Urban Middle Class Research Articles

‘Lady Guardians’ of the Royal Society of Horticulture of Portugal, 1898–1906

In the second half of the nineteenth century gardening flourished in Portugal’s public sphere, having considerably expanded beyond the private realms of palaces and villas. Envisioned as a sophisticated branch of knowledge, horticulture became a hub for citizen science, commercial activities, public education, and civic events. This was a context that fostered and advanced women’s involvement and status as gardeners, horticulturists, and educators, a development influenced by popular Portuguese perceptions of women as protectors. The Royal Society of Horticulture of Portugal (founded in Lisbon as “National” in 1898, decreed “Royal” in 1900), instantiated this enmeshment of perception with status by designating women members as ‘Lady Guardians’ while promoting their participation, especially as competitors and jurists in the society’s flower exhibitions. The women of the society offer a window into the more general identities and professional statuses of women horticulturalists as ‘guardians’ in a generalized sense: they included landowners, writers, gardeners, and family business owners, with many assuming greater responsibility in widowhood. At a time when women’s participation in science was highly constricted, horticulture as a field, and the Royal Society of Horticulture as its premier institution, constituted a remarkable opportunity for women to be publicly engaged and recognized for their expertise as amateur botanists alongside their male counterparts. This article’s analysis demonstrates that women horticulturalists in Portugal were a quite heterogenous group, consisting of women from the highest ranks of the nobility, participating alongside women from further social ranks, inclusive of the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and urban middle classes. Their participation in the society not only afforded them opportunities locally and civically, but also internationally, as will be illustrated by a few careers that reflect how education, travels, and professional engagement demonstrated the broad reach of Portuguese women’s horticultural activities.

Understanding humour as the catalyst to social reform: A study of Mahesh Dattani’s Where There Is a Will (1988)

Mahesh Dattani (b. 1958) is a reformist playwright of modern India whose works have been interpreted as texts of social critique. Academics such as Erin B. Mee and Asha Kuthari Chowdhari have attributed his works to the ‘invisible issues’ permeating India’s urban middle classes. They have highlighted how Dattani portrays topics such as gender inequality, homosexuality and communal violence to appeal to the public in pursuit of social reform. This article proposes that humour, in addition to these themes, is an equally essential aspect of Dattani’s reformist visions. It argues that Dattani’s humour resonates with what J. L. Styan calls the ‘dark comedy’. It explores the use of humour in Dattani’s play, Where There Is a Will (1988), through Henri Bergson’s concepts of comical inversion, rigidity and symmetrical repetition, to examine the comical elements of the events, dialogue and characters. This approach assists Dattani in posing reformative queries and, according to Styan, eliciting responses from the readers/audience.

„Wider den nächtlichen Unfug“ – Die Bielefelder Straßenbeleuchtung von 1853 bis in die 1880er Jahre als versicherheitlichende Infrastruktur und Mittel der Selbstdisziplinierung

ZusammenfassungDieser Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem Wandel von Sicherheitsbedürfnissen und technologischen Möglichkeiten im Zuge der Industrialisierung anhand der Etablierung der Bielefelder Straßenbeleuchtung im 19. Jahrhundert. Er zeigt, wie die Entwicklung von der Öl- hin zur Gaslaterne zusammenfiel mit einem veränderten Sicherheitsbedürfnis im städtischen Bürgertum. Mit den technischen Möglichkeiten der Gasbeleuchtung konnte nunmehr der nächtliche städtische Raum durchdrungen werden und dadurch einerseits marginalisierte und als Sicherheitsrisiko wahrgenommene Personengruppen sichtbar gemacht sowie auf der anderen Seite dem Licht inhärente disziplinierende Bestrebungen bei den Bürger*innen internalisiert werden. Waren die städtischen Bevölkerungen der Vormoderne und des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts Laternen noch skeptisch oder ablehnend gegenübergestanden, so war bereits Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts ihre Installation Teil von dezidiert stadtbürgerlichen Forderungen nach mehr persönlicher, ökonomischer und Verkehrssicherheit. So wandelte sich die Laterne von einem Instrument des vormodernen Sichtbarmachens zu einem Instrument beständiger Sichtbarkeit in der Moderne. Dies führte zu neuen Konfliktlinien, da die Expansion der Beleuchtung nicht so umfassend verlief wie vom Stadtbürgertum gefordert. Hier zeigt das Beispiel Bielefeld neben Wandel und Konjunkturen von Versicherheitlichungsbedürfnissen im Zuge der Industrialisierung auch, dass eine Internalisierung obrigkeitsstaatlicher Vorstellungen keinesfalls die Abwesenheit von Konflikt bedeutete. Anhand von Verwaltungsakten und Eingaben wird aus der Perspektive der Historischen Sicherheitsforschung unter Rückgriff auf Foucaults Konzept der Gouvernementalität die Geschichte der Bielefelder Straßenbeleuchtung in den Kontext eines größeren Wandels von Sicherheit, Technik und urbaner Raumgestaltung gesetzt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Technik- und Infrastrukturgeschichte wesentlich dabei helfen, die Erkenntnisse der Historischen Sicherheitsforschung zu vertiefen und zu kontextualisieren. Techniknutzung und -erwartungen waren durch eine bisweilen prekäre Allianz verschiedener Akteursgruppen ein wesentlicher Bestandteil eines neuen Sicherheitsverständnisses als auch der sozialsegmentierten Ordnung des urbanen Raums.

Development-induced dispossession: Adivasi existence in the milieu of contemporary Indian texts in translation

The paradigms of development around the globe involves mechanisms associated with its social purpose, which is more often than not dubious in nature! Natural resources form the fundamental aspect of any developmental activity. But in the process of accumulating these resources, the beneficiaries often rely on malignant mechanisms. The capitalist discourse has always been successful in manifesting their agendas of development as constructive and profitable for the entire humanity. Periodically, when the utility of development is foregrounded by dominant cultural forms, often the ramifications of progress remain uncritiqued. The developmental projects earmarked for the rural population remain unnoticed, for it serves the interest of the elite and the urban middle class. Many a time, the indigenous population, who inhabit the resource rich area are swayed away by the false propaganda for development, ultimately aggravating their existing deprivation. In the case of India, too, amidst all the development activities, the marginalized populace or the so-called Adivasis are the worst sufferers, because they have been encountering displacement for ages. The current study attempts to unveil the displacement of the tribal population (Adivasi) of India due to development projects, thereby offering a critical analysis of the social policies. The study employs select translated literary narratives to examine the development-induced dispossession of tribal population in the colonial, postcolonial and neo-liberal phase of Indian history, adopting the theoretical framework of new historicism.

Urban political economy of elite education: international programs in Chinese elite public high schools

ABSTRACT This ethnographic data-driven article investigates the urban political economy of a new form of elite schooling, which is represented by the fee-charging international programs recently established by ‘key’ public high schools in metro China. Grounding the analysis in Harvey’s work on urbanization and neoliberalism, the literature on China’s development model, and Bourdieu’s theory of capital conversion, this article reveals that the construction of an international program is deeply implicated in the school’s social relationships with the state, real estate developers, and urban middle classes. While the program provides wealthy Chinese families with access to international higher education for accumulating desirable capitals at ‘world-class’ universities, the Chinese elite school generates its own capital. Through theorizing how the creation of the fee-charging international program draws together multiple forms of neoliberal profit-making and multi-scalar capital accumulation, this study adds novel conceptual and empirical insights to the emergent scholarship of elite and international education.

The third Ukraine: A case of civic nationalism

To some extent, the current Russian-Ukrainian may be described as a conflict between two visions of nation, respectively, ethnic and civic models. Putin believes that a language defines a nation. In his understanding, since many Ukrainians are Russian speakers, they are Russians. His perception of Ukraine is anachronistic. He has failed to notice Ukraine's radical transformation since it gained independence. The current Ukrainian identity has a strong civic component. Its core is represented by a new urban middle class with a new set of values. Sustainability of this identity largely depends on longevity and results of the war.

Girls’ education and the cultural capital of Pakistan’s urban middle class

This qualitative study employs a Bourdieusian framework to explore how urban middle-class parents in Pakistan support their daughters’ education while transmitting cultural capital. Parents emphasize talim-o-tarbiyat, referring to education and nurturing. I argue that, owing to the availability of educational resources and the recognition of the cultural capital conferred by Western qualifications, middle-class, educated urban parents choose Western education as talim. Additionally, Tarbiyat motivates their aspirations for their daughter’s education with specific cognitive references, notably Ashraaf values. Through boundary work and concerted cultivation, they reproduce cultural capital, influencing career choices and networks. Nevertheless, educated working women, experiencing a transformation of their habitus, foster new cognitive and social structures for themselves and their daughters. The study identifies desirable cultural capital, suggesting future research on exploring the conversion strategies of educated women’s capital by considering diverse sociocultural factors that intersect with gender dynamics within both private and public spheres.

Death Anxiety Among Urban Middle Class: The Predictive Role of Income and Symbolic Money Attitudes

Terror management theory argues that money can function as an existential anxiety buffer. Therefore, the primary goal of this study ( N = 153) was to examine the relationship of income and symbolic money attitudes to death anxiety among middle-class individuals. In line with our predictions, results demonstrated that higher income earners experienced less death anxiety than their lower income counterparts. In addition, the more those living on low incomes regarded money as a symbol of power, the more prone to death anxiety they were. Low income and symbolic money attitudes, namely the evil and power dimensions, strongly contributed to death anxiety, with income serving as a moderator in the power dimension and death anxiety association: it was significant and positive only for those at greater risk of poverty. Personal income also seemed to play a crucial role in the connection between left–right self-placement and death anxiety, especially among male participants upon whom other people were financially dependent. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Város és biedermeier Petőfi költészetében

The term of Biedermeier – which was used to describe the interior style of the middle class at first and then it was connected to some of the literary phenomena in the first half of the 19th century – made it possible to interpret the culture of the modern city and the urban middle class – o’en creating an opposition between the city and its antithesis, the country. The questions connected to urbanitas were o’ften discussed in the most important space of the culture of modernity: the press. They published articles and reports on foreign cities as well as the forming middle class culture of Buda and Pest in the fast-spreading metropolitan journals. The city and the country are recurring themes in the poetry of Sándor Petőfi along with the different lifestyles and identities connected to them. The first collection of Petőfi, which was published on 10 November 1844, caught people’s attention because of the way the poet’s role was represented in it: Petőfi’s poetic identity is the innocent and moral child of the nation – he is the one who has just arrived in the city, showing what the people are really like. However, the collection entitled Poems 1842-44 does not represent the culture that could by described by sociological or ethnographic terms, but rather the folk culture seen through the lenses of a Biedermeier (urban) culture: Petőfi therefore constructed the image of the country for the city.

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

ABSTRACT The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the ‘common man’ and ‘vote bank’ through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman’s Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation.

”Dattātreya‘s Dwelling Place”

The Śrī Gurudeva Datta Mandir is a modern Hindu temple constructed around the udumbara tree (ficus racemora) believed to be the mythical dwelling place of the antinomian god Dattātreya. Originally located in a public park, the temple is now an independently registered trust and is widely recognized as one of the most prominent and celebrated Hindu places of worship in the affluent residential area of Deccan Gymkhana in Pune, India. In this article, we examine how the natural and built environment, along with religious practices, are constantly reconfigured and renegotiated by various actors catering to the contemporary sensitivities of the urban Hindu middle classes. We argue that to understand urban religious spaces like the Śrī Gurudeva Datta Mandir, it is essential to consider how cultural, religious, and political sensitivities converge to give material form to these spaces. Through an analysis of the temple, the deity of Dattātreya, and the udumbara tree, we explore the complex interplay of these forces and their role in shaping contemporary Hindu religious practices and beliefs in urban India.

“Mimic Men” versus Conscientious Women in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Abstract The paper attempts to read the narrative of colonial modernity which runs throughout Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Glass Palace and then also examines how that modernity is gendered. I have shown how the novel unfolds the various layers of this modernity which exposes the abrasive opposition between the ideas of colonialism. This opposition is not limited to the ideological realm only but spills and then creates an uncomfortable silence between the native men and women, particularly in the bhadralok section (Western educated urban middle or upper middle class Bengali people). I have approached the text through the theories of Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Michel Foucault principally.

"Fitness" of the Urban Middle Class and "Wellness" of the Spa Centers in Delhi.

This article attempts to explore the notion of "wellness" in relation to the emerging health markets in Delhi. For this study, spa centers are going to be my major focus. How spa centers define and sell wellness? How does the notion of wellness link to the neoliberal economy and laissez-faire nature of the state? Moreover, in present societies how has it emerged as an "ideological normativity" which pathologies those who do not conform to the idea of wellness? Wellness is used in everyday conversation to indicate a healthy balance of mind, body, and emotions. It argues that how wellness as a quality is purportedly being sold through a range of objects and services, from a bottle of shampoo to the complex practice of power yoga. The article examines the spa center as a site and how it models the notions of health and wellness in new ways.

Cross-class alliances and urban middle classes with peasant characteristics: a historical-spatial approach to agency in territory-based rural mobilisations in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article explores the complexities of agency in contemporary territory-based mobilisations in the countryside by focusing on water struggles in Turkey. Using a historical-spatial approach, it combines agrarian political economy analysis with human-nature interactions. Through an analysis of cash crop production and urban-rural interactions, this contribution argues that capitalist agrarian transformation in Turkey led to the emergence of an ‘urban middle class with peasant characteristics’, with a strong capacity for mobilisation and alliance-building. It also argues that this group enabled abstraction, place-framing and aestheticised resistance, common elements we observe in contemporary territorial mobilisations.

The TG/HDL-c Lipid Ratio as a Cardiovascular Risk Marker in a Mexican Urban Middle-Class Population: Do We Need a Risk Score Tailored for Mexicans?

Risk scores are essential in primary prevention to detect high-risk patients. The most common scores exclude hypertriglyceridemia and abdominal obesity in their risk assessment. We examined the triglyceride/HDL-cholesterol (TG/HDL-c) ratio as a cardiovascular (CV) risk marker in a middle-class urban Mexican population sample. Our aim was to test the concept of a scoring system reflecting Mexican population characteristics. A total of 2602 healthy adults from the Lindavista primary prevention program were considered, evaluating gender, age, blood pressure, smoking, body mass index, waist circumference, lipid profile, and fasting glucose. According to the abnormality, a score from -3 to +3 was assigned. The summation of eleven variables yielded the Lindavista score (LS), which was calibrated versus the TG/HDL ratio and ACC ASCVD Risk Estimator Plus score to determine its correlation with risk categories. The TG/HDL-c ratio had a linear correlation with LS and high-risk ACC ASCVD categories. Compared with LS and TG/HDL-c, the ACC ASCVD system underestimates the high-risk category. The high prevalence of obesity and lipid triad in the Mexican population requires a scale that considers those traits. The TG/HDL-c ratio is a practical, easy, and economical instrument to categorize risk in Mexicans.

The Consumption of Leisure Sports and the Emerging Urban Middle-Class in Contemporary China

The Consumption of Leisure Sports and the Emerging Urban Middle-Class in Contemporary China

Flygskam, klass och ändrade resvanor

The concept of flight shame has raised awareness in Sweden under the year of 2019. It is closely linked to climate debates and knowledge about climate change and footprints due to flying. This has consequently led many Swedes to opt for train travel instead of plane flights. In relation to this, an internet forum called Tågsemester.nu has been launched where people can exchange train traveling ideas and get inspiration for holiday resorts from one another. This article analyses these narratives on train holidays with a particular interest in how they can be understood in terms of the perspectives of class and place. The concept of flight shame is discussed in relation to respectability. In support of the empirical material, I argue for an understanding of the train traveling practices, not only as climate active but also in particular practiced by an urban middle class. Traveling habits tend to get a biased understanding if only understood in terms of individual choices.

Middle-Class by Design

Middle-class housing in the context of post-independence growth in Israel, where urban growth was guided by the massive construction of new neighborhoods and buildings, produced various types of shared dwellings which became the prevailing types of urban housing. While mass housing is discussed in the context of Israel as a key device of a modernization project on the national scale, with deep consequences for marginalized immigrants and the lower classes – it has rarely been studied as housing typology for the middle classes. Nonetheless, urban growth and national consolidation starting the 1960s led to an emerging urban middle class, whose housing was the product of diverse actors, including urban and national policy, private contractors, neighborhood associations, financial systems, architects, and planners. Yet, as the social category ‘middle class’ is muddled, how can we distinguish mass housing for the middle classes, or middle class housing?
 This paper examines the architectural features of three middle-class mass housing estates built in Israel in the 1960s. Asking what constitutes the middle class, we point to the capacity of an architectural analysis to identify the designed elements that construct a middle-class identity within the context of shared urban dwellings. The three cases briefly examined include the Be’eri estate in Tel Aviv, Kiron estate in Kiryat Ono, and Shchuna Bet in Beer Sheba. The three estates, developed in the 1960s by commercial and semi-commercial companies explicitly for the emerging urban middle class, employ New Brutalist architectural and urban design principles in mitigating community and individuals, public and private, identity and property.

Selection and Description Bias in Protest Reporting by Government and News Media on Weibo

AbstractExtensive research in Western societies has demonstrated that media reports of protests have succumbed to selection and description biases, but such tendencies have not yet been tested in the Chinese context. This article investigates the Chinese government and news media's selection and description bias in domestic protest events reporting. Using a large protest event data set from Weibo (CASM-China), we found that government accounts on Weibo covered only 0.4 per cent of protests while news media accounts covered 6.3 per cent of them. In selecting events for coverage, the news media accounts tacitly struck a balance between newsworthiness and political sensitivity; this led them to gravitate towards protests by underprivileged social groups and shy away from protests targeting the government. Government accounts on Weibo, on the other hand, eschewed reporting on violent protests and those organized by the urban middle class and veterans. In reporting selected protest events, both government and news media accounts tended to depoliticize protest events and to frame them in a more positive tone. This description bias was more pronounced for the government than the news media accounts. The government coverage of protest events also had a more thematic (as opposed to episodic) orientation than the news media.

Weaving the network of collectivism –Kuqingas affective glue in China: Analyzing the reality showX-Change

This article examines the ways in which kuqing – bitter emotions – are performed, amplified and circulated in the Chinese reality show X-Change (2006–2008). Taking a social relational approach to affect, we understand kuqing as an embodied, socially informed and relationally inscribed affective response to suffering and pain. Building on the historical roots of kuqing, textual and audiovisual analysis is applied to capture its expressions and affective registers in the program. The analysis reveals that, while claiming to reduce the alarming urban–rural divide, the program engages in two juxtaposed and competing affective arrangements. The first recruits kuqing into neoliberal logics and individualistic subjectivity, but is counterproductive in that it reproduces structural class inequalities. The second results in a rearrangement in which kuqing circulates relationally and articulates with Confucian filiality and family ethics, weaving both the rural bitter underclass and the urban middle class into an intersubjective collectivist identity and relationship, thereby strengthening social cohesion and managing social division. Based on the analysis, we offer new insights into relationships between reality TV, power structures and the complex ‘emotional regime’ in a contemporary China challenged by its social ruptures.