Notions

Iona Burnell Reilly is an Academic in the Sociology of Education at the University of East London.Stephen Baker is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Ulster University.Michael Pierse is Reader (Associate Professor) in Irish Literature at Queen’s University Belfast.

• Chapter 1. ‘Confin’d within the Verge of their Occupations’: Sectarianism, Class and the Contraction of Political and Intellection Horizons in UK’s Higher Education Industry; Stephen Baker Chapter 2. Tracing Threads of Precarity: Working-Class Lives, Academic Insecurity and the Labour of Belonging; Vicky Brady Chapter 3. Middle Class Values Trapped in a Working-Class Academic; Kieran McCartney Chapter 4. Belonging and Solidarity in Working Class Research; Sorca Mc Donnell Chapter 5. Not Knowing Our Place: Social Class, Structural Division and Hegemonic Control in Northern Ireland; Aaron Edwards Chapter 6. On Not Getting Found Out: A Fugitive Class Identity in the Cultural Geography of Irish and British Higher Education; Marcus Free Chapter 7. “You Use your Education Against me”: Familial Dislocation as an Effect of a Higher Education; Sheila Gaffney Chapter 8. Clay-Footed and Curious: A Journey of Becoming; Declan Mc Kenna Chapter 9. A Class Negotiation through the Lens of Education: Exploring Social Class and Inequality; Michelle Kinsella Chapter 10. Seen Butt Unseen; Keith Murphy Chapter 11. Double the Diaspora: On Being Second Generation Irish and Working Class; Deirdre O’Neill Chapter 12. Epilogue: The Change-Makers: How Irish Working-Class Academics are Challenging and Disrupting Dominant Discourses in Higher Education; Iona Burnell Reilly

This is a timely and wholly welcome book which comprises a series of unique personal reflections on shared but individually distinctive career journeys made by Irish academics. These often frank and probingly self-reflexive testimonies traverse, challenge and disrupt the class boundaries and prejudices that are still a stubbornly persistent feature of higher education in Britain and Ireland in the 21st century. The book’s greatest strength is in how its contributors’ political, religious and cultural positions inflect and interrogate established assumptions about how class and ethnicity interact within third level institutions and affect the lives of their employees. At a time when universities on both sides of the Irish Sea are arguably no longer paying much more than lip service to the progressive principles of widening participation established half a century ago, the issues raised here have important implications for educational policy and practice more generally.