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I have a couple of reflections on teaching at Oxford for a couple of years mid-2000s. Don& #39;t want to reduce anyone& #39;s biography down to a couple of "key-points", but for what it& #39;s worth.. /1 https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/1319626184943112192">https://twitter.com/trillingu...
On occasion, amongst other things, I taught Marx, Fanon, etc and basically a series of texts that, if they had one thing in common, it was that they focused in various ways on STRUCTURAL inequality/oppression etc. /2
My "traditional" students - upper-middle class, mostly white, often women, usually "home counties" almost all of which had Oxbridge in their family already - they all LOVED those texts. They found them insightful, challenging, thoughtful. /3
That small amount of "non-traditional" students - those who did not come from the Oxbridge families, mainly along class and/or race lines - usually they did NOT like those texts, and viscerally resisted even doing an immanent (internal) critique of their arguments. /4
I realized quickly - maybe I& #39;m wrong - that the "trad" students loved them because they explained their social position to them. These texts made them understand how they were integrated in power. They didn& #39;t threaten them AT ALL because they were just, after all, texts /5
And I realized just as quickly that these texts threatened the non-trad students fundamentally. They proposed to these students that their presence in those hallowed elite halls was a fluke, a bit of luck, epiphenomenal, and above all, nothing to do with "meritocracy". /6
On reflection, I feel bad because the only thing that those non-trad students had, to deal with the class/race/region/religion/nationality bubbles in Oxford, was exactly the conceit that it was still a space of "meritocracy". I& #39;d given them texts that stripped that conceit away/7
All of this makes me understand, a little more (although it& #39;s not THE explanation) about the phenomenon of "non-trad" individuals in "trad" elite spaces being more existentially against the structural arguments than the "trad" individuals occupying "trad" spaces are. /FIN
do note the possibility of ecological fallacy: maybe this was my experience amongst a particular cohort in time and space, as well as the way they dealt with me - a "non-trad" tutor. see alternatively: https://twitter.com/j0s3fk/status/1319713227513671683?s=20">https://twitter.com/j0s3fk/st...
https://twitter.com/graciemaybe/status/1319735850838708224?s=19">https://twitter.com/graciemay...
https://twitter.com/fuernemark/status/1319686234529214465?s=19">https://twitter.com/fuernemar...
Too many replies to keep linking to now. Do read them all. Shows how multifaceted this issue is and how "non-trad" students diversely deal with it. I was only ever a "non trad" junior research fellow there. (Which =another story lools)
