“Your husband doesn’t seem like an English professor”: Choices, context, and work on the outside
Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
2021
Publication Title
Voices of Practice: Narrative Scholarship from the Margins
Publisher
Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing
Publisher Location
Washington, DC
First page number:
111
Last page number:
120
Abstract
In order to reflect effectively on my professional scholarly career, I wanted to craft an apt metaphor. My first attempt was the hackneyed image of a gravel road that stretches on indefinitely through the countryside. This gravel road might represent the acceptable path to a scholarly identity. My stories could then show that this is not the only path, for there are other paths, along the berm or through the brambles in the ditch at the side of the road. But I grew up on a cul-de-sac in a blue collar neighborhood in Southern California, where the fathers went to work on assembly lines, in service bays, or on construction sites. My father was a Teamster, working at a Firestone tire and retread plant in Paramount. There was only one way in and one way out of our cul-de-sac. There were no berms, no ditches by the side of the road, no scholarly pursuits. Only concrete and asphalt.
Controlled Subject
Gravel roads; Southern California; Blue collar workers
Disciplines
United States History
Repository Citation
Nagelhout, E.
(2021).
“Your husband doesn’t seem like an English professor”: Choices, context, and work on the outside.
Voices of Practice: Narrative Scholarship from the Margins
111-120.
Washington, DC: Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing.