This assignment invited us to use reflection and creative practice to examine how our identities, shaped by family history, culture, and social positioning, move with us through the world. It asked us to approach our own lives with care rather than judgment, acknowledging that questions of heritage, class, race, language, and belonging can be both grounding and uncomfortable. The goal was not to produce a definitive account of who we are, but to sit honestly with where we come from, what advantages or constraints those origins have carried, and how those forces continue to shape our presence in different environments. For the written portion of this project, I chose to write an autoethnography grounded in family history and class positioning, using Table 1.1 from Everyday Diversity as a structural reference point. Rather than cataloging identities in isolation, I approached them genealogically, tracing how privilege, mobility, and security accumulated across generations and arrived, unevenly but decisively, in my own life.
Auto-ethnography:
I was born in London to a tri-continental family line: an Austrian grandmother who came of age beneath Soviet occupation and was sent, not displaced, to earn her keep in France and England; a mother raised in motion — South Africa, Japan, Malaysia, Austria — learning early that home is sometimes plural; and a father who began in council housing in Tiverton and spent his adolescence learning the texture of shortage. My life is what comes after those biographies — the chapter written once the debt of survival had already been paid.
I grew up in New York in the way many immigrants do: half-anchored, half-elsewhere. English is my native register, Spanish the second language I learnt by choice rather than necessity. Unlike my father, I did not leave school for work at sixteen. Unlike my Oma, I did not cross borders under economic pressure. I attended public schools without fearing eviction notices or empty fridges. We were middle class when we arrived; upper-middle class by the time I understood what class meant. By the standards of Table 1.1 in Everyday Diversity, I belong to one dominant category after another: white, Western European, male, heterosexual, non-disabled, English-dominant, now upper-middle class. That configuration has gently arranged the world to receive me — not out of goodwill, but out of structural habit. Doors open more easily. My competence is presumed before demonstrated. I have never had to translate hunger into ambition. And yet, I am not untethered from hardship; I am tethered to it at one generational remove. My father’s childhood stories are not quaint family folklore — they are a record of what my life would have been had I been born only twenty years earlier, to the same blood. His eventual ascent from council estate to company founder is the atmosphere in which I was raised: not a morality tale about money, but about momentum — that circumstances are not sacred.
Geographically, my upbringing has been trans-Atlantic and serial: born in Britain, formed in America, and seasonally re-rooted in Malta, where my grandmother lives in a converted mill house and speaks English with a Central European undertone. Mobility has been my normal — not forced migration, not exile, but elective movement — which is a privilege disguised as cosmopolitanism. So my positioning is double: I live inside categories that confer advantage, but I was raised by people who remember when advantage was unthinkable. I move through the world with cushions under me, but with an inherited memory of floorboards. That is the tension that shapes my sense of self: I am not the one who climbed — I am the one who learned what climbing cost.
Taken together with the creative component of this assignment, this reflection aligns closely with the course’s learning goals around positionality, deep listening, and structural awareness. Rather than treating identity as static or purely personal, the exercise pushed me to recognize how social categories operate historically and relationally. This process also reinforced a central aim of the course: developing the capacity to sit with complexity without rushing toward moral resolution. My reflection is not an attempt to disavow privilege, nor to romanticize struggle, but to understand how both coexist within my own biography. In doing so, the assignment sharpened my awareness of how different forms of advantage quietly frame perception, mobility, and opportunity, and how inherited memory can act as a counterweight to complacency.
