It was my Granddad’s 87th birthday last week, so Patricia and I were Up North. On our way back to London, we caught up with Dr Ross Clare, a working-class ancient historian and game narrative designer.
Ross wrote an article for the Tribune called ‘How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail’. I liked the directness of that, and the writing was excellent. Then, I found out he wrote a book called Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic). What an amazing research topic, I thought. So, I got in touch.
Very gamely, Ross agreed to walk and talk on the streets of Manchester. His experience was rather different to mine (and he didn’t go on half as much).
I’ve pasted the transcript below. Substack’s automatic transcript tool made a couple of mistakes – namely confusing ‘North Nottingham’ with ‘North Africa’ – which I corrected, but it now refuses to generate a transcript with those corrections.
Transcript:
Hello, yes, I'm Ross, Dr Ross Clare.
So, I came from like an old pit town, North Nottingham, and came through the usual routes.
The thing with me is I never really knew what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be a novelist, but that's not really a job that you can just sort of walk into. You don't get the novelist job, necessarily. So I just sort of went with the flow.
I got to university. I just sort of stuck around there. And ended up doing postgrad studies, and that's when I started to realise, especially in postgrad, that academia is not exactly full of people who are from, what do you call it, working-class backgrounds. That'll do, won't it?
And I suppose it didn't really mean all that much, until I kind of bumped up against this particular dilemma – and it's true I didn't quite … well there's stuff you hear I guess about not quite fitting in. You don't sound right, you don't dress right, you don't have the same the right kind of attitude and stuff. And, it does really matter in academia, but the real issue for me was that you can put up with all that and do your work get on with it publish research and things, and teach and such, and it's all good.
The real issue is that I could tell that a lot of people around me had a lot of backing from back home, from their families and parents and stuff, which of course, you know, I didn't, I had to make my own way.
A lot of support from my parents of course but they didn't have access to lots and lots of money.
This was the problem because academia now, really quite willfully, will hire lots and lots of different people on very, very tiny contracts and not pay them, certainly not pay them enough to live in any real way.
And that was my issue for about, I think, three, four years. That's what I did. And I wouldn't recommend it. Like, I actually wouldn't recommend it.
Unfortunately, the advice I would give for working-class young people with early careers going into academia: have a plan B. I didn't have a plan B. I sort of left and now I work in games, writing for games.
Turns out that's also very difficult to get into. Most sectors are.
Any kind of specialist sector – academia, games – yes, it's very, very difficult.
It is worth it to have a plan.
It's unfortunate, I have to say, that hard work doesn't always pay off, but persistence tends to. Just keep trying. I think that is the idea for me. Just keep going on, keep trying to forge connections. You don't have to force yourself to network, as I never did. Maybe that's one of the reasons I didn't end up in academia.
But talk to people. I've met Paul here, that's why we're doing this. There he is.
And yeah, I ended up in a decent enough place. I'm working in games, I'm doing what I always wanted to do, which is write. I'm not a novelist yet, although, you know, any potential agents – how’s it going?
But yeah, I'm in a reasonable enough position now. The only problem is that I coasted a little bit, I think. I didn't really have any planned direction, and I think it is important to have. You don't have to stick with it originally, but I think it is important to know how to get to the next step. Maybe you can do it a little quicker than I did.
But I think that's it. I've given a weird walking lecture, and that'll do for me.
Thanks very much. Thanks Paul.
Share this post