A Working Class Girl Re-searching “Going Home” - Growing up Working Class Becoming a Research Scholar

This presentation will be an autoethnographic account of the lived experience of identity work growing up working class becoming a research scholar. Using a narrative style I will present different artifacts from my ethnographic field study among blacksmiths that made me dig in to my own social trajectory. A social trajectory crossing social classes.
Traveling back and forth between the social field of the blacksmiths and the social field within academia confronts me with a feeling of being an insider and outsider in both social contexts simultaneously. During the process I become aware of how the concept of upward mobility (which my trajectory would be defined as) provokes and makes me ask: Was what I came from something bad? Something I had to move away/escape from? How does a possible social class inferiority inform my observations and analysis? And what does it mean for my future moves within academia?