Working: Glimpses of the pandemic from this fine place so far from home

Abstract

This manuscript was written for a special issue on Reflections on a Pandemic. In it, I write as an emerging scholar from a working-class background. The pandemic has underscored the divergence between my working life as an academic, which is unintelligible to those I love, and their “essential” work, which increasingly renders them expendable. In this essay I struggle with the tensions that other working-class scholars have articulated before me: I am tentatively welcome in a place that asks, or even demands, that I become someone whose work is unrecognizable to my loved ones. Through the use of reflective inquiry and (counter) narratives, I am working to alter social work education, creating space for others from working-class backgrounds who might find themselves in this fine place so far from home.