Beyond the ‘scholarship boy’ paradigm: autosociobiography and social mobility

This article reflects on the potential of the rapidly emerging literary genre of autosociobiography to extend analyses of the personal experience and feelings associated with social mobility. We reflect on the congruence of its themes regarding the dislocating and isolating effects of upward social mobility with important recent research in qualitative sociology, which have exposed the weakness of quantitative social scientific studies for understanding the ‘social mobility malaise’. We argue that the theme of dislocation, sometimes encapsulated in the phrase that the upwardly mobile are ‘fish out of water’, can be rooted back to a paradigm of the ‘scholarship boy’, originating in the 1950s. We discuss how autosociobiography is a vital genre because it radicalises this framing and provides more critical and provocative perspectives which are more attuned to the period of intensifying economic inequalities in the early 21st century. Drawing on Jaquet’s arguments regarding ‘transclasses’, and reflecting on numerous autosociobiographical accounts, and recent sociological contributions, our article demonstrates the interdisciplinary reach of this genre.