Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Keywords
Working-class academic, Working-class culture, social class, caste, factory labor, crossover, deindustrialisation, precarious work, globalization, Detroit, Metro Detroit;
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Journal of Working-Class Studies
Volume
7
Issue
2
First Page
95
Last Page
112
Abstract
What was it like to have come of age after the Glorious Thirty (1945-1975), an era Jack Metzger (2016; 2021a) describes as a time when the working-class bettered their lives? I had the misfortune to have worked in several Metropolitan Detroit factories during the period of decline after the Glorious Thirty. During that time, I witnessed what the journalist George Packer (2013) has called ‘the Unwinding,’ the unraveling of the social contract that has left the working class to their own devices to find success and salvation. In keeping with the tradition in working-class studies of sharing lived experienced of class (Linkon, 2021, pp. 20-31; Strangleman, 2005, pp. 137-51), I highlight my multiple working-class lives to show that academic life is increasingly becoming more like blue-collar labor. Through a discussion of the concepts of class and caste, and the uniqueness of working-class culture, I propose that working-class academic crossovers are essentially ghosts trapped in a liminal limbo in an intellectual version of a contemporary factory that is largely devoid of the benefits of working-class culture.
Department
Department of History
Original Publication Date
12-2022
Object Description
1 PDF file
DOI of published version
https://doi.org/10.13001/jwcs.v7i2.7613
Repository
UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa
Copyright
©2022 The Author. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Attribution-Noncommercial License, which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Atkinson, Kenneth, "Academic Work As Factory Work: A Former Blue-Collar Worker’s Observations On Class And Caste In The Academy" (2022). Faculty Publications. 5409.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/5409
Comments
First published in Journal of Working-Class Studies, v7 i2 (2022) distributed by Public Knowledge Project under the GNU General Public License. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13001/jwcs.v7i2.7613