Let’s begin with class. In 2001, Walkerdine and fellow contributors to Growing up Girl observed that in examining social class, they were writing about something that refuses to go away. Four years later, Reay (2005) commented on the fact that in contemporary British society, social class is “not only etched into culture, it is still deeply etched into our psyches, despite class awareness and class consciousness being seen as ‘a thing of the past’” (p. 911). As if to illustrate this view, Hey (2006) describes being told to ‘get over it’ (p. 295). Another year on and Gillies (2007) refers to class as the ‘elephant in the room’ (p. 19). Three years after that, Taylor (2010) suggested that the intersections of class with gender, ethnicity and sexuality were still pressing. Four years later, Boylorn and Orbe (2014) observed that communication scholars have been slow to examine class as a salient cultural issue. Three years later, Hanley (2017) observed that the class ‘coffin’ is still empty, and most recently, Morgan (2019) observed that “understandings in class terms have not gone away and still, perhaps increasingly, form part of public discourse” (p. 8). We know from all of Diane Reay’s research that the links between class and inequality endure, but as she says “We need more understanding of how social class is actually lived, of how it informs our inner worlds, to complement research on how it shapes our life chances in the outer world” (2005, p. 913).

While many of the authors above challenged hitherto purely economic analyses of class by bringing gender onto the agenda, the 2016 European Union Membership Referendum result (‘Brexit’) in Britain and Donald Trump’s election as president in the USA brought increasing levels of inequality, stark divisions between people and shocking examples of a lack of social justice into sharp relief, foregrounding important questions about race. In Britain, post-Brexit analyses often featured references to a post-industrial ‘left-behind’ working class using definitions that were not only male by default but that also failed to acknowledge the hidden constructions of whiteness that underpinned them. Critiques of such analyses from postcolonial and critical race scholars uncovered these assumptions, at the same time raising questions about the role of immigration in the construction of class positions and identities and of their transmission across generations, about how immigration both defines the composition of the working class and operates as a potential dividing line within it, and about how race and racism are constructed and become manifest. We also need more understanding, then, of how intersections of class, gender and ethnicity are actually lived, of how they inform our inner worlds and how they shape our life chances in the outer world. Autoethnography as a genre of writing and as an increasingly popular mode of inquiry (e.g. Griffin 2012; Boylorn 2013; Turner et al. 2018) offers huge potential for understanding the lived experience of macro structures, systems and processes.

Recruiting contributors able to illuminate such complexities through written autoethnographies posed a number of challenges, not least in terms of selection criteria and the definitions that informed them. Recent publication of a number of working class and minority ethnic ‘voices’, such as the essays in Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant, Kit de Waal’s Common People anthology, Kerry Hudson’s memoir Lowborn and Candice Carty-Williams’ novel Queenie, inevitably attracted responses on social media that challenged the notion that published writers could still lay claim to a working-class identity. It is an essentially reductive and unhelpful argument, as Hey (2006) and Childers (2002) suggest (see further discussion by these authors in my own autoethnography in Chap. 5), not least because it rests on simplistic conceptualisations of subjectivity. Nevertheless, one has to start somewhere. Since class had been the first ‘key’ that had enabled me to start analysing my own lived experiences as an undergraduate from a working-class family, I had thought initially in terms of identifying women like me who had been the first in their family to access higher education. But I quickly recognised that this is an inadequate indicator of an enduring class sensibility/consciousness, especially since parent(s) may go to university as ‘mature’ students, rather than ‘automatically’ progressing to university from school; or contributors may have one parent who did access higher education while the other didn’t. In any case, being a graduate no longer offers the opportunities higher education opened up for me, bringing mobility but also personal costs. Intersections of class with other forms of structural inequality, stratification systems (such as caste) and processes of subject formation including migration also make it clear that class may not be experienced as a singular or primary site of identification (Mama 1995). Further, there is the fact that people sometimes experience themselves ‘performatively’—becoming conscious of how they are variably classified/classify themselves according to context, deploying or being ascribed different aspects of their identities in interaction with others, including institutional actors (within what Skeggs refers to as “systems of inscription, exchange, valuing, institutionalization and perspective (that) provide the conditions of possibility for being read by others in the relationships that are formed between groups”, 2004, p. 2). And then there are temporal and spatial dimensions which mean that specific aspects of identity become heightened at significant times of psychological, emotional or geographical transition or during periods of disruption to a life course which make attachments and subject formations more tenuous, fluid and destabilising. To try to capture such changes over time—both historical time and experiences of time within a life course—I also wanted to identify women of my own and subsequent generations.

The crucial criterion became whether potential contributors had developed a consciousness of inhabiting what Reay (2005, p. 912) calls a ‘psychic economy’ of class, gender and ethnicity and of how they intersect in complex ways that position the individual in a ‘liminal space’ even while sometimes confounding their ability accurately to analyse ‘in situ’ how different elements are operating in any given encounter. Occupying such a space develops an awareness that informs and infuses everyday life in a pervasive sense and engenders the kinds of tensions that can arise from ‘managing’ experiences of transitions (e.g. leaving family behind) and liminality (e.g. ‘passing’). The tensions may manifest in ‘invisible’ embodied/affective ways, perhaps as a constituent element of broader social relations, or within everyday interactions or in the form of an ‘inner dialogue’ that makes itself heard in certain situations—all of which impact on perceptions, actions, hopes, dreams and aspirations realised or abandoned. Familiarity with such a ‘psychic economy’ was explored in conversations with potential contributors drawn from long-standing and new contacts both personal and professional, from ‘word-of-mouth’ suggestions/introductions and from those identified via social media ‘trails’. While keeping an eye on age range, but without having had a ‘tokenistic’ agenda in operation, or knowing what the specificities of their experiences might be beyond the broad outlines we discussed, those invited to contribute had the capacity to generate not only stories of being clever girls but also insights originating in different and intersecting experiences of class, age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, country, region and sexuality. Which aspects of any of these they chose to focus on was left entirely to them. As a genre of writing, autoethnography can take a variety of forms, including that of the traditional academic journal article, semi-fictionalised accounts, short story, poetry, ‘layered’ accounts, ‘bricolage’, ‘fragments’, performance autoethnographies, craftwork and the use of visual images, all contributing to the making of a cultural artefact. Again, what style of writing contributors chose was left to them.

Conceptually, the collection is organised around notions of ‘formations’ and ‘developments’ through time and across place/space, in what I think of as three ‘braided’ strands:

In line with an autoethnographic approach, concrete examples of how these individual, social and theoretical strands intertwine in different contexts are given here and there in the form of personal illustrative ‘fragments’.

Chapter 2 lays the ground for the autoethnographies by providing some context to contributors’ lives in the form of the social, educational and geopolitical developments that provided the backdrop to them and by offering some analytical ‘tools’ in the form of theorisations of the production of the classed/gendered/racialised subject. Thinking about subjects as being ‘produced’ is to recognise the connections between distinctive kinds of subjectivity and the political, structural, cultural and historical conditions which give rise to such ‘formations’. After outlining some of these ‘conditions’ (changing educational policies, patterns of immigration in the post-war period), the chapter looks at the way predominantly sociological theorisations of classificatory systems have progressed—from a focus on social class as a form of stratification (and in particular on how ‘the working class’ has been conceived of and represented); through approaches which distinguished between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ (with the latter seen as critical in the analysis of gendered and racialised inequalities); through the importance of psychological and ‘affective’ factors in the formation of subjects; the concept of ‘intersectionality’; the historical legacies of colonialism and global movements of peoples through migration and how these are integral to conceptualisations of class, gender, race and practices of ‘othering’; to approaches that focus more broadly on space/place, movement and time.

The overview Chap. 2 offers is by no means definitive or exhaustive but is designed to provide a ‘work box’ containing some tools to enable the reader to place the stories being told in a structural and cultural context and to ‘think with’ about the similarities and differences the stories reveal, whether these relate to discourses of class and how these are internalised, or to age, ethnicity, culture, inter/national or regional/local spaces and places, belonging, movements and disruptions, institutional contexts, ‘psychic economies’, issues related to embodiment or processes of intergenerational transmission. There is much here for academic and student sociologists, psychologists, historians and human geographers; those teaching/studying English, communication and performance studies; teachers in training and counselling/psychotherapy educat...