Reflections on meritocracy, social mobility and who gets noticed in academia.
As academics, we spend a great deal of time encouraging students to question power, inequality and the ways in which institutions treat people differently. In criminology, these debates are part of our everyday teaching and research. Yet I do wonder how often we apply the same questions to our own working lives. Who gets encouraged to progress? Whose work gets noticed? And how much of what we call “opportunity” actually depends on who happens to be in the room?
These are not questions about whether particular colleagues deserve their achievements. Of course they do. Rather, they are reflections on something I have increasingly noticed in academia: the difference between being able to pursue an opportunity and actually being given a fair chance to know that it exists.
The ‘tap on the shoulder’
We are often told that academic progression comes from hard work: developing our teaching, publishing research, taking on responsibilities and contributing to university life. All of this matters. But so do the conversations, introductions and informal networks that some colleagues have access to and others do not. A word of encouragement from someone senior, an invitation to join a project or simply being remembered when an opportunity comes along can make an enormous difference.
There is nothing wrong with mentorship or colleagues supporting one another. Quite the opposite. The problem comes when these opportunities are not widely known about, or when some people are actively encouraged while others are left to work things out for themselves. I have previously written about the importance of genuine consultation and transparency in academic life. It is difficult to claim that a process is open if people only hear about it once decisions have already been made. Surely we should be asking whether everyone had a reasonable chance to take part in the first place?
Intersectionality is more than a set of categories
This is where intersectionality becomes particularly important. As Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, disadvantage cannot always be understood by looking at race, gender or other characteristics separately. People have complicated lives, shaped by different experiences that overlap and influence one another. Yet we sometimes seem more comfortable recognising inequality when it fits categories we already know and understand.
I can relate to this personally. I am Armenian, with a background that includes poverty, homelessness, displacement and seeking refuge and asylum in the UK. I have experienced racism, bullying and exclusion, but being Armenian or West Asian does not always fit neatly into the usual ways that ethnicity and racial disadvantage are discussed in Britain. These experiences have shaped my life and my research interests, including my co-authored work on intersectional harm in the British asylum system.
There is also a rather important class dimension to this which I think is often misunderstood in Britain. Although I was born in Armenia after the formal collapse of the Soviet Union, I was raised with many of the cultural values that had shaped life in Soviet Armenia. In my family, cultural capital was often regarded as far more valuable than financial capital. Going to the opera, ballet or musicals, learning an instrument, knowing classical composers and literature, and being taught what might be called ‘posh’ etiquette were not necessarily signs of wealth. They were things we were expected to do, sometimes whether we liked them or not! Education and cultural refinement carried a particular kind of status in that Soviet-influenced upbringing, even when money was scarce. Of course, that was not everyone’s experience of Soviet Armenia, but it was certainly the world of values I grew up with.
In Britain, however, these same habits can carry an entirely different meaning. Knowing your classical music, playing instruments, being familiar with literature or speaking in a certain way can easily be associated with private schooling, wealth or an upper-middle-class upbringing. I spent years working on my English accent in order to ‘integrate’ into the culture, which now apparently sounds rather ‘posh’. Combine that with my cultural interests and the way I carry myself, and people can form an impression of my background that could hardly be further from the truth. I still encounter this in academic life. It is a useful reminder that cultural capital does not have a universal meaning: what signals education and aspiration in one context may be read as inherited class privilege in another.
There is a further complication around how Armenian identity itself is presented. Some more nationalist or essentialist voices within Armenian communities have invested considerable energy in presenting Armenians as ‘white’ and firmly part of a European or Christian civilisation, sometimes drawing on Armenia’s history as the first state to adopt Christianity. At times, these narratives also unfortunately sit alongside a political and cultural orientation towards Russia. I have never felt that these kinds of claims properly capture the diversity of Armenian identities or the realities of how we are treated elsewhere. Nor should we assume that they represent the views of Armenians generally.
In Britain, the problem is that declaring ourselves ‘white’ does not mean that everyone else sees us that way. For those of us whose appearance, names, accents or backgrounds mark us out as different, including those of us with darker skin or more visibly West Asian features, the experience can be quite different from the image being promoted. I have experienced racism throughout my life, and a narrative that insists Armenians are simply ‘white like everyone else’ can make those experiences harder to explain or even have recognised. We can end up in an awkward position: not necessarily accepted as part of the majority, but not always understood within the familiar categories of racial and ethnic disadvantage either. Surely this is precisely why intersectionality matters?
None of this is necessarily obvious when somebody meets me today. I work in academia and now enjoy a relatively comfortable life, but that does not undo the poverty, exclusion or discrimination that came before it. Nor does it mean that I have somehow acquired all the networks and opportunities that others might have inherited.
I am not suggesting that my experiences are somehow more deserving of recognition than anyone else’s. That would defeat the point. What concerns me is the possibility that we sometimes replace one set of assumptions with another, deciding who might need support based on what is immediately visible. Anti-racism, as I have argued before, is not simply something we include in policies or teaching materials. It is something we should practice in our everyday decisions, including the decisions we make about colleagues.
When being capable means being left alone
There is an irony in social mobility. The more someone manages to overcome difficult circumstances, the easier it can become for others to forget those circumstances ever existed. Confidence, independence and a professional manner can all be mistaken for signs that someone already has the connections, support and opportunities they need. Yet being good at your job does not mean you know how to navigate every aspect of academic life, or that you would not benefit from someone opening a door for you.
This is not just about money. As Pierre Bourdieu argued, class also involves social and cultural capital: the relationships, knowledge and ways of navigating institutions that people acquire through their lives. We readily acknowledge that students arrive at university with very different levels of access to these things. We adapt our teaching and support accordingly. Why would we not show the same awareness when thinking about the professional development of academic colleagues? Nor should we assume that gender alone tells us who is confident, secure or in need of encouragement. People’s circumstances are rarely that straightforward.
Visibility, identity and academic culture
Universities quite rightly want to celebrate diversity and demonstrate their commitment to social justice. Representation matters, and there are good reasons why institutions seek to make previously overlooked voices more visible. However, I wonder whether some experiences and perspectives are simply easier to recognise, communicate or celebrate than others. What happens to those who do not fit a familiar story about disadvantage, or whose work and experiences are not quite as easy to place within an institutional narrative?
The same question applies to intellectual positions. Criminology is full of difficult debates about punishment, policing, migration, race, gender and human rights. There is room for strong convictions, and I have plenty of my own. But I have never believed that being committed to a cause means we should stop questioning how it is pursued. We should be able to disagree, consider competing arguments and even change our minds without being seen as less committed or less…interesting.
Sometimes I wonder whether having a particularly recognisable position makes it easier to be noticed, invited into conversations or connected with opportunities beyond the university. Perhaps it does. But academia should also have room for people whose views are more nuanced, whose interests cross disciplinary boundaries or who are simply less inclined to turn every discussion into a declaration of allegiance. As I argued in my earlier writing on academic activism, how can we learn from one another if we only engage with people who already agree with us?
Practising what we preach
So where does this leave us? I do not think the answer is to question the achievements of colleagues, or to abandon efforts to tackle historic and ongoing inequality. It is to look more carefully at how opportunities are offered. Where a role, project or development opportunity can be opened to everyone, why not make it known to everyone? Where a direct invitation is genuinely needed, can we at least be clearer about how those decisions are made? And can we be more mindful of the people who consistently keep teaching, pastoral support and everyday university life going, but may not always be the first names that come to mind?
I would also like us to be more cautious about assuming we know somebody’s circumstances from their appearance, identity, confidence or professional standing. A genuinely intersectional approach asks us to recognise the differences within groups as well as between them. It means acknowledging our own assumptions and being willing to question how they influence everyday choices. That applies as much to academic management and professional development as it does to our research and teaching.
Ultimately, I chose academia because I believed in education as something that could challenge hierarchy and create opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach. I still believe that. But if we are serious about fairness, equality and inclusion, we need to ensure that those principles are reflected in the way we treat one another, not simply in what we say about them.
Perhaps the question is not only whose potential we already recognise, but whose potential we might be overlooking without even realising it?
