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

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

If the standards of success and failure have been collapsed this way, if institutional rewards and punishments are so puzzling as to be one and the same for many working-class teachers and scholars, then our chances of becoming a permanent class-centered voice seem slim. Again, old news perhaps in an academic community that has begun to acknowledge its roots in colonialism, patriarchy, and other forms of domination. What I am advocating here is that we working-class academics speak publicly about our relationship to institutional cultures, that we let our colleagues know without shame (much easier said than done) when the interpersonal rules at a departmental dinner or a meeting with a dean overwhelm us and confuse us. It ' s not as trivial as etiquette, although I confess I have no idea which fork is for what. Interpersonal risks are real within the academy, and though I ' ve been part of many classroom conversations confronting hidden cultural assumptions, I've found very few opportunities to confront these same assumptions in the hallways of our offices. If those hallways are cold and antiseptic, immobilizing to those of us from working-class backgrounds, we can and should weave that experience of immobility into our educative work.

John: "Cultures of Fear"

I'm feeling way too vulnerable now so let me start with a place relatively outside my emotional vortices of terror: a recent viewing of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Moore constitutes the incidents at Columbine within an entire oeuvre of Euro-American white (is it mostly suburban as he claims?) fear. Moore at one point details a humorously sad retelling of how the "white" culture of fear developed historically in America, obviously a simplistic understanding of history but a telling one no less, and one that resonates with the stuckness in my body, particularly now.

I say particularly now because last fall I deliberately and decidedly disconnected myself from 95 percent of my old life. I closed my email account without offering anyone but my two sisters and two of my friends my new email address. Anyone else could find me through the university. I changed my home phone number to an unlisted one and gave the new number out only to the same four people. I have never cut myself off so completely from the human race. Why?

Last fall, I received a number of phone calls, calls mostly from colleagues or friends, needing to vent about other people. Such calls would almost always begin with "You know I love so-and-so" and then would consist of whatever the caller needed to discuss concerning what violence was done to them by, or how violently they felt about, "so-and-so." It's important to realize that this was not an isolated case or an isolated person; this was common behavior among my colleagues and friends. I even featured a section in my stage show that highlighted this behavior, trying to indicate how it affects me to be invited to participate in it, how it hurts me, and how it drives me crazy.