Invisible Laborers: A storied love letter to other working-class mothers in academia

Abstract

This paper began from my own desire to see the words of other working-class mothers in academia, to find the proof of our existence. I use autoethnography, or scholarly personal narrative, to nest my own stories of being a working-class mother within earlier scholars’ (Leeb, 2004) observations of the particular ways classism targets working-class women in academia. I also draw from Tiffe’s (2014) observations of the strengths of working-class people, in our abilities to disrupt the neoliberal university’s relationships to time, care, and bodies, and consider how working-class mothers in academia enact these disruptions through our presence.