From recalcitrance to rapprochement: tinkering with a working-class academic bricolage of ‘critical empathy’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous work on working-class academics has highlighted recurring themes, such as micro-aggressions, imposter syndrome, liminality, exclusion, invisibility and habitus. These themes have been encapsulated in a number of metaphors, such as ‘the ghost’ and ‘the phantom-limb’, both of which connote absence, silence and marginalisation. Whilst these metaphors vividly describe the lived experiences of working-class academics, it is necessary to make room for a more positive space in which academics can construct alternative futures. It is necessary to develop a ‘politics of critical hope’. A politics of critical hope seeks to move beyond linear narratives of victimhood, anger and heroic narratives of overcoming. This conceptual paper develops a critical hope that interrogates and repurposes dominant epistemologies in order to foster a bricolage of reparative and empathetic truths. It gestures towards an intersectional politics of academic work, compelling us to recognise that empowerment/ disempowerment is highly complex and stratified in nature.