Creating SoTL communities through critical storytelling: reflections on a participatory study with Russell Group academics of working-class heritage

This paper discusses a participatory critical storytelling project exploring the routes into academia taken by a group of eight UK-based Russell Group academics who identify as being of working-class heritage (WCH). The study has provided the participants with a space to unsettle, interrogate and (re)interpret their life (hi)stories to generate composite stories to counter stereotypes representing academics of WCH in deficit terms. The stories created from data co-produced during the sessions is being transformed into academic, and non-academic content aimed as students of WCH in, or considering postgraduate study. The final stories seek to demonstrate to these students people like them exist in academia.