Notwithstanding the expansion of doctoral study it continues to operate as a classed pathway (Pásztor and Wakeling 2018); a problem exacerbated by the surplus of doctoral graduates and an increasingly congested precarious global academic labour market. It is now accepted that the ‘leaky pipeline’ (Handforth 2018) of academia whereby ‘non-traditional’ bodies remain absent from professorial and higher managerial positions within UK higher education threatens the diversity of scholarship and leadership.This Society for Research in Higher Education funded project explores the effects of neo-liberal academia on working-class ECRs transitions through doctoral study and into UK academia; making visible their gendered successes, hurdles and strategies for success.

The purpose and focus of the research is to build on feminist research that calls out the ‘toxic impossibilities’ (Pereira 2016) of neoliberal academic life (Breeze 2018; Gill and Donaghue 2016; Loveday 2018; Pereira 2016, 2017; McLean 2016; Nash 2019). Specifically, it explores how first generation, working-class ECRs navigate neoliberal academia’s “intolerable demands” (Gill 2010: 237). Guided by Bourdieusian theory and feminist epistemology methodologically it draws upon themethods of one-on-one interviews drawing upon data generated from upon fourteen working-class, UK domiciled early career researchers (all who possess a PhD in sociology) lived experiences of moving through sociology doctoral study and to (and out of) the academic workforce.

The research interpretations make visible how gender and class background impacts upon experiences of and progression through doctoral study and into academia; participants ‘strategies for success’ and the wider implications of these strategies in participants personal lives and/or their imagined futures in the academy.In doing so, it foregrounds the importance and role of teachers and tutors of sociology in inspiring and aiding the transition to doctoral study (and later academia). The article also also touches on the experience of navigating precarity and casualisation, the important of research funding for doctoral study and geographical (im)mobility for aspiring working-class sociology academics. It considers the experiences, motivations, and barriers of those who choose to leave academia as well as of those who managed to navigate the pipeline to academia. Thus, making visible the successes, hurdles, and ambivalences of this precarious and often invisible group of working-class, sociologist academics.

A feminist epistemological approach was employed, participants were recruited through social media and relevant networks (BSA-ECF; SRHE Newer Researchers). Data was thematically analysed drawing upon Bourdieusian theory. One-one-one interviews conducted with 14 participants to access subjective experiences. Participants were also invited to partake in a photo-elicitation component of interview. Photo-elicitation prompts talk that is more affective and ineffable (Bagnoli 2009) and makes the familiar act of being an ECR strange thus breaking the ordinariness of everyday ECR life (Collier 1957; Pilcher 2016). Aware that “people and place combine” (Moles 2008:1) walking-interviews will employ the act of ‘bumbling’ to access “the transcendent and reflexive aspect of [participant’s] lived experience” (Kusenbach 2003:455) of being working-class and transitioning through doctoral study and academia.

The research results recognise and conclude that academia, for working-class aspiring academics remains a seductive endeavour (Taylor 2013) as they often engage in the ‘labour of love’ (Cannizzo 2017) out of “an ethic of service to others less ‘lucky’ than them” (Mahony & Zmroczek 1997:5). It explores the extent and ways in which neoliberal academia, for working-class ECRs operates as ‘cruel optimism’; that is, “a relation of attachment to comprised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible and toxic” (Berlant 2011: 21). With regards to significant of the research for education practice, policy of theory this paper responds to calls for “social justice [researchers] to continue to focus their gaze within, as well as outside of, the academy” (Read and Leathwood 2018:347). It contributes to scholarship on class and higher-education, doctoral employability and the politics of academia generating insights into the support needs of working-class ECRs considering the possibilities for innovation in policy and practice at various scales.

•Berlant, L. (2007) Cruel optimism: on Marx, loss and the senses. New Formations, (63), pp.33-52. •Breeze, M. (2018) Imposter syndrome as a public feeling. In: Taylor, Y. & Lahad, K. eds. Feeling academic in the neoliberal University: feminist flights, fights and failures. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan: 191-219. •Breeze, M. (2018) Imposter syndrome as a public feeling. In: Taylor, Y. & Lahad, K. eds. Feeling academic in the neoliberal University: feminist flights, fights and failures. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan: 191-219. •Cannizzo, F. (2018) ‘You’ve got to love what you do’: Academic labour in a culture of authenticity. The Sociological Review, 66(1), pp.91-106. •Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. In: Flood, R. & Gill, R. eds. Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections. London: Routledge: 228-244. •Gill, R., & Donaghue, N. (2016) Resilience, apps and reluctant individualism: technologies of self in the neoliberal academy. Women’s studies international forum. 54:91-99. •Handforth, R. (2018) Exploring the career aspirations of women doctoral students: a longitudinal qualitative study, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield: UK. •Loveday, V. (2018) The neurotic academic: anxiety, casualisation, and governance in the neoliberalising university. Journal of cultural economy, 11(2): 154-166. •Maclean, K. (2016) Sanity, ‘madness’, and the academy. The Canadian Geographer, 60 (2), 181–191. •Mahony, P., & Zmroczek, C. (1997) Why Class Matters. In P. Mahony and C. Zmrocrek (eds), Class Matters: Working Class Women’s perspectives on Social Class. London: Taylor & Francis: 1-7. •Nash, K. (2019) Neo-liberalisation, universities and the values of bureaucracy. The Sociological Review, 67(1), pp.178-193.