A Life Lived in Class

I have spent my whole life in ‘class’, first as a working-class girl and then as a primary school teacher, and later as an academic. My academic career spans over twenty-five years taking the work of Pierre Bourdieu to the limit. Taking Bourdieu’s work to the limits is to engage with his research a...

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Main Author: Diane Reay
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Liverpool John Moores University 2018-12-01
Series:PRISM
Online Access:https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/prism/article/view/287
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author Diane Reay
author_facet Diane Reay
author_sort Diane Reay
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description I have spent my whole life in ‘class’, first as a working-class girl and then as a primary school teacher, and later as an academic. My academic career spans over twenty-five years taking the work of Pierre Bourdieu to the limit. Taking Bourdieu’s work to the limits is to engage with his research affectively as well as intellectually, to recognise our own social and academic positioning in the same powerful way he recognised and worked with his own autobiography (Bourdieu, 2007). It also requires the deconstruction and reconstruction of his concepts in relation to our own distinct experiences. In this article I attempt to tease out the many different and antagonistic embodiments of the relationship between a habitus and a field, taking myself as a case study. I am going to focus on two fields: the working-class coal-mining community of my childhood and youth, and the educational system.
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spelling doaj.art-7156a6b8d826475788c964b5e5ea42dd2024-04-23T02:24:42ZengLiverpool John Moores UniversityPRISM2514-53472018-12-0121A Life Lived in ClassDiane Reay0University of Cambridge I have spent my whole life in ‘class’, first as a working-class girl and then as a primary school teacher, and later as an academic. My academic career spans over twenty-five years taking the work of Pierre Bourdieu to the limit. Taking Bourdieu’s work to the limits is to engage with his research affectively as well as intellectually, to recognise our own social and academic positioning in the same powerful way he recognised and worked with his own autobiography (Bourdieu, 2007). It also requires the deconstruction and reconstruction of his concepts in relation to our own distinct experiences. In this article I attempt to tease out the many different and antagonistic embodiments of the relationship between a habitus and a field, taking myself as a case study. I am going to focus on two fields: the working-class coal-mining community of my childhood and youth, and the educational system. https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/prism/article/view/287
spellingShingle Diane Reay
A Life Lived in Class
PRISM
title A Life Lived in Class
title_full A Life Lived in Class
title_fullStr A Life Lived in Class
title_full_unstemmed A Life Lived in Class
title_short A Life Lived in Class
title_sort life lived in class
url https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/prism/article/view/287
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