ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways in which social identity is constructed through the power relations of class and gender in higher education. The constructions and meanings attributed to class play an important role in the social construction of class identities within the institutional context of the academy. Whilst individuals are unique and variable, selfhood is socially constructed in the processes of primary and subsequent socialisation and 'in the ongoing processes of social interaction within which individuals define and redefine themselves and others throughout their lives'. Identities then are generated in, and are expressions of, process and interaction. The ethnographic studies that drew upon empirical data to analyse working-class women's relationship to productive and reproductive labour, constructed and fixed working-class women's identities within the framework of domesticity. Many of the accounts of women academics from working-class backgrounds demonstrate that the material resources gained through their academic employment does not negate their lack of cultural, social and psychological resources.
