Bookworms and Class Wormholes. Public Libraries in the Process of Upward Mobility of Academics in Poland
Bookworms and Class Wormholes. Public Libraries in the Process of Upward Mobility of Academics in Poland

Summary/Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to study the role of books in the biographies of upwardly mobile academics from Poland. The interviewees, despite their working-class background, experienced a major change in their life—they managed to secure an academic post and by doing so, they broke the vicious circle of social reproduction against all the odds. Their biographies are thus examples of “wormholes” between different social classes. A careful analysis of the position of books and the library in these narratives brought the authors’ attention to two interrelated findings. The first one supports Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, by emphasising that having books at home (objectified forms of cultural capital) leads to acquiring the embodied form of cultural capital (knowledge and competence), and, in the case of our interviewees, also its institutionalized form (advanced university diploma). Furthermore, books at home created what Bourdieu referred to as a “familiar relation to culture.” On the other hand, the empirical material suggests that reading is not universally recognized as a beneficial activity, and—as such—can be a source of interclass tensions. The second main finding points to the role of local libraries and culture-club centres as places where social capital can be acquired by the people who cannot otherwise inherit it. This finding is especially important in the (post)socialist context, where the library was one of the symbols of widening participation in education. The authors argue that the decreasing number of such places poses a threat to upwardly mobile individuals, especially from rural areas.

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