Foregrounding my mother’s role in my experience of being a ‘Scholarship Girl’, this chapter trace... more Foregrounding my mother’s role in my experience of being a ‘Scholarship Girl’, this chapter traces the inter-generational transmission of gender, class and educational achievement in the life of a white woman of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation. There is a noticeable feature common to a number of women writers of my generation: that of the unkind, withholding, even cruel mother who is unloving towards, ‘exploits’ or otherwise tries to ‘thwart’ her daughter. In telling a tale through narrative, poems and diary entries, of a female pilgrim’s progress from growing up in a council flat in the post-war period of the welfare state to an academic career, I paint a more sympathetic picture of my own mother and her travails in attempting to escape a stigmatised self and to achieve the middle-class status which I now self-consciously enjoy.
Once completed, contributors shared their autoethnographies so that each writer could compare the... more Once completed, contributors shared their autoethnographies so that each writer could compare their own experiences to others’, could reflect on similarities and differences, discover resonances, be surprised, stimulated, shocked, moved, have expectations overturned—in other words, so that we could learn from each other. We shared our responses via a ‘chain’ of emails. This ‘conversation’ is reproduced in this chapter as a kind of ‘modelling’ for readers of the power of autoethnography. For the contributors them(our)selves, this process felt transformative, turning the ‘making’ of the book into a collaborative autoethnography in itself that embodied more than the sum of its parts. The space between the book’s ‘covers’ became a place in which a diverse group of women met to examine the relationalities that shape our world, to address the constitution of alterity in social and political relations, to reflect upon sameness and recognise our different ways of perceiving and conceptualis...
Five years ago UK households were running a surplus of £70bn as we tightened our belts in the wak... more Five years ago UK households were running a surplus of £70bn as we tightened our belts in the wake of the financial crash. Towards the end of last year, however, British families were on course to spend £40bn more than they earned, leading to warnings that the UK could be heading towards another credit crunch. Using longitudinal interviews, Jackie Goode delves behind the numbers, to look at the gendered role of financial decision-making, and outline how important debts don’t have to be financial.
The book is organised around notions of ‘formations’ and ‘developments’ through time and across p... more The book is organised around notions of ‘formations’ and ‘developments’ through time and across place/space, in three braided strands: the social, educational and geo-political developments over historical time; developments in academic theorisations of class, gender, race and other systems of power and processes of subject formation during the period in question; and developments that take place across an individual life in processes of ‘becoming’, examined through contributors’ autoethnographies. This chapter covers the first two of these. It traces the huge changes that have taken place in relation to educational policy and provision and patterns of immigration in the period during which contributors grew up, and the political mobilisation of discourses first of meritocracy and social mobility and more recently of excellence, resilience and the entrepreneurial self, before discussing the way theorisations of classificatory systems have progressed—from a focus on social class as a form of stratification (and in particular on how ‘the working class’ has been conceived of and represented); through approaches which distinguished between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ (with the latter seen as critical in the analysis of gendered and racialised inequalities); the importance of psychological and ‘affective’ factors in the formation of subjects; the concept of ‘intersectionality’; the historical legacies of colonialism and global movements of people through migration and how these are integral to conceptualisations of class, gender, race and practices of ‘othering’; to approaches that focus on space/place, movement and time.
For a woman, eating and drinking alone in public is apparently seen as anomalous behaviour. Depen... more For a woman, eating and drinking alone in public is apparently seen as anomalous behaviour. Depending on location and time, there are attendant risks of being subject to negative moral discourses, surveillance, and unwelcome sexual attention. This article uses an autoethnographic account to examine an instance of ‘eating out’ alone as constitutive of the gendered nature of sociality in public spaces. It supplements emerging analyses of lone female dining in a context of ‘single’ women being an increasingly significant demographic category by offering further differentiation in terms of age and venue type.
This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and educat... more This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and education through highlighting the processes at work and the resources drawn upon in the making of autoethnographic texts. At its centre is a poem about my father, which acts as an illustration of how such artefacts exert agency across time, through the play of what Keighley and Pickering refer to as 'the mnemonic imagination', enabling a re-interpretation of the past in the present and on into the future. Using the work of feminist scholars Steedman and Walkerdine, the paper offers an insight into the way cultural analyses and 'affective histories' make sense of the fortunes of a 'Scholarship Girl'. At the same time, in exhuming an instance of the good that men do in the form of a crucial intervention in my life by my father, it pays homage to what the poet Robert Hayden called the performance of 'love's austere and lonely offices' plus.
Foregrounding my mother’s role in my experience of being a ‘Scholarship Girl’, this chapter trace... more Foregrounding my mother’s role in my experience of being a ‘Scholarship Girl’, this chapter traces the inter-generational transmission of gender, class and educational achievement in the life of a white woman of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation. There is a noticeable feature common to a number of women writers of my generation: that of the unkind, withholding, even cruel mother who is unloving towards, ‘exploits’ or otherwise tries to ‘thwart’ her daughter. In telling a tale through narrative, poems and diary entries, of a female pilgrim’s progress from growing up in a council flat in the post-war period of the welfare state to an academic career, I paint a more sympathetic picture of my own mother and her travails in attempting to escape a stigmatised self and to achieve the middle-class status which I now self-consciously enjoy.
Once completed, contributors shared their autoethnographies so that each writer could compare the... more Once completed, contributors shared their autoethnographies so that each writer could compare their own experiences to others’, could reflect on similarities and differences, discover resonances, be surprised, stimulated, shocked, moved, have expectations overturned—in other words, so that we could learn from each other. We shared our responses via a ‘chain’ of emails. This ‘conversation’ is reproduced in this chapter as a kind of ‘modelling’ for readers of the power of autoethnography. For the contributors them(our)selves, this process felt transformative, turning the ‘making’ of the book into a collaborative autoethnography in itself that embodied more than the sum of its parts. The space between the book’s ‘covers’ became a place in which a diverse group of women met to examine the relationalities that shape our world, to address the constitution of alterity in social and political relations, to reflect upon sameness and recognise our different ways of perceiving and conceptualis...
Five years ago UK households were running a surplus of £70bn as we tightened our belts in the wak... more Five years ago UK households were running a surplus of £70bn as we tightened our belts in the wake of the financial crash. Towards the end of last year, however, British families were on course to spend £40bn more than they earned, leading to warnings that the UK could be heading towards another credit crunch. Using longitudinal interviews, Jackie Goode delves behind the numbers, to look at the gendered role of financial decision-making, and outline how important debts don’t have to be financial.
The book is organised around notions of ‘formations’ and ‘developments’ through time and across p... more The book is organised around notions of ‘formations’ and ‘developments’ through time and across place/space, in three braided strands: the social, educational and geo-political developments over historical time; developments in academic theorisations of class, gender, race and other systems of power and processes of subject formation during the period in question; and developments that take place across an individual life in processes of ‘becoming’, examined through contributors’ autoethnographies. This chapter covers the first two of these. It traces the huge changes that have taken place in relation to educational policy and provision and patterns of immigration in the period during which contributors grew up, and the political mobilisation of discourses first of meritocracy and social mobility and more recently of excellence, resilience and the entrepreneurial self, before discussing the way theorisations of classificatory systems have progressed—from a focus on social class as a form of stratification (and in particular on how ‘the working class’ has been conceived of and represented); through approaches which distinguished between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ (with the latter seen as critical in the analysis of gendered and racialised inequalities); the importance of psychological and ‘affective’ factors in the formation of subjects; the concept of ‘intersectionality’; the historical legacies of colonialism and global movements of people through migration and how these are integral to conceptualisations of class, gender, race and practices of ‘othering’; to approaches that focus on space/place, movement and time.
For a woman, eating and drinking alone in public is apparently seen as anomalous behaviour. Depen... more For a woman, eating and drinking alone in public is apparently seen as anomalous behaviour. Depending on location and time, there are attendant risks of being subject to negative moral discourses, surveillance, and unwelcome sexual attention. This article uses an autoethnographic account to examine an instance of ‘eating out’ alone as constitutive of the gendered nature of sociality in public spaces. It supplements emerging analyses of lone female dining in a context of ‘single’ women being an increasingly significant demographic category by offering further differentiation in terms of age and venue type.
This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and educat... more This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and education through highlighting the processes at work and the resources drawn upon in the making of autoethnographic texts. At its centre is a poem about my father, which acts as an illustration of how such artefacts exert agency across time, through the play of what Keighley and Pickering refer to as 'the mnemonic imagination', enabling a re-interpretation of the past in the present and on into the future. Using the work of feminist scholars Steedman and Walkerdine, the paper offers an insight into the way cultural analyses and 'affective histories' make sense of the fortunes of a 'Scholarship Girl'. At the same time, in exhuming an instance of the good that men do in the form of a crucial intervention in my life by my father, it pays homage to what the poet Robert Hayden called the performance of 'love's austere and lonely offices' plus.
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