Hidden Injuries Of Class Research Articles

Gendering ‘The Hidden Injuries of Class’ and In-Work Poverty in Britain

Gendering ‘The Hidden Injuries of Class’ and In-Work Poverty in Britain

Alma's (Not) Normal: Normalising Working-Class Women in/on BBC TV Comedy

This article examines the BBC sitcom Alma's Not Normal and its representation of white working-class femininities in/on British TV comedy. After The Royle Family creator Caroline Aherne's death in July 2017, the BBC created a bursary in memory of the comedy star, awarding £5,000 to the successful applicant to develop a pilot comedy script. Though open to people of all backgrounds and genders, the three winners so far have been working-class women – Sophie Willan, Amy Gledhill and Kiri Pritchard-McLean – an important shift from the recent success of female-fronted and female-authored middle-class comedies on the BBC such as Miranda and Fleabag. This article examines the award's first winner: Boltonian Sophie Willan and her series Alma's Not Normal. While Phil Wickham argues that contemporary working-class sitcoms in Britain display the ‘hidden injuries of class’, something that is felt but no longer acknowledged, I contend that Willan exposes class wounds by explicitly referencing and drawing attention to social issues in her TV series. More specifically, I argue that, as a working-class woman in the North West, Willan uses comedy to interrogate the intersections of class and gender. This textual analysis will then be used as a framework to conceptualise the labour of working-class women in British television comedy, mainly because class has been overlooked as a social category in contemporary scholarship on feminism and humour.

Learning the rules of the game: How is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds?

AbstractFocusing on the lived intersection of social class and hegemonic masculinity, this article uses data elicited over a 5‐year period to analyze the experiences of 10 white male participants from nonprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who were recruited as information technology professionals by a prestigious professional service firm (PSF). Employing a Bourdieusian perspective, we reveal how participants learned to enact the configuration of corporate masculinity deemed hegemonic in the field of their employing PSF. We pay particular attention to how participants engaged with distinctive forms of cultural capital to enact corporate masculinity, and the symbolic violence and “hidden injuries of class” this represents and leads to. In turn, we highlight how classed masculine norms create exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination in organizations. We suggest that class becomes recognized as a germane area for scholars of diversity and inequality to focus on and integrate in the future, in their ongoing investigations into which social norms create marginalization in organizations.

Atrocity Stories and Access to Elite Universities: Chickens at the Station

The article explores the interactional management of class relations using atrocity stories as a conceptual device vis‐à‐vis new case study data. We argue that interactionist ideas are well placed to comment on the hidden injuries of class in the higher education sector and demonstrate this using atrocity stories and Goffman's work. We use the atrocity stories of atypical cases (non‐traditional graduates of an elite university) to expose class differences. Atrocity stories and Goffman's work on cooling, impression management, and total institutions were used here to unlock extended interviews with graduates from the 1960s–1980s who attended one elite British university. The findings expose the manifestation of the English class structure and a variety of responses. The conclusion finds evidence of resistance rather than challenge. A call is made for more longitudinal ethnographic research exploring how universities might promote access agendas—with particular attention to those both upwardly and downwardly mobile.

Class acts? Working class student officers in students’ unions

This article explores the recent emergence of ‘working-class student officer’ roles in students’ unions associated with elite UK universities. These student representative roles are designed to represent the interests of working-class students within their universities and sit alongside student representatives for liberation groups and/or student communities. Based on interviews with postholders and using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and Reay’s applications of a ‘reflexive habitus’, I explore how these students have come to assert a public and political ‘working-class student’ identity within their universities. Their commentaries reveal the ‘makings of class’ in a context where students are very aware of claims for recognition and the ‘hidden injuries of class’ and offer an insight into how working-class students are finding new ways to navigate their classed identities in HE.

Accumulated Injuries of Environmental Injustice: Living and Working with Petrochemical Pollution in Nanjing, China

This article examines perceptions of living and working with toxic pollution in two periurban petrochemical areas in Nanjing, China, a heavily polluted megacity on the Yangtze River. Despite the concentrated geography of the petrochemical industry in Nanjing, protests over pollution have been small scale and highly localized, paralleling dynamics in many “cancer villages” of rural China. This contrasts with high-profile anti-PX (paraxylene) protests that have happened in Xiamen, Dalian, and other cities in China over the past decade. This article draws on twenty-five semistructured interviews and participant observation with workers and residents in both petrochemical areas. We extend the idea of the “hidden injuries of class” (Sennett and Cobb 1972) to analyze the cumulative effects of social and environmental inequalities in China, contributing to interdisciplinary debates about environmental justice and health, environmental pollution in China, and the lived experiences of toxic geographies. We argue that people living and working with petrochemical pollution in Nanjing, China, experienced accumulated injuries of environmental injustice: multilayered and intersecting effects on health and well-being, which reflect social inequalities between different populations. Accumulated injuries of environmental injustice emerged in interrelated ways: epistemic injustices about toxic exposures; unequal and inadequate compensations for environment harm; and collective frustrations over political powerlessness. The research has wider implications for analyzing the complex social effects of living and working with environmental injustice in different places around the world. Key Words: China, environmental health, environmental justice, petrochemical industry, toxic pollution.

Basic Skills, Literacy Practices and the ‘Hidden Injuries of Class’

This paper draws on qualitative data from three research projects that examined the impact of poor skills on the life chances of adults living in two disadvantaged areas of England. We employed the theories of Goffman and Bourdieu to document how problems with literacy have a corrosive effect on the identities of interviewees, threatening their wellbeing. Though learning difficulties occur across all social backgrounds, the poor family resources and educational opportunities of our respondents meant they struggled to overcome their literacy problems when young, thus shaping later life course transitions. Thus the origins of the shame that our adults felt about their poor skills lie in part in the distinctive classed experiences they had when young. However, the resourcefulness of our respondents meant that many had secured employment, bought homes and become parents which obscured the ongoing psychic problems that a lifetime of poor skills had bestowed on our sample. The disjuncture between the apparent material standing of our sample and the ‘hidden injuries of class’ raises questions about how we understand the operation of class across the life course and the role of literacy, learning and wellbeing in the shaping of social identities.

Stuart Hall at Eighty

Stuart Hall at Eighty

Hidden injuries of class and bourgeoisie dreams: Casino workers, traditional shipbuilders and boutique hotels in Macao

With more than US$15 billion invested in Macao's gaming industry between 2005 and 2010 for the creation of world-class casinos, theatres, theme parks and luxury shopping malls, intense casino development transformed Macao's urban landscape. Much is said about Macao's astonishing rate of tourist arrivals and staggering gross domestic product in the last four years as a combined result of longstanding casino tourism and nascent World Heritage tourism in the 29.5-sq km postcolonial territory. Less is known about its 500,000 residents and workers. Building upon existing work that interrogates the salient connection between the self and class position of workers, I examine the 'hidden injuries of class' or the difficulties for the individual worker in terms of achieving dignity and respect in capitalistic Macao. Specifically, drawing upon life and work history interviews with former traditional shipbuilders and casino workers, I examine both pre-casino and casino Macao's class experiences and relations. In doing so, I seek to relate the present with the past and illustrate how the building of Macao's bourgeoisie dreams in forms of the territory's pursuit of casino resorts and boutique hotels brought about 'hidden injuries of class' for two different generations of Macao proletariats.

Cognitive Structure of Social Mobility: Moral Sentiments and Hidden Injuries of Class

Drawing on the mobility accounts of eighty-nine respondents who perceived themselves as socially mobile in post-war Hong Kong, I devise a typology of four biographies – normal, choice, special, and emotional biographies – to examine the cognitive structure of their accounts in order to make sense of moral sentiments of class. Three tentative conclusions are drawn. First, class feelings could be seen as better class markers than self-reported class identity. Second, upward mobility does not simply complicate class feelings but could lead to a distorted class sentiment that justifies rather than challenges class inequality; yet four biographies show a variety of its operation. Third, upward mobility does not necessarily treat previous class injuries; instead, it could bring new class injuries. In sum, social fluidity of a class society does not make class inequality less arbitrary or more just nor does it necessarily render class feelings and moral sentiments of class as irrelevant.

The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors Michelle M. Tokarczyk (bio) Elizabeth Bidinger . The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography: Representation of Family by Four American Authors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. 202 pp. ISBN 0-7864-2576-8, $35.00. In this text Elizabeth Bidinger takes up the often overlooked problems in writing autobiography that includes family members who, unlike the author, have not chosen to have their lives represented in literature. Given that most recognized writers stand to profit from literary works, there is a power imbalance between autobiographers and their families. This imbalance is heightened when autobiographers from the working-class represent family members, whom Bidinger classifies, following G. Thomas Couser, as "vulnerable subjects." According to Couser, as cited by Bidinger, vulnerable subjects are "persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship but are unable to represent themselves in writing or to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else" (3). In essence, working-class people do not have the facility with language or literary standing to represent themselves, and their ability to give meaningful consent is often compromised. Bidinger further argues that the representation of working-class subjects is problematic because many Americans are biased against the lower socioeconomic classes. Authors from working-class families often write with the expressed purpose of giving voice to those who cannot speak for themselves, or of representing an unfamiliar way of life to mainstream America. However, good intentions do not necessarily correlate with ethical representation, which Bidinger finds compromised in many works. Her definition of ethical writing is somewhat vague, but she most clearly articulates it in the final pages when she refers to Lynn Z. Bloom's view that in ethical autobiographies the truth is conveyed through characters and story "untainted by vindictiveness or special pleading" (190). Elsewhere in the text, Bidinger cautions against autobiographers demonizing or Orientalizing their subjects. Bidinger begins with a chapter in which she analyzes some twentieth-century texts for their strategies in representing working-class relatives: Theodore Dreiser's Dawn, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Anzia Yezerska's Red [End Page 227] Ribbon on a Horse, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory. In Dreiser's and Wright's work, she finds the genesis of the contemporary tendency to showcase family secrets, and in Wright's case, to distort familial characterizations for ideological purposes. Yezerska's autobiography laments her distortion of family members' lives in her fiction while simultaneously continuing the distortion by glaringly omitting her child from her autobiography. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings achieves an aesthetic and ethical excellence because it presents family members as complex characters who enabled her creativity and ambition. Angelou neither romanticizes nor demonizes. Bidinger's discussion of this text is especially illuminating in presenting a model of an ethical autobiography, and in doing so, further explaining the extraordinary power of this work. Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory is seen as a noteworthy departure from the genre of ethnic autobiography. While most of these works represent the development of an ethnic identity, Rodriguez explores the transformative impact of an education that alienates him from his roots. Bidinger is a keen, close reader and a skillful prose stylist. Yet it's difficult to place this chapter in the context of the book, for the works discussed here are rarely—if ever—mentioned later in the text. Bidinger also offers no rationale for beginning with works written in the early twentieth century when, as she briefly notes, Ben Franklin's autobiography, slave narratives, captivity narratives, and many other forms of personal writing existed before the American republic. Finally, while Bidinger is well versed in the scholarship on autobiography, she seems unfamiliar with that in working-class studies, with the exception of Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb's The Hidden Injuries of Class. The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography is, unfortunately, weak on class analysis. The body of the book is comprised of four chapters, each of which focuses on a contemporary autobiography. Bidinger praises...

Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England

Journal Article Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England Get access Andy Wood Andy Wood School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 39, Issue 3, Spring 2006, Pages 803–826, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2006.0024 Published: 01 March 2006

London: 1753 by Sheila O’Connell

90 and images cherished by some groups of people for others symbolize their own or a previous generation’s deprivation and hidden injuries of class. Mr. Borsay catalogues historical personages chosen and omitted from representations and retells quarrels over what elementsinBath’shistory to present and when. He describes how the organization of space in Bath works to separate, stigmatize, exclude, and elevate people. This book is a postmodern encyclopedia of almost all the sources of the historiography of Georgian Bath. We are shown how difficult it is to alter popular romance, guidebooks, and ‘‘common knowledge’’by accurate information gleaned from primary documents. Thus Mr. Borsay comes to think that Bath today is the product of the images through which people have experienced it. This study represents a missed opportunity and worthy project gone awry. Mr. Borsay’s earlier comprehensive study, The English Urban Renaissance, 1660– 1770, showsno doubt thataccuratescholarship is possible and can function usefully beyond the small circle of people who might read it through. The present ends by arguing that Georgian Bath’s ‘‘national heritage of beauty’’ has lasted because it ‘‘consoles’’ and ‘‘comforts’’ ‘‘people’’as an element in theiridentities, and that late twentieth-century uses of Bath exemplify how ‘‘people’’ ‘‘integrate the past with the present’’ in order to achieve ‘‘fundamental well-being.’’ Which people? In 1984 Orwell wrote ‘‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’’ At one point Mr. Borsay says ‘‘the past is a competitive business.’’The near future iseven more so. This book defends supposedly endangered objects and cultural ideals through a semiotic justification of picturesque nostalgia. A useful heritage study should be based on an unsentimental accuracy. Ellen Moody George Mason University SHEILA O’CONNELL. London: 1753. London: British Museum, 2003. Pp. 272. $47 (paper). This is the handsome and useful catalogue of an exhibition celebrating the 250th anniversary of the BritishMuseum, on display from May 23 to November 23, 2003. It contains 350 black-and-white illustrations , and thirty additional illustrations in color (the most charmingofthem, Carmontelle’s watercolor of Mozart, age eight, at the harpsichord), each accompanied by a cogent and informative commentary . The catalogue is prefaced by four essays. In ‘‘Curious and Entertaining—Prints of London and Londoners,’’ Sheila O’Connell tells her story through a wealth of artifacts, trade cards, and other materials. She surveys thethreedominant categories of the print trade (and of the age): topographical views, portraits, and satires. Her study nicelycomplementsthe most valuable of the book’s essays, ‘‘Art and Trade—From the Society of Arts to the Royal Academy of Arts,’’ Celina Fox’s discussion of the Society, founded in 1753 primarily to support the development of designers or artisans for London ’s burgeoning industries: ‘‘carvers, joiners, upholsterers, cabinet-makers, coach-makers and coach painters, sign painters, weavers, curious workers in all sorts of metals, smiths, makers of toys, engravers . . . .’’How this society evolved into the Royal Academy of Arts is told with clarity and precision. Ralph Hyde’s 91 essay on topographical print-making, ‘‘Portraying London Mid-Century— John Rocque and the Brothers Buck,’’ is more narrow but also useful. Finally, Roy Porter’s ‘‘The Wonderful Extent and Variety of London’’ sweeps over the whole of mid-century London in Mr. Porter’s usual dazzling manner,wherebymistakes in details are usually atoned for by the grandeur of the generalizations.Whoelse but Mr. Portercouldsupporthisstatement that during ‘‘the Georgian century the Church’s role in daily life in the city was on the wane’’ with the sole example of Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation? The illustrations gathered for each geographical section—divided into The City; The River; Covent Garden and Bloomsbury; Westminster; St. James and Mayfair—are further subdivided by topics . ‘‘The City’’ has, among others, subsections on city politics, banking, coins, coin balance and weights, street criers, and a most useful group of illustrations (with explanations) pertaining to Elizabeth Canning, including a print of the floor plan of the house at Enfield Wash where she was a ‘‘prisoner.’’ All readers will discover things they did not know. One can discover why ‘‘bone china’’ has that name, why labor actions are called ‘‘strikes,’’who was the bald-headed colonel of the...

More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern

As the sites of a memory that is inevitably public memory, the historian and the archive are implicated in power, and in the production of truth. This truth can be said to involve a gift of the past to the present and therefore a responsibility for this gift. This responsibility involves practising history as a criticism of power. This is how I situate my autobiographical reflections on my formation as a historian, and on the nature of the historical work I have produced. What I discern as a certain cultural distance from large parts of British identity I relate to Irish and class identity.Out of this experience of identity in mid-twentieth-century Britain, one of powerlessness, I develop a critique of the power I believe inherent in liberal notions of history, especially its perceived ethical neutrality. I consider what I call the politics of the liberal archive from the viewpoint of my sense of being an intellectual and cultural outsider (on the inside). This politics of history also concerns a living out of the hidden injuries of class. I then turn to my own work, considering how it has dwelt on themes that have been shaped by my personal formation, in particular my interest in 'the social', and in the nature and operation of power. I consider changing notions of the social and their relation to historical writing, especially social history. I look at the linguistic or cultural turn in history, especially British history, and the reasons for opposition to it, identifying a postmodernism which has the powerful mark of the secondly modern school experience upon it. I also dwell upon the pleasures of history, and the stratagems for provoking the otherness of the past into being, particularly that of place. I relate Irish, diasporic identity that this task of provocation and conclude by dwelling upon historical writing as both witness and restitution.

SOCIAL CLASS AND PARENTAL ATTITUDES TOWARD EDUCATION

This study investigates the impact of social class on parents' attitudes toward their children's education. The results suggest that two concepts—resistance and conformity—are central to understanding parental attitudes toward education and the process by which those attitudes are shaped. The data indicate that the probability parents will conform to or resist the meritocratic ideology of acquiring a college degree to help ensure occupational success tends to depend on parents' social-class background and, concomitantly, on whether they have experienced “hidden injuries of class.” A more inclusive sampling strategy proved useful in documenting the varied attitudes found among working-class and middle-class parents. The attitudes of parents toward higher education have the potential to influence their children's attitudes toward education, their children's chances of obtaining a college degree, and their own chances of returning to school. This research suggests that the family is an important site for cultural production and social reproduction.

The Hidden Injuries of Class

The Hidden Injuries of Class

A Note on Markoff and Lembcke's Review of the Hidden Injuries of Class

A Note on Markoff and Lembcke's Review of the Hidden Injuries of Class

The Hidden Injuries of Class.

The Hidden Injuries of Class.

Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Random House, 1973, pp. 275

Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Random House, 1973, pp. 275

The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb

The Hidden Injuries of Class, <i>by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb</i>