The Biographical Experience of Entering the Academic Profession. Popular-Class Lecturers at the Post-Socialist University

Abstract

This book is devoted to upwardly mobile university lecturers or people who “escaped the collective fate of their class”. The upward mobility of the academic faculty is under-researched in the peripheries of global knowledge production, although there is a significant interest in the social mobility of students. Up until now, no author has explicitly raised the question of how mobility is possible in a post-socialist higher education system, what emotional mechanisms it involves, and how mobility translates into cultural practices of upwardly mobile individuals. Translating Western working-class studies into the post-socialist context poses some particular challenges because of fundamental differences between Poland and the countries where theories of class experience were coined. I draw on Bourdieusian understanding of social class, stressing that rather than analyzing narrowly understood social classes from a transhistorical perspective, sociology should investigate multidimensional social space in which power struggles take place in a particular place within a particular time. The non-reproduction under study was facilitated by some historical and structural factors (e.g. the rapid expansion of the higher education sector in the 1990s, and socialist egalitarianism), but at the same time, the declining prestige of the academic profession made interviewees question whether their career is, indeed, a typical instance of social advancement. In the book, I discuss “social anatomy” (factors facilitating mobility and turning points of the career path), “physiology” (mechanisms associated with social functioning in a new class culture), and “vivisection” of upward mobility in academic settings (cultural practices of class-mobile academics).