Notions: The Lives of Irish Working Class Academics

In Ireland, it is said that people with notions are acting above their station and with a misplaced sense of their own importance. Certainly, working-class academics often feel out of place at work, caught somewhere between where they come from and where they are now. To be at once working class and an academic is seemingly paradoxical, since the career assumes a moving away from one’s origins. That transition, if it is made at all, is seldom straightforward.

A series of autoethnographies f...