Immobility in Mobility: Narratives of Social Class, Education, and Paralysis

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Nainby, Keith, Pea, John B

However, my claim is not that ? ve moved "forward" from shame to pride, from naivete to class consciousness. This reconciliation, of all things, is not so easy. I'm still not sure, from day to day, if I can admire myself for having completed my Ph.D. andbegun a professorial career. Shouldn't it have come harder, if it's worth having? If a component of working-class solidarity is knowing what hard work is all about, can I be at once a scholar and a theorist of working-class experience? Is writing this essay hard enough to count for anything at all? I'm not sweating as I write, my limbs and my back don't ache as long as I sit properly, I don't keep track of my hours. Do I love my academic self as much as my family loved me? Can I learn to? Has anything in my schooling taught me how to do that? How can I be a "critical educational scholar" without taking it way, way too easy?

John: "My back was feeling much better"

Is "cultural homelessness" just Aronowitz's borrowing and melodramatic "poaching" if you will - from a culturally popularized discourse about "the homeless" in our society, Aronowitiz's linguistic "slumming" among the discourses of "the underclasses?" Lately, I've begun to wonder. Three nights ago, I threw my back out, the latest misfortune in a long line of frustrations for the year. In the fall I totaled my old truck, bought a new used car that I couldn't afford, bounced a car that would stay running this time, my personal dream of middle-class safety. Wasn't I pulling in an instructor's salary at a state university? Shouldn't I be able to afford a car for crying out loud, one that wouldn't break down for once?

Three nights ago I threw my back out. I also swallowed all of my remaining pills (muscle relaxers), downed the rest of the bottle. I deliberately make it sound more dramatic than it really was: there were only nineteen pills. I counted them over and over, trying to decide whether they were enough to put me to sleep forever. They were also old, two years old, but I had been saving them for just this moment. I really laid on my comforter for hours, holding that stupid bottle in my hand: if I let the genie out, what wish, exactly, would I be granted?

I had no idea what would happen. I knew I didn't want to damage some part of myself for life, go halfway and ruin myself in unforeseen ways. I also knew that I didn't want to shit my pants or drown in my own vomit. I really just wanted to relieve all the pain, lower back, lower spirit, lower intelligence, and lower aspirations than I was supposed to have. Finally, noteless and too tired to care, I just swallowed them, dry, bitter, little stupid white innocuous pills. I had told people that I had back pain that last day at work; maybe they would think it was unintentional. And I could be free.

Cultural homelessness. I guess someone could say that by refusing to leave a note, I had no class. And I guess I would agree. I've been trapped between classes for a long time now: too confused, scared, and crazy-feeling to totally commit to the middle-class and too financially bound, "educated," "articulate," and alone to return home. And I despise myself for that last sentence, the hidden pretensions that I've learned to encode without thinking about them. Now, at a strange university, in a strange town, in a strange system of codes, I'm still playing Springsteen over and over, "The Badlands:" "I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand." And I've read all this stuff about social class, and I'm supposed to be writing a damned dissertation on it - codes of social class performance and communication - and I still don't understand.