CONFRONTING MYSELF: AN AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATION OF THE IMPACT OF CLASS AND EDUCATION ON THE FORMATION OF SELF AND IDENTITY.

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the inter-relationship between class transition and
education, in a bid to understand the impact of both in the formation of self and identity.
This thesis considers that processes of recognition, deeply personal, but also located in
institutional encounters, are essential to moving beyond feelings of illegitimacy and to
moving across class boundaries. It is a story of one woman’s agency and greater capacity
to talk truth to power.
Using an auto/biographical approach, I illustrate how education has enabled me to cross
class boundaries to become a senior lecturer in a university, and to confront how my class
origins and family status have had an enduring impact on my epistemological beliefs. I
highlight how misrecognition can become a source of agency, to the benefit of self and
those whom I teach.
Drawing on critical theory and feminist approaches, I argue that auto/biography provides
a legitimate means of illuminating the minutiae of self/other encounters. A psycho-social
multidisciplinary lens encompassing concepts of habitus and recognition, has enabled me
to chronicle and theorise the lived experience of class relations and how these can be
understood and transcended.
This is a story of ‘une miraculée’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Using the theories of
Pierre Bourdieu and Axel Honneth, as interpretive frameworks, I present a
phenomenological perspective of what it is like to be a ‘lecturer from the working class’
in class-ridden society and a neoliberal education system, and the disrespect and
misrecognition these can bring. Writing auto/biographically, augmented by the use of a
collaborative narrative approach (Arvay, 1998), I confront feelings of illegitimacy in
academia and demonstrate how undertaking the PhD has had an impact on me personally
and professionally.
The aim of this thesis was to speak the truth about the dominant middle class ideology in
the academy; and to challenge the academic community, in particular middle class
colleagues, to confront their unconscious class prejudices.
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Furthermore, I anticipate that this research will make an important contribution to the
existing research paradigm that uses auto/biographical approaches to show the lived
experiences of people’s lives; and show that writing auto/biographically is therapeutic,
educational and reflexive, as well as agentic.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English