March 2020 - Existential Doom
Two years on its very easy to forget the shock and fear of the existential doom we were living with in March 2020 we locked ourselves away because of the pandemic outside our doors. Today in 2022 we have learned to live with Covid-19 and the lockdowns and the immediate existential crisis is over. However I want to take you back to those last weeks in March 2020 and the subsequent first lockdown in the UK we knew very little about the virus and how it was impacting on our communities and our people. I was living in County Durham at the time I had just moved up to the area after getting a job as lecturer at the very prestigious University of Durham. I live alone so those early days of lockdown knowing very few people in the area was lonely and difficult. I was estranged by hundreds of miles from my loved ones and like millions of us I felt it sharply. Watching the television in those early days seeing deserted streets in China and then watching scenes of carnage in the hospitals in Italy and then New York, knowing it would soon be our turn in the UK and then listening to the Government rhetoric at those 5pm briefings – I knew this was an historic moment, a bookmark in history when from that point onwards things would be described as pre and post covid as it was after the second world war. As a sociologist and more importantly a working class woman I knew that working class people’s words, experiences and voices would disappear as they always do when the retelling and the books start to be written. The history and the testimony would be written down by the middle class as it always is – and my fear turned away from existential to representation.
Calling Myself A working class academic annoys everyone
Calling myself a working class academic annoys almost everyone despite those two facts being true, most of the people I meet struggle to understand how a working class person who is now an academic can still be working class, and conversely how can a working class person ever become an academic? This perplexes most people. Having worked in Universities for fifteen years the term working class academic is both annoying and perplexing but also terrifying for some. Orwell recounts his own experiences of middle class life and in Down and Out in Paris and London he notes the overwhelming fear that the British middle class have of the mob - the working class. Consequently, being a working class academic in the bastion institutions of the middle class means we have compromised those towers of ivory. The middle class fear of the working class is obvious in any elite University you are most likely to find a working class person safely in their place emptying the bins, serving coffee or making the beds in the dormitories – the class system amongst our finest British Universities is not only alive and well and thriving but it is unapologetic highly reproductive and systemic to such an extent that most elite University Sociology and Social Science departments barely recognise the concept of class as a legitimate subject to think through why our society is so deeply unequal. In these bastions of middle class reproduction where women are not women, and decolonising the curriculum is treated as a religion, class inequality, class prejudice and working class people barely register in the minds of those who think themselves the greatest of thinkers.
Back to March 2020
It was just me and the diary writers then
In March 2020 I am living in County Durham in an old mining community that has been taken apart, devastated and purposefully declined. I moved there because it reminded me of home I was born and brought up in a similar place in Nottinghamshire -Sutton in Ashfield a place like East Durham also devastated, declined and because of its vote to leave the European Union in 2016 now despised. Sutton- In Ashfield is about the same distance away from the University of Nottingham where I attained my degree, Masters and PhD at 40 years old having worked in a factories and then shops, as East Durham is from the University of Durham - both Universities have little interest and connection to the communities they sit in and both Universities have treated the working class people in their shadow as low level sources of employment and never as potential students or god forbid members of their academic staff. With my experience, and my knowledge, but also my loneliness I knew that the pandemic would one day be over all things eventually come to an end whether we want them to or not a lesson all working class people know precarity is how we live. Knowing that academics, politicians or the media would be able or wiling to represent the lives of the working class. I reached for my reading of a few of the Mass observation Studies diaries that were sent into an office in London during the second world war run by the Government to find out what ordinary people were doing and thinking in the war years. Nina Maisel a school girl from London’s east End started sending her diary in 1940 at the height of the Blitz when the war rhetoric about London’s East end was stoicism, and London Unites against the Nazi’s the truth was far from the war rhetoric. Maisel’s diaries clearly outlined the misery, squalor, and the suffering of London’s working class while reports of parties were happening all over Mayfair – the quote from Mark Twain comes to mind here ‘history doesn’t repeat but rhymes’.
"I used social media to recruit people into the project" If only it was that easy.
As a working class academic, and a sociologist I felt a responsibility to ensure the working class experiences of the 2020 pandemic would at least be collected and published. I went through the Ethics procedure at the University when you are undertaking research it is vital that you think through the ways in which you are planning to undertake that research and whether it is right to do it and even whether you are the right person to undertake that research. I have read far too many pieces of journalism, and research undertaken by people who have had the arrogance to not understand that they may not be the right person to speak about and instead have spoken for.
As soon as I received ethical clearance I used social media to recruit working class people into the project , you might have thought this would be a simple process and it was I had many enquiries from people who wanted to take part and in all 46 people sent me a diary. They sent handwritten pages, daily text and social media messages, photographs, and even essays. It was an extremely emotional experience reading through those diaries as I was also experiencing the same things. Unfortunately and somewhat predictably I was subject to online bullying and some offline abuse about the project – a group of British sociologists started using twitter to talk about their displeasure of my research accusing me of ‘trying to get ahead in my career’ while their research was stagnant, others thought I was going to kill people by asking them to write a diary – one Professor of Sociology managed to get my personal number and called me up at 10pm screaming down the phone calling me a murderer. It was an awful experience and completely fuelled by these few academic’s own prejudice and class hatred. To be honest I have experienced this for the whole 15 years I have been an academic. Knowing the project was too important for petty jealousies, the class prejudices I was experiencing myself gave me the strength in ensuring the diaries would be published. I began to look for funding to extend the diaries at this point I thought this could have been a standard academic piece of research. I applied for £3,500 to conduct further in- person interviews from the University of Durham’s special fund for Covid research and of course they had no interest and saw no value in working class people’s experiences. I tried a few other academic sources of funding and came to the same conclusion – no one within academia who held any purse strings was really that interested. So instead I decided to diy- it and think through how I would really like to pay homage and to respect those voices. The diaries were incredible, poignant and very moving I felt extremely grateful to the diarists for trusting me with their inner thoughts at such a frightening time. The diaries were so much more than the academic publishing process that strips every inch of humanity out of the research so it ‘fits’ within the peer review publishing process a type of ‘circle jerk’ ensuring the riff raff stays out and only those knowing the right language, the right method, and the right code’ get published. In the past I have taken my own research and re-written it into their language unreadable by anyone outside their circle just to get published. Instead I imagined a beautiful book that was illustrated that really celebrated working class people. I pulled together a few friends and we decided to do a Kickstarter to raise money so we could self publish and pay the artists whose work would be so important – this was a purposeful decision too many times working class people work for free because they think it is the only way to get their work noticed, or because they believe in the project. This is the consequence of working class people being shut out of the creative industries and having no access to those who decision make and fund. Paying each other for the work we do in the Creative Industries has become a political act. We raised £12,500 and paid the artists and our book designers three of our artists were young working class women who had never been commissioned before.
The book is now out and we have published it under a collective ‘The Working Class Collective’ again another political act – far too many ‘editors’ and ‘curators’ out there are happy to use other people’s work and stick their own names on the front. I was not happy to do that this book is about solidarity, from the 700 people that backed the book, the 46 people that wrote and sent in their diaries, the 13 people in our team that wrote, drew, and designed and organised this project and the thousands of people who have wished us well. We are now a collective and we plan to celebrate more working class voices, and spaces through our platform – we know that with solidarity we can do this ourselves and navigate around the classism, the snobbery, and the dogmatic archaic hierarchies that all working class people have to live with. This book is beautiful, interesting and will be an important testimony as future historians, and sociologists wonder where the working class voices of the great pandemic of 2020 are. There will be a small mad yellow book sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere waiting to tell those stories
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