Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter’s conclusions reflect, in the light of contributors’ stories and the conversation they engaged in after sharing them, on the potential of bringing diverse autoethnographic voices together in a collection like this, for illuminating: the lived experiences of intersections of class, gender and ethnicity as experienced by three generations of ‘clever’ girls/women; notions of transition, ‘liminality’ and becoming; and imaginings of what it might mean to be ‘ordinary’ in a society characterised by increasing levels of inequality, polarisation and practices of ‘othering’. Gail Lewis has referred to the creation of spaces ‘where the erstwhile unspeakable may be spoken, and the established norms of intelligibility (whatever their specific shape in specific sites and arena) may no longer provide the traction determining what is deemed legible and comprehensible’. This chapter reviews how far the ‘assemblage’ of the edited collection, made up of a rich and stimulating set of autoethnographic stories set in their broader social, cultural and economic contexts, might act as a ‘jumping off point’ for readers’ own memories, reflections, analyses, theorising and writing—a transformative ‘line of flight’ perhaps, away from ever-widening inequalities and towards new connections.