Working-class women in academic spaces: finding our muchness

In the Burton, T., dir. [2010. Alice in Wonderland (Film). Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures] cinematographic reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, there is a moment when the Mad Hatter looks sincerely at Alice and tells her that inside her, something is missing – that she used to be much more muchier – that she has somehow lost her muchness. Seeing middle-class upward mobility within academia as a precarious space in which I must negotiate my own muchness, I explore and theorise the phenomenon of muchness through an autoethnographic lens that focuses on events in my and my mother's lives and analyse these events through theories of new materialism.