Journal of Class and Culture Second Annual Conference, Liverpool John Moores University, 12 October 2024

A summary of the second annual conference of the Journal of Class and Culture, outlining panel discussions of academic and cultural practice against a context of structural exclusion for working-class people. Four panels were held under the titles: ‘Working-class academics getting in, staying in and putting up with shit when we’re in’; ‘Education and the working class’; ‘The working class and the crisis of representation’ and ‘Working-class representation in popular culture’. The summary documents discussions of the fugitive experience of working-class academics, writers and artists; discrimination against working-class people in academia; the need to reset academic methodology in order to go beyond the class hierarchies and embedded structures and practices; the need for education centred on working-class politics, form and aesthetics; identifiable remedies; the need to challenge class hierarchies and biases in academe and beyond, along with an interrogation of the visible and concealed structures that maintain them.