Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Bangor University
I am a Senior Lecturer at Bangor University and a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of class, identity, and higher education. My research is shaped, in no small part, by my own experience as a working class academic – someone who has navigated a higher education system not designed with people like me in mind. That personal experience is not incidental to my work; it is central to it. It informs the questions I ask, the people I want to listen to, and the arguments I make about who belongs in academia and who gets left behind.
I completed my PhD at Bangor University on graduate trajectories in a regional context, exploring what happens to graduates after university in areas outside the major metropolitan centres. That work opened up broader questions about aspiration, place, and inequality that continue to run through everything I do.
Research
My research spans four interconnected strands:
Working Class Academics
This is my primary and longest-standing area of research. I am interested in how class operates – often invisibly – within the culture, structures, and everyday life of universities. I explore questions of belonging, imposter syndrome, identity management, and the particular pressures faced by academics from working class backgrounds as they move through and up within higher education institutions. This work draws on qualitative methods and, wherever possible, the voices of working class academics themselves.
Student Experience and Higher Education
My work on students examines how class, gender, and place shape the experience of being a student in the UK, particularly in regional universities. I am interested in access, retention, and what happens to students whose backgrounds and expectations do not match the dominant culture of higher education. This strand connects closely to my broader concern with who higher education is for, and who it fails.
Universal Basic Income (UBI)
I have a growing research interest in Universal Basic Income and its potential implications for social inequality in the UK. This work considers UBI as a policy response to precarity, poverty, and the changing nature of work – and asks what it might mean in practice for the kinds of communities and individuals I have spent my career studying.
Bangor City Research
My Bangor city research examines processes of gentrification and urban change in a Welsh regional context. I am interested in how rising property values, shifts in the local economy, and changing demographics affect lower-income residents and small businesses — and in what gets lost when communities are displaced. This work connects questions of place and class to the broader political economy of austerity and regional inequality in the UK.
Background
We lived on a social housing estate built as part of the new town development — rows of houses for young working class families, which is exactly what we were. Nobody on our street owned their home, and nobody expected to. That would come later, courtesy of Mrs Thatcher, but in the early years of my childhood it wasn’t yet part of the script.
Looking back with the benefit of a Bourdieusian framework – something I obviously didn’t have at the time – I can see my cultural capital taking shape in small, telling moments. My mother stood out among other parents for asking the school about homework and after-school activities. At the time it seemed unremarkable. Now I recognise it as a kind of middle-class educational instinct operating in a firmly working class setting. I liked school well enough as a child, but somewhere along the way the interest faded.
My parents had no academic qualifications between them, my dad’s working life followed a well-worn path, and my own sense of what was possible – my habitus, to stay with Bourdieu – pointed firmly in one direction. You left school, you got a job. Further study didn’t really feature.
So that’s what I did. Waitressing, chambermaid work, customer service roles across various organisations. People tend to reach for the word ‘menial’ for this kind of work, and I understand why, but those jobs gave me a practical education that I’ve drawn on ever since – the kinds of skills that now get dressed up as ’employability’ in university prospectuses. By the time I was 22, I also had two children. My energy for learning didn’t disappear; it just redirected itself into raising them with a critical eye on the world and the belief – contradictory, as it turns out – that hard work could get them anywhere. How little did I know?!
It was years later, with my partner’s support, that I signed up for an Open University course in Sociology. Even then, the idea of university in the traditional sense didn’t occur to me as a real option. It took my OU tutor spelling it out – suggesting, directly, that I should consider enrolling somewhere – before the thought properly landed. This is not unusual. Research consistently shows that working class learners often need that external validation before higher education starts to feel like something meant for them (Archer and Leathwood, 2003: 11). We don’t tend to talk ourselves into it.
I loved university. I also spent much of it waiting to be found out – a quiet, persistent dread that someone would tap me on the shoulder and explain there had been a terrible mistake. My first day in the lecture theatre stays with me: the nerves, the thrill of it, the feeling of being completely out of my depth and desperately not wanting to leave. I recognise that cocktail of emotions instantly when I see it in students now, because it never fully went away for me either. A kind word at the right moment can do an enormous amount, and knowing that has shaped how I teach.
My research on working class academics grew, in part, out of student feedback. Several students commented on how approachable I was, but one remark in particular lodged itself in my mind: Teresa, I thought all academics would speak like the parents of those on University Challenge, but you are, well, normal. My first instinct was to read this through a gendered lens – female academics are routinely expected to be warm, accessible, nurturing – and that probably accounts for some of it. But ‘normal’ kept nagging at me, partly because two male colleagues from working class backgrounds had described almost identical responses from students. Class, I suspected, was doing the heavier lifting. Traces of where I come from are not hard to find: I live in social housing, my interests run mostly to low-brow culture with the odd streak of highbrow, and I speak casually, with a vocabulary that would raise eyebrows in certain senior common rooms. I am, by most measures, an atypical academic.
Though it is more complicated than that. Wakeling (2010) poses an uncomfortable question about whether academics can really claim working class identity at all, when the comparison is with occupations that involve genuine physical labour – cleaning, stacking shelves, standing at a checkout for eight hours (p. 38). I find I cannot dismiss this. My partner works shifts as an NHS cleaner. The physical toll of that job has aggravated a long-standing back problem. Meanwhile, I write in cafés. I complain about long hours while sitting down. When I think about family members in retail, Goodley and Ashby’s (2015) description of working at Sports Direct – conditions they compared to a gulag. What I do is not work in that sense. Wakeling (2010) makes the point dryly: how many academics, he asks, have ever been sacked for poor punctuality? (p. 39). The answer says it all. I use the term ‘working class academic’ because it is the closest fit for who I am and where I came from, but I use it with humility — aware of the capital I have accumulated, the comfort I now have, and everything that separates my working day from the working days of the people I grew up alongside.
WORKING-CLASS ACADEMICS BLOG 