This summer, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies hosted a weekend conference at the Kylemore Abbey Global Centre in Ireland, bringing together several past recipients of the Laura Shannon Prize—one of the preeminent book prizes in the European studies field, which carries an award of $10,000—alongside Notre Dame graduate students, faculty, and guest authors. The conference theme, Storytelling from the Margins, invited reflection on how certain voices and narratives have been historically pushed to the periphery—and what that means for both those storytellers and the world of literature today.
This dicussion between Jacob Kildoo of the Nanovic Institute and award-winning Katriona O'Sullivan, author of the Irish best-seller Poor, provides insights to O'Sullivan's complex process of writing about trauma, her thoughts on the systemic barriers to opportunity in the world of literature and higher education, and her own struggles and triumphs while writing Poor. O'Sullivan shares excerpts from her book and answers audience questions in the concluding Q&A session.
Transcript included below.
Jacob Kildoo: Well, welcome everyone. Thanks for coming. I’ve been really looking forward to this session, for weeks really. I’ve been looking forward to the whole event for weeks, but in particular, I'm very excited for this session. Just really pleased to be here with Katriona O’Sullivan to spend some time talking about her memoir, Poor. I’ll introduce Katriona more fully in just a minute, but I wanted to offer a few words about the book and some of the larger questions that it invites us to sit with. Our retreat this week has revolved around the theme of “Storytelling from the Margins.” I think at its heart, this way of framing things invites us to reflect on a lot of really big questions around how "centers" and "margins" are constructed and how this pushes certain kinds of stories to the outskirts and privileges other kinds of stories.
I think this idea invites us to reflect on important questions like, who’s historically been allowed to tell their story? Whose stories are deemed worthy of attention and scholarly analysis? And on whose terms? As educators and researchers, I think too often we see marginalized perspectives treated as something to interpret, or explain, or in the worst cases, even rescue. But I think the idea of storytelling from the margins prompts us to ask a different kind of question. That is, what happens when we step back and allow people in marginal positions to actually tell their own stories? To narrate their own experience, and to do that on their own terms?
I think Katriona’s book gives us a really powerful answer to this question. It's a memoir that resists neat categorizations. It's at once a trauma narrative, a trenchant critique of institutions, a reflection on social class, and in important ways, it's an inspirational success story too. It can be all these things together because it insists on narrating the complexity of a real life lived on the edges of society. And because it's told in a voice that's really unclinching and intelligent and just deeply humane too.
On that note, I'll introduce Katriona here. Dr. Katriona O’Sullivan is a professor in the Faculty of Science at Maynooth University. A psychologist and a memoirist, her first book, Poor, debuted at number one on the Irish non-fiction bestseller list. The book, a memoir of growing up in extreme poverty, describes the far-reaching impact of childhood poverty. As one of five children in a home shaped by her parents’ heroin addiction, Katriona's story chronicles her journey from poverty, teenage pregnancy, and homelessness to graduating with a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin, and becoming an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education.
Katriona's CV is immense. I'll read just a few highlights. She's the principal investigator on the award-winning STEM Passport for Inclusion Project. She's held research grants from the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland. She's been an invited speaker at the UN, Westminster, the World Education Forum, the European Gender Action Workshop on Women in Digitalization, and most recently at the UN Gender Equality Workshop. She's worked with Irish policymakers to develop policies around education and inclusion, and she's published research on equality, gender, education, inclusion, and STEM.
Wow.
So for the choreography, we’ll have Katriona read a bit from her book, a few excerpts, then we’ll commence with a bit of an interview, then we’ll open up things to Q&A with the audience. So, let’s give Katriona a warm welcome.
Katriona O'Sullivan: Thank you. It's so lovely to be here, and thank you for being so supportive and fanning, which is lovely that my book has reached people internationally as well as nationally. So, I'm a professor in the Faculty of Science at Maynooth University. Just to contextualize who I am and my story, I always start at the end, because it's the best bit. Professor of psychology – I graduated with a PhD from Trinity College in 2012, 2008. A first-class honors degree from Trinity College in psychology. If you don't know what first-class means, it means I'm f***ing amazing. I swear a lot, by the way, and it's not at you, but that's part of my vernacular where I come from.
I start at the end, more importantly actually than my educational outcomes and my employment outcomes, because sometimes I think when we talk about success, we frame it in terms of economics. I'm loved. Every morning I wake up, I have an amazing husband and three lovely kids. Every morning I wake up, my husband goes downstairs and makes us a coffee on our fancy coffee machine, because I'm not poor anymore. We do Wordle together, because I'm intellectual now. And then he says, "I love you." On days like today where I'm coming here, he'll say, "It doesn't matter what they think. I think you're amazing." I think the gift of education, employment, and opportunity for poor people, sometimes we lose why we're doing this. It's to provide people with enough security to achieve what we all want, which is connection. I feel very blessed and gifted to have that, because if you knew me 27 years ago now (I used to say 25), I lived in a one-room bedsit that was probably like from that glass panel to that glass panel with my seven-year-old son. I was completely social welfare-dependent. I'd never had a—I had a cash-in-hand job. I used to clean toilets in a train station. If you knew me then, you just don't expect women like me to end up here.
Or 30 years ago, 32 years ago, 16, homeless, living in a homeless hostel with an eight-month-old baby. I'd left school a year before without any qualifications, and I was completely alone and terrified and unable to ask for help, a chip on my shoulder with the anger. If you knew me then, we just don't expect these outcomes. Or 41 years ago, I'm the seven-year-old daughter of two intravenous heroin addicts, and I wake up every day hungry, not just for food, but for a hug and for someone to teach me that I'm valuable, show me that I have potential, teach me how to regulate my emotions. So that's who I am and where I come from.
My book is the story of how I got here, and it's not a story of grit, because grit will not get you here. It's a story of the people and the policies and the practices that actually allowed me to escape my destiny, because poverty is a destiny in the same way that privilege is. So Poor is my—it's my intellectual and my personal experience combined to try to make people think. We think more, I think, when we hear real stories. Hurt helps us. Intellect does as well, but it's very dry and boring. Nobody reads my intellectual papers as much as they've read this, to be honest. I'm going to read you a few excerpts from my book and then we'll have some questions and answers.
This is a story of when I was in school as a child.
I was wetting the bed every single night. Children tend to do that when they're in a crisis. Then going to school without washing or changing my pants. I didn't know how to wash. There were no towels in our bathrooms, barely any toilet paper, never any soap, none of us owned a toothbrush. In the toilets with Miss Hall, I felt ashamed, as though it wasn't just the kids who teased and mocked me. "Pissy pants, pissy pants, smelly b****." "I don't want to sit with Katriona, miss. She smells like wee." I knew that Mrs. Arkinson and Miss Hall thought I was smelly too. It was true. I stared at the floor. "Couldn't she just leave me alone?" I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to talk to anyone. "Miss..." I might cry, actually, it's okay to cry. Miss Hall crouched down and said quietly and kindly, "Katriona, you're not in trouble. We're going to help."
I did need help. I could sense it in the relief I felt from her words and looking at the pants. They had pictures of little girls in T-dresses on the front and days of the week stamped above the picture. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday," she said, landing her finger on each one as she said the word. I looked at Miss Hall and she was looking at me. I wanted to reach out and touch her fluffy hair and silky blouse with the big loose bow at the neck of it. She was so clean and pretty and smelled lovely. I sometimes wonder if she was, she could actually be Princess Diana. They looked the same to me. Maybe it was really her, a princess in our class.
"When you come into school in the morning, before everyone else, I want you to come to my desk and I will give you a set like this." She showed me a white flannel and a white towel and lifted one pair of pants onto the small pile. "You take them and come into the loo and lock the door just like I did, okay?" I didn't nod or shake my head, I just stared at the floor. "Do you wet the bed?" she asked, crouching to look up at my face. I flinched but didn't answer. She pushed my hair back. "Head up now," she said. "Nothing to be ashamed of, but let's learn to keep ourselves fresh and clean." There were three little sinks and she chose the last one. Explained how to run the water warm and showed me how to wash. "Start on our legs," she said, after I took off my yellow-stained pants. She threw them into the bin straight away. "Get the flannel, wet it in the warm water, then we twist this so it won't drip. And now we rub our legs like this." She showed me how. Up and down and from my knees. The way she kept saying "we" felt nice. I was never part of a "we." "Head up, Katriona," she reminded me. "Nothing to worry about. We're only learning how girls wash, is all." She wiped across my groin and around my hips and bum. She showed me again, "Up and down, wash, wash, wash, around and under," and asked me how to show, asked me to show her how to do it myself. I did, repeating the words as she said them. "Then dry like this," she said, patting my skin and giving me the towel to repeat the action myself. "Now pop on your Monday pants," she said, handing them to me. She repeated my new routine. I was to come in every day and use the girls' loo to wash like she showed me and put on my new pants. She would keep the pants in school and every morning she would give me the bundle of flannel and towel and a pair of pants. My used pants went back into the little bag. There was a small stand in front of the cubicles and she showed me where to leave the bag when I was finished. I never thought about what happened to it after I left my clean pants on. But of course it was making its way to Mrs. Arkinson's washing machine and back into school for the following week. I stood there in clean pants with clean legs. "Now," she said, "what a great girl." I felt as though I was standing in a beam of sunlight. She would never know what she did for me. How in that small bundle of towel, flannel, and pants, Miss Hall gave me power. In that small bathroom, every morning before the girls came in, I was in control of one thing.
That's the first story.
This is me now as a chubby single mother, on my journey into recovery, looking for something, knowing that there was more. I'd started therapy, I'd asked for help, and I was in Dublin.
Trinity College was a landmark. I hadn't seen my friend Karen in ages, so when I saw her across on O'Connell Bridge, I stopped to say hi. She wasn't surprised to see me, and of course she stopped to chat. Everyone knows everyone in town. We stood on the median together. "What are you up to?" I said to her. "I'm in Trinity College," she said. "I'm studying law." My heart started to pound in my chest. "No way, Karen," I said. Karen was a townie, through and through. Brought up in abject poverty in the city center like me, and a single mother like me. Her dad was Joe Dowling, the wonderful man who ran the little center in North Strand where I used to call in all the time for support. "What are you doing?" she asked. "I'm working in the canteen," I said, waving the question away with my hands to get back to the reason my adrenaline was spiking. "What do you mean, you're in Trinity College?" She took a minute to light a cigarette and put her bags down between her legs. "Yeah," she said. "I'm studying law." "Law, like law-law?" I was baffled. "In Trinity College, like?" I pointed at it, the grey walls and buildings in view from where we stood. She nodded, took a drag. "Yep." "How the..." I felt something stir. Was it jealousy? "I did the access program there," she said. "It's for girls like us, Katriona. You go in and learn how to go to college. At the end, you can pick your course for a degree." "For real?" I said. "Ah, here, Karen, they'd never let me in the door of that place." I tried to joke but I could barely hear myself over the pounding of my heart. A beam of sunlight had lit the street. "How did you get on in it? How did you get onto it?" I said. I put my purse back in my pocket. Pennies could wait. Trinity College was a landmark, somewhere lads I knew went to rob bikes. I never looked at it when I passed it, never thought about what was going on in there. I didn't care about its history or what it stood for. There was nothing for me in there. So my dreams were limited. I didn't have anyone talking about college or university around me. Nobody even mentioned it. In school, the teachers hoped kids like me would make it through the GCSEs and go on to do a trade. In poor areas like ours, kids were encouraged to do hairdressing, childcare, and catering, not history, politics, or maths. Years later, I would argue against the corralling of poor kids into trades and low-level careers and be shocked to my core at the widespread belief amongst educators that those born into poverty lack the brains for third-level education. I fight this nonsense every day.
On O'Connell Bridge that afternoon, Karen explained to me how she got into Trinity. She started at the beginning. Told me about the Trinity Access Program, how people like me could apply to do a course where you'd be helped to go to college or university. She said she loved it, told me it was brilliant. Said there was loads of support and the people running the course were great. "I'd love to do something like that, Karen," I said. She dropped the cigarette and stood on it. "And they pay you," she said. "You get childcare and all." I I started to pinch, I wanted to pinch myself. The ground under my feet was turning into gold. "Where is it on?" I'd love to see a video of myself marching over to Westland Row that day. I could not move fast enough. I was a woman on a mission. For the first time in my life, I knew where I was going. I was going to Trinity. There was a security guard on the door to the building around the back of the campus across from the DART station. I asked him to show me where to find the Trinity Access Program, and he showed me, so he pointed me to the door with the glass window. I knocked and looked in the window, and the lady in there glanced up and waved to me like she knew who I was. "Hi," she said, and beckoned me to come in. She had a small, stern face under a mass of brown curls. I pushed open. "Hiya," I said. "I'm I'm my name's Katriona O'Sullivan, and I want to go to college. I know Karen Dowling, and I just met her and she told me she goes here. How is I, how am I going to go here? I want to go here." She smiled widely. "Whoa," she said. Introduced herself as Irene. "Would you like to sit down?" I shoved myself on the seat. "Come on, come on, come on, let me in, let me in." "It's just," I said, "Karen Dowling is a single mother, I'm a single mother as well, and I want to go here. So when she told me, look, how can I go here? I want to go here." I felt I couldn't speak fast enough. "You want to go to the access program here?" she said. "Why?" "Why?" How could I ever explain? How could I speak on my, how could I speak on my life in a way that would even touch on the depth of why I wanted out of it? Where I lived, my life was considered a good one. I had my payment every week, I had my rent paid, I had my little job, the few bob on the side. I'd find a nice fella soon, right? I'd eventually get a council flat next door to a friendly face. What was wrong with that? Nothing. It just wasn't what I wanted. Not for me, and not for my son. It wasn't enough for me. "I want," I let the air out of my lungs that I'd been holding in since I'd met Karen. I looked around the room. Irene stayed quiet, she gave me a nod. "I want to know everything," I said.
And this is the last one. This is all after I'd done it all.
The Trinity Access Program played a huge part in my journey. It changed my life. It held out a hand when I was trying to climb out of the trenches. I'm hugely grateful to the program. And for many years, because I was so grateful, I championed the program blindly. I used to give talks to potential funders, telling them my story. I dressed the part, flowery, knee-length dresses from Oasis, tights, kitten-heeled shoes, clothes I didn't like, to show how much I'd changed. I played someone who had escaped the working classes. I didn't see the problem for a while. Being asked to represent the college was like a pat on the head or a gold star. But being educated has given me the ability to think. And with it came the opportunity to critically consider society in a different way. I asked myself, "What was it that these access programs offer? What do they do?" And when I did that, I saw things with new eyes.
When I was studying in the program, I was a popular student. The staff liked me. I was enthusiastic and I did well, and because of that, I was supported and encouraged. I was given information about grants and bursaries and how to get them. I got a scholarship to Trinity, childcare support. I was their good news story. My opinion changed when I started to work as part of the Trinity Access Program team. I began to understand that a charitable mindset shaped and directed the program. I began to see that the system that worked for me because I was good was failing others who were not good. I realized that the students who were celebrated were the people who got good grades, who toed the line and played the part, like I had. They were grateful to be in Trinity, worked their asses off to keep up with their studies, and were always keen to demonstrate that they were making the most of the opportunity. They allowed themselves to be paraded like show ponies at fundraising events. While these students did well, the other ones, the other ones who struggled more did less well. They weren't invited to events. And at staff meetings, they were spoken of in hushed tones. I figured out that only certain types of people, or a certain type of poor person is welcome at Trinity. And that is the one who never tries to rise above the program and remains eternally grateful for the charity it offers. Once I started to see those things, I couldn't unsee them. Just to be clear, Trinity doesn't want me to work for them now. Looking back, I realized that taking the access students across to the road behind, from the main campus was telling. It might not have been intentional, it might have been a practical option that seemed to work, but I couldn't help thinking there was something deep in that decision. Locating the poor students away from the main body of Trinity, it has a subconscious effect on the students themselves. Unseen, unheard, unwanted. Access programs are a bandaid on a broken education system, often run by the middle classes and funded by the elite. Neither of whom can fully understand what it's like to be discriminated against, either in education or in life. These programs ask applicants to prove their poverty, prove their inequality, prove their worthiness, prove their motivation, prove their potential, and it selects the ones it believes are worthy of the gift of an education. The more I thought about it, the harder and harder my job got. I saw things that made it impossible to stay working in Trinity in the Trinity Access Program. I saw the project sold as one, I saw the project sold as one that saves poor people from the clutches of their own communities. Rich people donated, brows furrowed with concern, but their donations were not always about making the lives better, it was about, it was about being identified as a Trinity donor. Maybe patting themselves on the back a little and changing nothing. Indeed, wittingly or unwittingly, these structures uphold and reinforce inequality. Many times when I stood there appealing to alumni to dig deep for the poor, I may have been the smartest person in the room. And that's the kind of problem, that's kind of a problem. I graduated with a first-class honors degree from Trinity College, despite growing up in a poor household, being poor. That helped me get where I am today. And yet, even with my PhD, my new research role in University, my prestigious research council funding, I knew I was still regarded with pity by the upper echelons of Trinity and by its well-heeled alumni as one of the charity cases.
That's me.
(Audience claps)
Thank you.
Jacob Kildoo: Thank you so much, Katriona. Those are moving snapshots into your story, and I appreciate you sharing it. Great. So I have a handful of questions. Yeah, I wanted to start with just sort of the beginning, the title of your book, Poor. You talk about this a little bit in the epilogue and sort of explain your rationale for wanting to frame things this way. I'll quote you here, you write that the term "poor" "cuts through a lot of jargon, words like disadvantaged, underprivileged, deprived, underclass." You say that those terms "they have their place, but they don't quite capture the visceral truth of what it's actually like to grow up the way you did." Can you talk about why it was so important for you to name that truth directly? And then could you also maybe talk about what storytelling, what it is about storytelling that allows you to express something that those more clinical terms can't quite get at?
Katriona O'Sullivan: Yeah, I think Poor makes people feel uncomfortable in some ways. It's a polemic term. I think one of the things that I've been privy to in my research career, in my academic career is the uncomfortableness of people in terms of naming disadvantage and using words like "underserved," "disadvantaged." Like, I've been in meetings where the same person has been like for five minutes gone, "disadvantaged, but underserved, but..." You know, like, people are so scared to name poverty and name social class and name what it's like. And so for me, it was really important to have a title that grabbed somebody and was totally honest. And also, it's a play on words, because there's an idea that people are poor. Like, we're poor. And for me, I think "poor" represents the poor system and structures in which I grew up. Like there were people in my childhood who had no power to do better by me, which were my parents. But there were people that had enough privilege and power to not reinforce the hurt that I experienced. And so for me, they are the poor people. And so I use "poor" interchangeably, and I think it's a nice conversation, but I also think it's very important in language to say "truth." To say, "I was poor." And I had poverty of mind, poverty of love, poverty of opportunity, poverty of fairness. So, and I think, yeah, when you write from a non-academic point of view, it sometimes gives you permission. You can break the rules, because we have rules in terms of, you know, subjectivity, objectivity, all these things. It gives you permission when you write, like I've written, to be able to say what you actually mean. And what's been really nice is actually hearing other people use the term more freely and not feel so embarrassed. And I think it's okay to say "poor" even if you weren't poor. We need to be comfortable naming the reality of people's lives. And it's not a criticism. Like if I work with people who are very privileged or have had very privileged lives, I have actually no problem with them saying, "Wow, you grew up really poor." They're more uncomfortable with that than I am, you know, because they feel like it's a difficult thing to say. So I called it Poor. Now, we got lots, we had lots of conversations about the title as well. I did want to call it "Go Your Own Way" at one point, but Fleetwood Mac would have cost us too much money, so we went with Poor, which I think is more polemic.
Jacob Kildoo: Yeah, that makes really good sense. Yeah, I want to get into sort of, reflecting on, Yeah, reflecting on the experience of writing the book itself. In the first chapter, you reflect a little bit on the difference between memories you want to hold on to, ones that bring you joy, which, of course, there are plenty of. But then there are others, of course, that weigh you down, but that you still feel compelled to, to tell people about. You say that you want to share those painful memories with the reader so that you can sort of leave them here and move on from them. That's how you put it in the chapter. Can you talk about the role that writing the book played in the process of sort of letting go? Was there a way in which sort of revisiting those memories helped you to move on, or did they maybe take on a new light or a new weight at different moments? How did that dynamic play out?
Katriona O'Sullivan: Yeah, I think when I wrote that line, that was very aspirational in the sense that, you know, I'd love it if I could just write it down and it'd be gone. But there was definitely something. I wouldn't recommend writing a book as honest as what I have written without therapy. I think there are people who are asked to write poverty stories who haven't actually had the opportunity to heal. And I think that's quite harmful and inappropriate in publishing. And I've seen the harm that that's done on friends. I, I'm lucky that I have, have been in therapy for a long time and also have had the privilege of, like, actually moving out of poverty to the point where it isn't as visceral today. So, but yeah, I think one of the really transformational parts of it was actually when you write about your life, your whole life, it's like you connect everything. So, like, I think we, you know, I don't know about everybody else here, but there would be memories from childhood and then there's memories from teenage years and then there's, so, like, but nobody really ever sits down and, like, links their whole life together and thinks about that little girl and then how she turned into a teenager. And so in my case, like, I had all this compassion for myself as a child. I could see how sad it was, the experiences I had as a child and how hurtful. And then all of a sudden, I became, like, this really judgmental adult who looked at my 13-year-old self who became a delinquent. I had this real harsh, judgy voice about her when I was writing. And having an editor, I remember sitting with my editor and she said, "I'm actually not going to allow you to talk about yourself like that." And that was really, really mind-blowing to me, because I actually couldn't see. I think we live in a meritocracy. All of us live in this world where it's taught from a very young age that we are responsible for our outcomes and hard work is the key to success. And that is the biggest lie that is taught to all people, as far as I'm concerned, because some of hard work is important, but, like, I could never, there was no amount of work that I could have done to escape what I was experiencing or to do better. And I had this, I had internalized that, and so when I was looking at myself as a teenager, that's how I wrote about myself. I failed at school, I didn't attend enough, I was, I fought with people, I smoked, underage sex, you know. And so the writing of the book gave me a real ability to see the beautiful little child that I was and how the hurt transformed into this lost young woman who then was just searching and so broken. And that was an amazing gift for me.
The other thing that it gave me was my mother became very static in the story. So when you can, when writing about her, I was able to find, like, so much love for her in writing about her. Like the memories of her joyful dancing, the way she, you know, that beauty. She had an amazing character. So it gave me the gift of being able to see the light and dark of humanity in my parents. And that was really wonderful. And like, the thing about writing a book is, the great thing about it is like when you write, you write anything, like, often times we we write it and it's really painful writing it even if it's a sh*t article we're doing or something for work. And then you never read it again. So like, I wrote this book and then like I obviously I talk about it now because it's become so popular. But like, once it's down, it is kind of gone, which is fantastic. But it was a brilliant process, but also really painful as well. And like, even in academic writing, like, you know, you get that moment where you have to push, you know, there's you you write something good, but you know it can be brilliant. But you have to go emotionally to a deeper place. And it might not be the same when you're writing about academics, but you still have to push yourself intellectually. With Poor, there were moments where I had to actually say, "Am I going to be honest?" There's a brilliant book by Tara Westover called Educated, and for me, her book is similar to mine, but she didn't say everything in my opinion. And I was like, "If I'm going to write this, I'm going to make you feel the brutality of poverty." I wanted everybody who read it to feel how hurtful it is for a child to be neglected. And so I think that was the hardest part, was actually getting into the words and saying, "This is how hard it is."
But I like myself more now after doing it. And I have a lot more forgiveness for myself.
Jacob Kildoo: Katriona, throughout the book, you express deep frustration about those circumstances that you grew up in. But there are also interesting moments too, and you actually, one of these came up in your third excerpt there, where you reflect on how growing up poor gave you certain kinds of skills, insights, or instincts that actually really helped you succeed later on. One moment that stood out to me is when you describe a research project that you were doing at Trinity, and how you had developed this childhood habit of sort of keeping tabs on your parents, and this sharpened your ability to sort of "join dots," is how you put it, and think like a researcher. What did it mean to, like, recognize those kinds of unexpected strengths? Maybe you already knew them or thought about them that way before you wrote the book, maybe some sort of emerged as you were writing. And how did that, like, shape your sense of belonging in spaces like academia, for instance, that are often dominated by people from more privileged backgrounds?
Katriona O'Sullivan: So, yeah, I don't feel like I belong in academia a lot of the time still. I don't know if anyone really feels like they belong, so when I do say it's to people, secretly we all feel like we're going to get kicked out, I think, at some point or another, unless you're one of my colleagues who's an a**hole. But, I never, yeah, so I don't think anybody should have to go through trauma. I think trauma is.… People should be protected. But like growing up poor….like that story about meeting Karen, and marching over to Trinity College, like none of my privileged friends would have the balls to knock on the door of the director of the Trinity Access Program…and say “like yeah, excuse me” like there's so many gifts in poor communities that we miss out on, that are not all bad. But like, when you're when you're there are skills that are forged in the fire of adversity and poverty that we need in academia, we need in business, we need everywhere. And so in my case, like my ability, like when, so, for example, now, my colleagues would tell you this, if we're in a staff meeting and something has to be said, Katriona's saying it. You know, now sometimes I might say it a bit, like aggressively, I have to learn still the code, the code is hard for me. It's tiring to have to hold myself to the middle-class norm of being polite. It's not that I'm not polite, I don't want to fight you, but I just want to be able to say the words how I would speak. And that can be quite tiring, but I also bring with me an honesty and an ability to advocate for myself and for truth and honesty that isn't always seen, because people who grow up in different environments are taught different rules. So like, I kind of take advantage of it as well, because the politeness that goes in academia, you can get away with a load of sh*t as well if you want to. The thing you're talking about there is the trauma, I suppose, like having experienced sexual trauma as a child and also the trauma of my, my life, my family every single day. What that does is it just changes your biology. It makes you hyper-vigilant. And that hyper-vigilance is horrible and I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but it is actually in some ways a skill. So I remember sitting – I did psychology and statistics, and I always felt like maths was going to be a problem. And our maths lecturer, Michael Goombly, I used to read his isms. Like, I was so on all the time. Like, Michael would say, "And, yeah, so the exam would come. The exam is on, and so we might talk about standard deviations. Standard deviations." I'd be like, "Okay, he's going to ask a question on standard deviations," because I would be reading everything. And so I'd be very on to, like, little signs about what I should study, because I'd hear things that maybe someone who hadn't got that hyper-vigilance wouldn't necessarily see. Also, like you said, like I was an investigator by nature, because I was constantly investigating my family, my parents. And so there was this kind of investigative kind of way about me. Now I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I'd prefer not to be hyper-vigilant. But, yeah, there are skills. And I think that's something, that's the biggest loss in equality and equity work is that there's this charitable idea about us. Like we're broken people who need to be middle-classed. I remember Trinity, they took us to the fucking gallery. Excuse my language, the first month that we were there, the National Gallery. I was like, "I don't like this art." "I don't know this." This makes me so uncomfortable, because it reminds me of what I don't know and what I am not. And I think we all, so we need to be like celebrating the diversity and the different voices that come. And so I think that’s one of the most frustrating pieces, that we're not open and aware of the skills that exist within diverse communities and there– I have loads of them, and they have actually been the reason why I am so successful in academia.
Jacob Kildoo: Yeah. Yeah, that's brilliant. That's so interesting. Um, Katriona, the story you tell in the book is basically chronological, but of course you sort of pick out certain key episodes or moments or developments. How did you go about picking which moments to highlight and which to leave untold? And I'm really interested if there were any, like, stories that you wanted to show up in the book but ended up on sort of the cutting room floor or something like that. Yeah, how was that process?
Katriona O'Sullivan: So, the process of actually writing a memoir– or, it's hard actually. Cause nobody, you know, I don't know about you guys, but like nobody sits down and goes, this is home. So like I remember getting the contract, I was lucky. I was asked to write it by Penguin and then I was just sent off. I've done a chapter in a book, Trinity Tales and they loved that and they asked me if I wrote it myself. And I said, of course. And they said, okay. Here's a commission, go and write your book. And then I used to go to the same place and sit down and I'd be like, I was born on April the 18th, 1977. Like start from the beginning. And I was just blocked. It's like, how the f*** do you do this? Like, um, and so obviously, I'm in an education. I was like, I need to be educated about this. So I did a little course, got in touch with some people and it's like big rocks. There's big rocks and there's small rocks, okay? So the big rocks are the big memories in your life. And it doesn't have to be chronological, but sit down, so I sat down in the same way I do in work. I had to sit in the same place and I'd set myself a word limit for the day, 1,000 words or 3,000 words, whatever, and it'd be like, here's a list. I listed a load of memories, big rocks, big memories from my life and I wrote them, I wrote them as stories. And then after I had 50,000 words, then we began to bring together the big rocks. Now there were small rocks in there that I thought were big rocks and the editor would say, that's boring. No one's going to want to hear about that. So, like when you get edited, so you get reviews, my Trinity experience was like, that's sh*t. No one cares. And it was like my life. Yeah. Um, I, yeah, there's lots that were left. There's lots of stuff not in there. So you need to understand this. I was very strategic in writing this book. In the same way that we write a research paper. There are things I wanted the reader to do and to learn from this book. I wanted the reader to learn that talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. I wanted them to learn that addiction and poverty is a cycle and reproduces itself, that my mother and father did not choose that life. And so I was very strategic in the stories that I told and how I told them. I wanted you to love me. And the reason I wanted the reader to love me as a child, because then I knew it would be easier for you to understand how bad I became as an adult, if you love the child. So there was a lot of strategy in my mind when I was writing. It wasn't just of me writing the story. It was like, how do I ensure that you love me and you feel for me, even when I'm robbing, I'm having an abortion, I'm sleeping with lots of men. I'm sorry to look you in the eyes while I'm saying these things. But you know, how do I ensure that the reader stays, forgives me? Because we need forgiveness. Poor people need understanding. They, you, the reader needs to know that we're not bad people. That bad things happen that make us do bad things. And so that was like the strategy in the book. Now, the things that were left on the book on the floor, they were horrible things, which I thought the book would be loads of was lots of Trinity stories. So, I remember my editor, never forget this. She said, “Oh, everybody has a Trinity story. No one's going to want to read about that.” And I was like, what? That gives you the idea of who's in publishing even. Because she did, so there's loads of Trinity that didn't go in, loads of my experiences of stuff that didn't go in. The other thing about writing a memoir is that you have to think about the arc of the story, so the middle and the end, like where is the drama and where is the end? So there was pieces that got left because, um, it didn't fit the…so if you're if you track, you've got my middle and then the drama and then the wonderful ending of Mary Robinson and me standing up and deciding that I don't need Trinity anyway, because I have this wonderful husband. Yeah.
Jacob Kildoo: Yeah, I get. Well, you'll be happy to know your strategy totally worked.
Katriona O'Sullivan: So you love me. Yeah, that's good. That's good. That's good.
Jacob Kildoo: You know, one thing that really stood out to me in the book is how vital mentors were at key moments in your life. And you talked about one and your teacher in the excerpt there. Um, you know, some offered life-changing support. And not just by being kind or competent, but by going far beyond what was kind of expected of them normally in their roles. What do you think it was that sort of set those truly exceptional mentors apart and not just from the bad ones – and I have some in mind from the book – but from even just decent or well-meaning ones, too?
Katriona O'Sullivan: Um, I think so Miss Arkinson, Miss Arkinson uh, realized that, um, everybody needs a light in them. Everyone needs someone to guide them and to light them up. And she worked really hard to make sure that every child in her class had a light. She gave them a light about themselves. Um, the thing about Miss Arkinson and the story with her is since publishing the book and going on Facebook and going on the– I used to think it was just me that was special. But actually there's about 700 people who've posted about how she changed their lives as well. Which I feel pretty jealous about. Um, but I think I suppose Mr. Pickering, um, he came to my home uh twice and challenged my dad. I think sometimes some people are just willing to go the extra mile for other people and that was really important, like when I do my public speaking, I talk about, like, the lessons from my life. I think the most important thing, characteristics of good pockets of sunshine or role models or mentors was they always believed in my capacity to achieve greatness even though I didn't. And it wasn't dependent on my behavior. So there was always a sense that I was good. And they always made me feel like I was good, even when I wasn't good. So that's Miss Arkinson and Mr. Pickering. That's even in my adult life. Like I've got mentors now who still remind me constantly that I'm good enough and I'm great and I have it even when I'm not. Cuz there's times when I'm not. The other thing was going the extra mile for me. And showing me they were fighting for me. I mean, not everybody needs people to fight for them, but like it's like the 5% of the population who live like I did, cuz it's about 5% or 7% in Ireland. We need people to fight for us. The other thing was um in the story about Karen, um Karen didn't, you know we have this motto, you know, um if you can't see, you can't be it. So I don't believe that. Like, I believe it in some cases. I needed to be told I could do it and I needed to be told a lot. And so Irene Boydal, the woman who ran the access program, Karen Dowling, even now in my job, like I have another colleague who's my mentor, Gemma, and another colleague, Mac, they they are, you can do this. So like I recently got promoted to professor and I only got an associate professor two years before and the requirements say you have to wait five years, okay? And so it was two years after the promotion and Mac, my mentor, the chair in psychology in the news, he emailed me and he said, can we have a meeting? And I was I sh*t. And I said, yeah. He said, I want you to apply for professor. And he's not up to him, he's not involved. I said, oh no, I can't. It's not he said, no, no, no, no, you have to do it now. You've written this book, you're in this position, you've published this. You have to do it now. And I'm like, Mac, I'm not. No. And he was like, you have to, you are good enough. So it's constantly having people who are willing to remind you that you're good enough and to fight for you in some ways. And always as well, like fighting when you're not there. You know, um that was really important for me as well. So, yeah.
Jacob Kildoo: Do you stay in touch with any of those people?
Katriona O'Sullivan: Yeah, so Miss Arkinson, I went up there last year and had afternoon, a little salad – an Irish salad, with her. Mr. Pickering died, unfortunately. Irena had lunch with last week, because she's home from Sydney. I'm going over to Sydney in four weeks. I'm going to stay with her. So, yes, yeah. I'm really grateful for the people. And I try to be a person for other people now. And it's actually a gift to help other people. It sounds like a hassle. You know, because we're all trying to progress. But like the gift of happiness is actually helping other people. It's not an impact factor. It isn't in an impact factor. It is in the connection with the students in caring about your teaching or whatever, or just giving a moment. And I think we just forget that that's where joy is. I know we're all pressured. But the joy is in helping other people. That's where that's where life matters. And so I try now to do that for other people.
Jacob Kildoo: Katriona, one of the, I think, takeaways from the book is how empowering education can be. Especially for those who have been excluded from it historically. But at the same time, and we saw an example of this, you can be really sharply critical of how the British education system often sort of reinforces class hierarchies, even when it claims to be inclusive. You point out that working class students, you know, they're often only accepted once they learn to act like the right kinds of students and so on. Can you talk about what it was like to navigate that tension between education as something that kind of on one hand be liberating, but on the other hand, sort of pressures you to assimilate in a certain way?
Katriona O'Sullivan: Yeah. So, the best I don't know if it's clear in my book this, but like prior to education, to higher education, particularly, I was a very I didn't have criticality at all. Like, it's not it wasn't present in my life. There wasn't it was like, I need to get a council flat, I need to get my welfare. I need to like, don't tell him anything. Hide, survive. I didn't have like, and then going to Trinity College, it was very difficult being different, but the thing that kept me there was the amazing experience of learning. Like, you're the growth intellectually of being able to see the world differently. And how….what an honor that is to have that. And it was so powerful. Like it was like the elixir. I used to go in and read things and be, oh my God, this person read this and did this years ago. And, you know, the mushrooming or the the sign-ups and firing and learning was is such a gift and it's such an honor to have it and to and so originally at first when I was, you know, going through my level eight or whatever, like, honestly, the gratitude for that gift was all I really had. I didn't have a knowledge of the full system of education prior to that. So I just thought, oh my God, Trinity College, thank you so much for letting me do this and my life feels so much better and I feel good and I feel so grown and then I start reading about education and the history of education and the history of inequality. I remember reading, there's, I don't know if you know Bordeaux, but like I remember reading this article and it's like nearly 100 years old and it was talking about cultural capital. And I was like, they've known this for 100 years. And still my brother is in prison and education is still unequal. So like the gift of education, the joy of it, allowed me to actually see it differently. And so, I can't, so like what Trinity gave me was the ability to actually look at them and say, you're wrong. This is wrong. You're upholding this this system. So that was joyful, but also hurtful at the same time. And like, I write about in my book, all of the trauma of my childhood. The worst experience of my life was waking up in Trinity and realizing I could have been saved. Realizing that I could have been saved and I wasn't. And it's personal to me. Like my sister is, my mom died at 60. My dad was 55. and my sister's kids are in care, she's an addict. She lives an hour away from here. My brother's been in prison his whole life. This isn't, it isn't like abstract, theoretical stuff. It's like actual real lives get affected when we don't do more and we don't use our privilege more. And so when I went, you know, realizing that we've known for years how to solve inequality, we don't do it, we accrue all the benefits for ourselves and our own kids and keep the meritocracy going. All of that, like, really made me angry and hurt me a lot. Um, and also made me feel a bit ashamed about actually having been grateful for it and been part of the, you know, part of, and I am still part of it because I'm in higher education. So I have to align with that. I read for Paulo Ferrar – I love Ferrar – if you've never read him, he talks about you have to be in the system to change the system and to be consciously aware all the time of what you're doing. So anyway, I don't know if I've answered your question. It's been tough. Yeah. And it's actually tough because I actually sometimes with my colleagues feel really angry at some of the things I hear and see and also feel responsible that I have to try and help more because I am someone who has come from that life. So I have a voice. So it can be hard. Yeah. It can be hard.
Jacob Kildoo: Yeah, it sounds like you're still sort of navigating that tension.
Katriona O'Sullivan: I am. Every day. Every month I think, I'm leaving higher education. And then I think, oh, the money's really good. And you can just do nothing if you want to. Not that we ever do nothing. But like someone's doing nothing. You know. It's a hard place to be and to be in. Yeah. No doubt.
Jacob Kildoo: I want to ask a bit about the audience of your book or the audiences, I guess. One of the things that struck me while reading it is that you clearly sort of speak to lots of audiences at once, or different audiences at different times. So you know, sometimes it feels like you're writing to like me, the reader. Other times you're writing sort of to your parents, you're writing to your brother Matthew in very explicitly in the letter of his that you or to him rather that you share. Yeah. Sometimes you're clearly taking aim at sort of people in power or in an education system, things like that. So I guess I want to ask you, for your part, who were you writing for? And or maybe the better way of framing it is, um, how were you thinking about your audience while you were writing the book?
Katriona O'Sullivan: So my hope was, I suppose in terms of audiences, there was kind of three that I had in mind, but my real hope was that some girl or woman would read it and say, "Oh my God, it wasn't my fault." "I didn't fail." "It wasn't me." That was a really important thing for me that like women particularly would feel seen and less responsible for the things that they didn't achieve. Because, you know, I have thousands of messages from people, from women particularly, who say, "Thank you." "I didn't know." "You know, I thought I was bad." Because I thought I was bad. And I walked around, and when you think you're bad, you choose bad things. You don't know that you can, you know, that there is an option to choose better things, so in the secret moments of writing I thought, oh God, if there's going to be a woman somewhere who's going to read this and think it wasn't my fault, or maybe I can do that. And I've had so many, you know, even this week a girl sent me a screengrab of her CAO and she got into university. She's like, "You've inspired me to try." I'm like, "Oh, Jesus, that's amazing." And then on the other side, the angry side or the side of me that like sees people who can do more who don't. I wanted to challenge them. I wanted to challenge people to think differently about failures, people who fail, about poor people, about our potential. I wanted to highlight the things that got me through as well because, you know, if it was today, so like I marched over to Trinity College in in 2001, it was. And back then the policies and practices and people that were in place were able to support me to get to where I am today, but if I marched over today, first of all, I wouldn't get in because there's no office. Now you have to fill in a form online that nobody, you don't get to see anybody, and seeing people is important. It's important to be able to when you're scared. So there's no childcare anymore. There's no grants, it's not free anymore. So like it was a call to action to say, I'm not a charity case, I'm an amazing academic. I've published in Nature, I'm the dog's bollocks. And if you invest in, if you invest in this, you will get this. You can potentially get this. It's not charity. We shouldn't cut services. We should reinstate services because excellence lives in all communities and opportunity doesn't. So I was hopeful that policymakers would see it and read it and go or their aids would and they'd tell them we should do something with this person. And then again, the final thing was I just wanted to thank people. You know, the teachers particularly, or the educators, or the community workers, I wanted them to read it. I and I do talks all the time for them. I always say, if you need an outcome because maybe because sometimes they never see it. Mr. Pickering never saw what he did, he died. He never knew that what he did for me actually got me into Trinity College. Like he instilled this love of books in me and told me I was brilliant at English, and in my interview for Trinity, when I was failing, they asked me, are you good at books? And I was like, it was like he was standing behind me. I was like, "Well, actually, did you know that Shylock was the victim in The Merchant of Venice?" Because he taught me all these things. And so his work many years later changed my life, and I wanted to remind people who do the work that what you do matters and that it changes lives, it changes and it's important. And so and I think I've done that because I get so many wonderful emails, so many wonderful, wonderful responses from all of them people, which is really amazing. Yeah, no, that's wonderful.
Jacob Kildoo: Yeah, no, that's wonderful. Great. Well, at this time, I want to turn things over to you all to ask any questions you have for Katriona.
Audience member - Alison Rice: ...from the outskirts and beyond, so place and geography playing a major role in that. And, I'd love to know if that is also part of, you know, how you conceive of your own movement to Trinity for education. And you were mentioning, of course, that "Trinity" for you was not the center of Trinity, but you were in a particular part of Trinity. So I find that quite interesting. Also language itself. And, you know, I'm from Southern California and I speak a certain English, and I hear you speaking this wonderfully lyrical, you know, English, that, of course, you know, to me represents Ireland. But of course, class is often represented in the way we speak and in our relationship to language itself and how we approach it. And I'd love if you could speak a bit to, one of the phenomena that someone like Annie Ernaux and others who represent what we call the transfuge de classe in French, you know, really, a migrant who has left a certain class behind in many senses in order to make it in Paris with a Parisian accent and in the Parisian educational system. And so, you know, such interesting dynamics there, almost like the dynamics I study, which are those of real immigrants and migrants to France, for instance, from the larger Francophone world, and needing to learn a new language which might be French and not a native tongue. But has it at all been to you... so, I'm thinking place, but also language – has it been a needing to "master" to, you know, approach English in a certain way as a language of education and then a language, of course, of writing and and then professional career?
Katriona O'Sullivan: So, I love that question, especially around place. I think it's funny because when Trinity colleg is, like I lived like 15 minutes away in the most disadvantaged areas in one of them in Dublin, and then Trinity is like the most affluent. And the walk across, you know, you would walk across through the poverty into the affluence. And it's interesting around place, I think in Ireland particularly because we have so much rural, so many people living in rural Ireland, there is a there is class issues that go with actually being working-class or underclass or poor and rural. And often times people talk to me about that as well, but they also talk to me about going to Trinity for let's use Trinity as the example. We've only got seven, we've more than seven, but we have seven old universities here now. And Trinity is like the most privileged, as well as UCD, but people who come from the country, which is outside of Dublin, and their experience, because I'll talk about my experience as an interloper in terms of class and they'll go, "Well, I felt like that way as well because I had a bogger accent and I was and I wasn't part of it." So location is a really important thing and because I was born in England and I have an English accent as well as an Irish twang (anyone who's Irish will hear English, anyone who's not Irish will hear Irish), which is so weird. But there's that space as well, because people can't class me in the same way that you would class someone from inner-city Dublin, because of the accent. So there's also loads of complexities around being able to class someone, and we do that a lot here is trying to check where people are from. Like in Trinity they'd ask you what school you went to, and then they'd know, you know, what area you're from in Dublin. The class thing around language, I think that's so important. Like for me the gift that my father gave me, gave me great hair, it gave me a propensity towards addiction, which I give back, but he gave me the gift of books. So I read. He taught me to read and so language, I expression and language I always had. So when people talk to me about, like, what makes me different, I hate that. I'm like, everyone's talented from where I come from. But if I had to differentiate me to some of the other kids that grew up like me, it was books. It was reading. And so I had language, but I also was taught to speak in a way that was different to people in Trinity. And also even now when I write academically, it's so hard to write academically when I want to write with my working-class voice, which is different. And I think it adds a layer and it adds a layer a lot to my friends and colleagues who would become from a different class in terms of writing or expression, because there's another layer of, like, not doing it correctly, not knowing the words. And because academia is so the writing is so dry and convoluted at times. And like it takes a day to write a sentence sometimes. Where you could just say, I f***ing hated that thing or you know what's been amazing is actually discovering, you know, hip-hop pedagogy for example, or places where there are places that are now beginning to celebrate expression of words in ways that relates specifically to class or culture. And I think that would make life a lot easier in academia. Either, like my first essay that I handed in to my psychology lecturer, he said, if there's three spelling mistakes or punctuation errors in the first paragraph, I'm not marking it. I'm sending it back to you guys. And like we were a class of disadvantaged kids, early school leavers or whatever. Like that was, we were all, "Oh sh*t, I left school." Um, so it is a very complex thing and actually the confidence that is a, the people, I think people feel like they can't speak right. That's a big thing. Is I don't have the words. And people will always say to me, even my middle, my working-class friends will say, "But you can, you can speak the words. You have big words," they will say to me. And so there's definitely, like, some work to be done around inclusion of language and the and not making it so restrictive. Because it just makes it so distanced. That's why we're so elite, like the academy is so far away from people who have a gift, but they might not necessarily be able to just use the big words, the sentences. Um, so it's a really brilliant question. And I still struggle with it. I still struggle with being myself in my language, and it's tiring. Like if I have a meeting, oh my God, and there's people in the meeting who don't know me, it's really like, "Okay. Don't say f***. Don't say f***." And then it might just slip out by accident. And I'm like, "I'm sorry. Sorry, I'm not, you know," I make a joke, "I'm not swearing at you. You know the difference." And then I'm like, "Why can't I say, why can't I use my expression? Why, why, why are you telling me that I can't be who I am?" Because like we loved each other as kids like that. Like my family spoke like that, we weren't violent. It wasn't like there's a difference between violence. Sorry, I'm going on a rant there, but good question. Really good question. Thank you.
Audience member: So nice to meet you. Thank you. Um, I have two, one is a yes no question, the other is more. Are there other access programs? Does your current university have an access program, or is Trinity unique?
Katriona O'Sullivan: No, there are others. There are others, yes. The one that was in Trinity– so there's different versions. So the Trinity year-long one is a foundation year. And yes, there is a couple more of them in Ireland, but they're not funded by the state. They don't agree with them so they're funded– the university decides to fund them through other funds that they have, but the state doesn't necessarily fund them and recognize them as a program. Yes.
Audience member: And the other is actually that part of your last reading and kind of your current views about Trinity, I do remember when you wrote that you went to the access office, you were glad that it was on the edge, that it was not on the main campus. I guess just talk a little bit about that, or the realization. Did you really feel that way at that time?
Katriona O'Sullivan: Yes, because I felt, I think I did. I think there was so being outside of Trinity. So intellectually afterwards, as a postdoc, beyond my, at the time, being in that little space that was at the back of Trinity, there was something lovely about that. There was something lovely about the connectedness and that it was kind of us. You're like a baby. You're like a baby student, and you're not really a student. And there's something amazing about that and it feels safe. And so there is a question around like that cultural clash that may have happened if I was straight in. So you like you get tastes, you do taster lectures over in the big college. You know, there's lots of opportunities to mingle, but later on, so at the time it was good, because it wasn't like straight in, which I may not have survived because of feeling so different and being so different. But the issue of my reflection around it being outside is this idea that we need to do something separate and not necessarily educate the college or the university about the value of education and these students. So like by saying, look, we're going to take these special 30 and put them in this little space and prep them and then bring them over to us. That does nothing to, like that's been going on for 30 years now, and it's exactly the same. There's no policy change. There's no advocacy for that to become a model nationally. There's no so for me as someone now with more knowledge, I'm like, that actually feels like we should be educating the university and making that more inclusive, rather than necessarily making it separate. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have separation as well, so it's complicated. Support an opportunity to acclimatize, to learn the rules, to experience difference, so you come back, yes, so you come back, but they need to learn that too. Why am I being taught that? Why are they not being taught about the value that I bring? You know, why do I have to explain why I sold sausage rolls to one of my students, like one of the students that I was in class with the year before, I'd been her canteen lady. Why do I have to explain to her that I have a brain just because I work in a canteen? Why are the students not being taught that in the first place? There's some space for educating the privileged and the majority about inequity as well, rather than preparing us for them. Prepare them for us as well and make sure they understand it. And they should understand it because they have the criticality. And it's the application of that criticality that I'm quite annoyed over and questioning of, but I still still think there is a space for separate spaces to answer it. Absolutely. Yeah, because you remember that moment in that early writing. Yeah, maybe I wouldn't have marched into the campanile. I don't know if I would've. I might have because I'm a bit brazen, but.
Audience Member: My name is Pamela, nice to meet you. Um, I work at a university where at least a third of the students are poor, probably more than that but documented about a third of the students. And I've done a lot of work around trying to simplify access and also training faculty to hear how their language might be heard by the students they're working with and one of the things I love about your book is the the way that you present double narratives, you know, what you're saying inside save me and what you're saying because you're protecting who you are and you're being loyal to your world as as you're interfacing with someone who represents an institution, but also do a lovely job of also presenting how you hear the institutional figures around you, which may be different from what their intentions are. But in any case, we do a lot of work with instructors and with students and staff trying to make that difference, those double layers visible and to try to create an equitable environment so that students don't have to experience language and environments as barring their access. One of the biggest challenges that we keep working at and that is very hard in addition to how to scale the small program, right, which is a big higher ed problem. But um one of the big challenges is finding the right language to reach out to students who opt out from the very beginning, you know, they enroll but they really disappear from any ability to communicate with them within the first week or the second week and they're, you know, you lay out so many of the reasons why they're disappearing. But I wondered if you'd explored that warm outreach to people who are reading the institution within the first week or the second week and deciding that it's telling them to go away. What's the right language to bridge that?
Katriona O'Sullivan: That's a really good question and really hard. Like the first things that come to mind is to be sure that everybody is being seen and thought about the same way. So you know, what I think about I always use this example of my own sons. So it's my we're privileged now, you know, we're middle class family now. The lads are going to university. Like my son uh started a course and and left a course because he wasn't it wasn't for him. Didn't like it. Didn't and and we were like, okay, that's fine. Let's find you something else, you know, because that's what you do. And and so I just be sure that you know, maybe they're just not into it the same way everyone, you know, so I'd be checking the numbers and making sure that it's not if if it is definitely something to do with class or disadvantage then just make sure it's just not a general thing that happens because that happens. Um, the hard piece with that is sometimes there's not anything that you can do. I mean, like there are times when I would have gone to a place and just thought this is absolutely not for me and there would be nothing that the place could do because at the time I just wasn't ready for that opportunity. And the fact that you're asking the question suggests to me that the place is welcoming and it is warm. I mean the pre-entry stuff is really important. So I think for mature students or students that have been out of school or out of education who are not necessarily coming directly from school or that having that we've found that having like a pre-entry relationship with them where it's not everybody together is a really important thing. So we host like a weekend in the institution for our in our institution for students that are uh we call them access students. So that would be our mature students, students with disabilities, students from working class communities or social class and we have like a weekend for them so that they bring together and there's like activities, there's team building so they can make a friend, they can meet a student who's been ahead of them. So sometimes that can be quite nice. I think the overwhelming first day when everybody's there might be something to consider as being a problem. So maybe that outreach piece beforehand. Um, getting them because often times I find I'm research shows if we brand, we can get a student branded with the university with a hoodie or a visit or whatever, it actually increases their likelihood to go and stay. So that might be something else to think about. But also, I also think that philosophically like saying no to something is okay as well, even though because we're so measured in higher education in terms of completion and attendance and sometimes it kind of can make us worry about things that are just part of a life course for people. And so and that's an institutional issue is that we need to accept that people will fail and they'll fail more and they'll disengage more and we need to be okay with that as institutions and we're not okay with that and so that can be problematic I think as well. But the pre-entry stuff might be helpful. A nice weekend in your institution, nice team building exercise. I don't know if you do that already, but...
Audience Member: We do especially with transfer students and especially that um uh also with our first time um students and we also teach faculty to send out messages at the end of the semester to the students who haven't um succeeded in the class and to say, you know, this might not have been the right moment. Let's talk about when it will be the right time to get what your steps are.
Katriona O'Sullivan: That's great. We don't do that at our institution. We blame the student. (laughing)
Audience member: But I love the double dialogue so what you're thinking and what you're actually saying and get what you're hearing and what the institutional figures are saying. It's so I I will use that when I'm working with people.
Katriona O'Sullivan: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. That's really nice. That's what I hoped for, so I'm really grateful for that feedback. You had a question, did you?
Audience Member: Yeah, I guess um two questions. Um, one is uh, if you have any – and if this is not your experience – but if you have any thoughts about the differences between the way class works and is read in the United States versus in Ireland? Um, some differences came to mind but I don't know if they're true or not. Um, and so if you have any reflections on that I'd be interested. And then I guess also it kind of relates to what you said about blaming the student and that's kind of like blame and shame has been a theme of what you've been saying so far and I I have not read the whole book yet, but I look forward to doing that but um, the two narratives that seem really pernicious to me at least in the and there are many but in the US, one is um taking the success story and and then saying like applying a kind of bootstraps narrative to it. Well, you did it so why can't everybody else or why didn't everybody else? Um, and then I guess the other and I don't know how um, you alluded to it but I feel like this has become really powerful in the US is a kind of biological determinism that has come back like roaring back into public discourse that everything is hereditary, whether it's, you know, intelligence, mental illness, poverty, we want to obesity. We want to blame genes for everything and that's another way of kind of taking society out of the equation. Um, so I don't know. Those are just not really coherent questions.
Katriona O'Sullivan: So, that's a really coherent question. It was really. So, it's funny because I'd hate to be poor in the US because of the social welfare system and the healthcare system. So for me the difference is the level of state and country support for people who are poor, but like poverty affects most people the same way when you grow up poor, even if you're in a developing country. Like some of the… there hasn't been many critical comments from of my book, which has been amazing. But what, you know, what I talk about "poor-poor" and "rich-poor." So when I do my talks, I talk about when people are "poor-poor," they lack resources, love, care, opportunity, and the ability to regulate themselves. And what happens when you grow up "poor-poor" is you're at risk of all the things you actually just talked about that we say are biological that are being said as biological. So when you grow up "poor-poor," you're more likely to be sexually abused (10 times more likely to be sexually abused), to have sexual trauma, to be addicted, to be obese. So, I think that what I'm trying to say is the services and supports that are on offer differ around different countries and around the world, especially in the US, I think it would be harder to be poor in the US. And I know that's that's like, I don't think I'd be here if I'd have been poor there. But then Tara Westover, her book Educated, she was poor in the US and she ended up in Harvard.
So there's a similarity across all "poor-poor" people, but it's what happens within the different systems and supports that will probably predict outcomes, access to healthcare, access to. But even here in Ireland, like we have a social welfare system and a free healthcare system and it's still "poor-poor" people will die quicker and earlier than anybody else. In terms of the– I love the biological. I love when people try that with me. I love explaining statistics and epigenetics to them and saying, like we don't we can't even map the fucking, we can't even map our cells. Like, you know, this idea that we know biologically that the science is even that far progressed. I just get into a scientific argument with people when they do that. But it is scary. This is what I say because I am obviously very argumentative at times. I'll say, "There was a really famous person in history who had that view." "Do you know who it was?" And they go like this, "Ah." I said, "It was Hitler." And then people get really uncomfortable. But it's true at the end of the day. So like, and it would be it would be in some way easier if we could just explain everything by biology. But like at the end of the day, you know, if it was biological, then my brother wouldn't be in prison and my sister wouldn't be addicted and my mom wouldn't be dead and I wouldn't be, you know, if it's biological. So I have conversations like that. It's not very often because people with them views sometimes, the scary part now I think is that them views have always existed and there is research happening in them areas, but people are more likely to voice them now. And I think that's a good thing, because when people can voice them, other people can stand up. It's like what's happening in the US at the moment around EDI, around DEI. It depends on which way you you put your letters around. I actually think it's a really important time. I actually think this is not a bad thing. And I know that's scary, but I am calling for in my book for us to stop looking at EDI like it's a charitable endeavor. Like everybody should be concerned about this because diversity brings excellence. It's not charity. So there's a– I think there's a chance for powerful people to actually stand up and say, we are actually going to defend these things because they are important. But I wouldn’t like to be poor in America. I'm just going to be honest with you. Not now. Not ever maybe, but I'd heard loads of stories of people escaping as well. Hopefully that's okay. Thank you.
Audience member - Ananda Devi: I come from a completely different sort of viewpoint, more from the literary viewpoint. I was wondering whether before you knew or realized what a talent you have for dialogue, for example, or for creating those scenes that you're taking from your own life, but creating them in such an extraordinarily moving and powerful way that they immediately speak to the reader. It's such a difficult thing to do, like that scene with the teacher, which brought tears to your eyes and to mine too. And it's a scene which is described from the literary point of view in such a powerful and delicate and beautiful way and it says everything it has to say in a tiny perfect sort of place and situation. I was wondering whether you knew this about yourself before writing it.
Katriona O'Sullivan: I still don't know about myself. I still, hopefully I've just written my second book and it's not a it's not a follow on, it's a different topic, it's called Hungry and it's a biography of my body as a woman, as a poor woman, and I have, no, I still, I think the thing about writing is there's always doubt. Like, you know, you know. Like, and I know writers now and they're amazing and they doubt themselves and I doubt and I doubt. I write something and occasionally I read it and go, oh my God, that was amazing. Then I went, no, it wasn't. So no, but I always, so I met a girl I knew about, I knew her years ago and I met her on chance in the street about two weeks ago and she said, "Oh, I've read your book," and she said, "You were always an amazing storyteller." And I said, "Really?" I always knew I was a good orator or a speaker. You know, as a kid, I loved drama and I loved stories. So I always knew I had a capacity to tell a story, but I never thought I was a good writer and I still don't think I'm a good writer. Even though I think that it's a good book, I still have doubts, but I think that's good. I've met some a**holes who just think they're amazing and they're definitely not. So I'd prefer to be a doubtful genius than a confident mediocre writer. So, but, thank you. The other thing when I wrote Poor was, okay, so academic writing, like, I think I wanted it to be beautiful. Like I wanted for you, someone in literary circles, to say this is a beautiful book because I have an ego and I wanted to write a beautiful book as well that feels like fiction but is real. And so you saying that to me is a gift. Thank you. And hopefully I will continue to write. I'd love to write fiction. I'd like to try but I don't know, I'm scared. It's so scary, writing is so scary. It's such a hard job and I admire people who write, who try to tell stories, to share their… it's such a difficult thing to do, but also amazing.
Jacob Kildoo: Well, this whole conversation has been a gift. Thank you so much, Katriona.
Katriona O'Sullivan: Thank you. Thank you.
This transcript was created with the help of AI tools (Adobe Premiere Pro and Claude) and edited for improved accuracy and readability. Minor errors and discrepancies from the original interview may persist; please reach out to the Nanovic Institute if you take notice of any significant issues.