Please join the Working-Class Academics section of WCSA on

Monday, December 15th 2PM (UK) for:

Am I the Problem or is this Environment Toxic? Dismantling Working-Class Imposterism within the Academy, with Rachael O’Connor

O’Connor is an Associate Professor, Legal Education, University Lead for Academic Personal Tutoring and Academic Lead for Reverse Mentoring at the University of Leeds, UK

In this virtual session, Rachael O’Connor will build on recent collaborative research and publications exploring the concept of ‘imposter syndrome’ in the context of UK law school settings and higher education more broadly. Raised in Hull, a port city in England’s North, O’Connor thought she knew nearby Leeds from teen excursions.  She met Leeds’s other side at university, where she encountered a degree of privilege and wealth that her state school education had not familiarized her with.  Attending law school heightened her awareness of class and her working-class status, as she says: “It seemed to me as a junior lawyer that everyone around me was made for that shiny corporate, international legal world and yet again – I was the imposter.”

O’Connor’s scholarship and teaching responds to institutional blindness in regards to working-class students. With Nadine Cavigioli and WCSA board member Stacey Mottershaw, O’Connor has just published Supporting Working-Class Students in Higher Education: Developing Your Class-Conscious Practice (Routledge, 2025).  The book identifies challenges working-class students face, explores methodologies appropriate to capturing working-class students’ experiences, charts class inequalities in universities and the larger society, and discusses the role of working-class staff in addressing first generation students’ challenges.  O’Connor has previously published on working class imposterism in law school for The Law Teacher (May 2025). She maintains students’ experience “put[s] the onus squarely on law schools and the legal profession collectively to do better by working-class students.”

For O’Connor, “if our work to tackle class inequalities on campus doesn’t extend beyond the University walls, our working-class students will continue to face insurmountable barriers created by privilege, nepotism and a lack of understand of the value that working-class people bring to professions.”  For “meaningful strategic and policy changes” she sees staff and students at the center of transformation, but believes that employers must participate in creating an agenda for change.

Register for the December 15th talk here: EVENTBRITE LINK

–Carol Quirke, At-Large