Clever Girls

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association's "Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award for a Book about the Working-Class Academic Experience"

This collection by three generations of women from predominantly working-class backgrounds explores the production of the classed, gendered and racialized subject with powerful, engaging, funny and moving stories of transitions through family relationships, education, friendships and work. The developments that take place across a life in processes of ‘becoming’ are examined through the fifteen autoethnographies that form the core of the book, set within an elaboration of the social, educational and geo-political developments that constitute the backdrop to contributors’ lives. Clever Girls discusses the status of personal experience as ‘research data’ and the memory work that goes into the making of autoethnography-as-poiesis. The collection illustrates the huge potential of autoethnography as research method, mode of inquiry and creative practice to illuminate the specificities and commonalities of experiences of growing up as ‘clever girls’ and to sound a ‘call to action’ against inequality and discrimination.

“Clever Girls is a powerful, intergenerational meditation on character formation and how it is shaped by class, race and gender. Its first-hand accounts are fascinating, sometimes shocking in the ways in which women have had to struggle, and always thought-provoking.” (Bernardine Evaristo, Brunel University London, UK) 

“This remarkable collection draws on the stories of working-class women to show the pleasures and pains of growing up as a ‘clever girl’. Individually and collectively, these contributors’ accounts show the very best of what auto-ethnography can do: incisive, moving, and brave, the accounts show the reader the complex ways in which relations of inequality are experienced and  how history is lived on the ground.” (Steph Lawler, The University of York, UK) 

“This is an urgent and extraordinary book! If there was any doubt about the power of autoethnography to produce textured, nuanced, powerful expositions of the formation of subjectivity in its classed, gendered and racialized complexity, then this book dispels that doubt. The vibrancy of the autoethnographic accounts contained in this book, together with the methodological rigour, theoretical sophistication provided by Jackie Goode, hold together that which is so often rendered apart in academic writings: ‘experience-near’ accounts of situated lives along with analytic nuance.  If we want to understand something of the gendered, raced, classed realities that are buffeted by, enduring within, yet destabilised and refused by people as they negotiate the structures and desires that thwart and propel them, then this book is must. And a very readable and even enjoyable one at that.” (Gail Lewis, Birkbeck, University of London, UK) 

“By turns brilliant, moving, uplifting, harrowing, shocking – these stories of intrepid cleverness amongst girlhoods positioned by the Othernesses of class, race and ethnicity, are hugely important for understanding the complex landscapes of today. A must-read that will inspire you to begin your own auto-ethnoethnography. ” (Valerie Walkerdine, Cardiff University, UK)