Cultural capitalists and academic habitus: Classed and gendered labour in UK higher education

This paper explores gendered work in the academy entwining autobiography with a wider analysis of how gender and class are mobilised in academic hierarchies in the UK. It interrogates the repercussions of an elitist male and masculinised academy for a feminised group of workers within Higher Education-contract researchers, and describes some of the consequences for their work of processes of corporatisation, casualisation, contractualism, commodification and compliance. Drawing on the analyses of Jill Blackmore, Nancy Fraser, Dorothy Smith and Pierre Bourdieu, the paper maps out some of the gendered and classed institutional practices that result in pervasive social injustices within academia. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.