Chapter 12: Epilogue The Change-Makers: How Irish Working-Class Academics Are Challenging and Disrupting Dominant Discourses in Higher Education

Rather than retelling my story here and duplicating what I wrote for the previous collection of working-class autoethnographies (The Lives of Working Class Academics: Getting Ideas Above your Station, 2023), I will share another aspect of myself that I have not previously written about and that is relevant to this collection of autoethnographies – my dual and at times conflicted identity as both English and Irish. It is the intersectionalities of my identity and historicity that originally sparked my own interest in this field. In the spirit of the autoethnographical approach being deployed in this volume and in the previous one, I will elaborate on my own autoethnography and provide some insights on the Irish dimension of my story given that I grew up in England, the child of an Irish migrant, living within an Irish diasporic community.