When you face discrimination and marginalisation, it makes you start to question yourself and your own ability, which I still do. Rarely will you be gifted opportunities, whereas I saw others benefit from them. So I started to wonder whether they were just better than me: were they getting opportunities because they deserved them, while I didn’t?

My experiences as a first-generation philosopher have been shot through with luck. I grew up in the middle of the Canadian prairies, in an 800-person town so remote it had neither paved roads nor stoplights. No one in my family had attended university.

The barriers faced by first-generation students are not accidental. First-generation students’ hurdles around college's administrative, academic, and lack of cultural capital are a pattern of systematic biases.

I am a first generation philosopher. All of my grandparents and my mother were immigrants to the United States from Denmark. In immigrant neighborhoods in those days, occupations tended to go by nationality.

Growing up working-class, I know we are resourceful and compassionate, that we do not only seek connection to find gain but also to genuinely find friendship and solidarity. We mustn’t give up trying to improve conditions for all, especially for contingent faculty and grad students.