Clever Girls

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association's "Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award for a Book about the Working-Class Academic Experience"

This collection by three generations of women from predominantly working-class backgrounds explores the production of the classed, gendered and racialized subject with powerful, engaging, funny and moving stories of transitions through family relationships, education, friendships and work. The developments that take place across a life in processes of 'becoming' are examined through the fifteen autoethnographies that form the core of the book, set within an elaboration of the social, educational and geo-political developments that constitute the backdrop to contributors' lives. Clever Girls discusses the status of personal experience as 'research data' and the memory work that goes into the making of autoethnography-as-poiesis. The collection illustrates the huge potential of autoethnography as research method, mode of inquiry and creative practice to illuminate the specificities and commonalities of experiences of growing up as 'clever girls' and to sound a 'call to action' against inequality and discrimination.

1. Introduction. - 2. The classed, gendered and racialized subject. - 3. On Autoethnography. - 4. On Be(com)ing Clever; Liz Thomas. - 5. `Too Clever by Half ; Jackie Goode. - 6. Common Ground; Nell Farrell. - 7. From Too Womanish, Girl! to Clever Womanish Woman; Christa Welsh. - 8. I stand with them united and secure; Melanie Reynolds. - 9. Things You Wouldn t Say To Your Daughter; Panya Banjoko. - 10. Being the One Good Thing; Sarah Ward. - 11. Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Jan Bradford. - 12. `Must Try Harder : Anxiety, Self-Shaping and Structures of Feeling, Then and Now; Tracey Loughran. - 13. Single Indian woman; very accomplished but can t make round chapatis; Meena Rajput. - 14. But you re not
really
foreign : an authoethnography of a working-class Canadian `passing in England; Kristin O Donnell. - 15. `Untitled ; Motsabi Rooper. - 16. Is this
yours
Did
you
write this? ; Victoria

Adukwei Bulley. - 17. Letter to My Younger Self; Claire Mitchell. - 18. Fractured Lives and Border Crossings; Emily Green. - 19. Clever Girls in Conversation. - 20. Conclusions.