Working-class Communities Research Articles

Class matters in class matters: Education and emancipation in working-class culture: A conversation between Frank and Rita

This article is on education and emancipation in working-class culture, examining the use of illustrative language (particularly working-class dialect), as a tool to generate higher (or at least wider) educational exchange. Taking the form of a play script, or as an imagined sequel to Willy Russell’s play Educating Rita ([), this article utilizes the easily digestible format of conversation to explore and illustrate Mikhail Bahktin’s complex ideas on dialogism, and the ideological pedagogical position of Jacques Rancière’s novel The Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1989] 1999). We see Rita become academically educated, and as the narrative develops, the idea of what is meant when we say the word ‘culture’ is constantly challenged. Through exploring social culture in working-class communities, this narrative examines how a ‘lack’ of academic awareness has the potential to lead to a social state of intellectual undress: one that disarms and excites information exchange.

Wilhelm Reich and Sexology from Below.

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927-1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below.

Inequalities in the making: the role of young people’s relational resources through the COVID-19 lockdown

ABSTRACT Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, youth researchers have reported increased inequalities between young people, but the social processes that drive these changes are not well understood. In this paper, we draw on rich longitudinal interview data following the same participants from a year before and into the midst of national lockdown during the pandemic in Norway to explore the unfolding of classed and gendered responses that were triggered in young people across the class spectrum. We find that advantaged, ambitious youths engaged in self-resourcing practices with support from their family that could make them even better positioned after the crisis. Youths that were socially vulnerable before the pandemic dealt with the situation alone and in highly gendered ways that seemed to amplify their insecure position in the peer group and community. Thriving youths from working-class communities engaged in lockdown practices that connected them deeper to the family and resourced them for gender traditional, local lives. Illuminating how a crisis prompts practices that increased emerging differences along classed and gendered lines, the paper shows that to grasp inequalities in the making, researchers must consider the importance and changing nature of resources – including relational resources in the family – over time.

A South African Perspective on Learning in Social Movement Activism

There is a body of education scholarship in South Africa that captures the role played by social movements in democratising education in post-apartheid South Africa. However, this scholarship says little about how power dynamics affect learning and intellectual labour in social movements or social movement organisations. In addition, the issue of learning in social movements or social movement organisations is hardly explored in the South African social movement literature. This lack of focus on how activists, especially grassroots activists in working-class communities, learn and produce knowledge in social movements and organisations obscures the complexity of learning and knowledge production in activist settings. This article explores how activists, especially grassroots activists, learn in social movements. Based on secondary literature and interviews, the article advances two main arguments: First, learning in social movements and organisations takes place in non-formal and informal ways. Both these forms of learning take place inside and outside formal educational settings. And they both contribute to the empowerment and critical consciousness of activists in social movements and organisations. In addition, informal learning takes place inside and outside popular educational spaces. However, it is not inevitable that non-formal and informal forms of learning in activist settings will generate critical knowledge and activist practices that disrupt the status quo. Second, power relations based on “race”, social class, gender, and sexuality, among other axes of social division, impact on how learning takes place in non-formal or popular contexts of education. This article seeks to understand how power relations shape the learning and knowledge production process in social movements and organisations.

Holding the State Accountable: Feminising Work and Responsibility

The article discusses an increasingly commonplace phenomenon whereby women take on the formidable challenge of holding state actors accountable for the survival and well-being of their working class and land-poor communities. Women provide the bottom-up pressure, be it through negotiations or agitational collective action, that pushes the state to fulfils its commitment to provide water, subsidised food, essential household commodities, public transport and sanitation facilities. This article argues that this labour is both skill-building and exhausting and points to its ‘irreducibly political’ nature. The article also discusses the parallels with the women members of self-help groups relentlessly conducting complex negotiations with multiple institutional actors in order to realise their policy entitlements of bank linkage and anti-poverty loans. While some forms of women’s action vis-à-vis state actors are collaborative in nature, others are more conflictual and confrontationist, depending on local contexts and conditions.

Class matters: Dialogue and dialogics in the work of Condé and Beveridge

This article explores curatorial projects that give voice to working-class communities that have been disfranchised by the ideology of neo-liberalism. Defining contemporary art galleries as public spheres, curatorial projects that are based in dialogue and dialogics reveal the conflicting and contradictory aspects of dominant cultural narratives. Through collaborative and participatory methods, progressive artists co-create artworks with working-class communities, creating alternatives to the traditional gallery system in which artists, artworks, audiences and institutions are abstracted from the world around them. With a focus on the work of artists Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, and their collaborations with individuals representing various communities – labour organizations, activist groups, cultural groups and the art world – insurgent curating is defined in terms of dialogue-based activism. Dialogue-based projects are championed as ways to catalyse emancipatory insights and the critique of neo-liberal capitalism.

“A Voice to Uplift Other People”: A Case Study of Integrating Organizing Methods in an FQHC-Based COVID-19 Vaccine Initiative in Latinx Communities

The COVID-19 pandemic added another layer of trauma for working-class communities who have experienced trauma from systemic inequity and racism. Early pandemic response efforts failed to reach the most vulnerable Latinx communities in the United States due to historic disinvestment in these communities. Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) were uniquely positioned to respond to the pandemic through testing and vaccine implementation because of their footprint in these communities. However, to advance equitable COVID-19 recovery and long-term, trauma-informed community resilience, FQHCs need to expand their role beyond immediate response through testing and vaccine deployment. Applying Freirean principles of liberation to an integrated model for crisis recovery and community resilience-building, this article presents a case study of the implementation of a COVID-19 vaccine outreach and education initiative at AltaMed Health Services, one of the largest FQHCs in the United States. Findings suggest that leveraging organizing and empowerment strategies to implement COVID-19 vaccine distribution in working-class communities contributes to pathways for community health and well-being, infrastructure for crisis response and recovery, equitable service and information delivery ecosystems, and engaged and empowered communities. Lessons from this study can provide a blueprint for integrating strategies for long-term community resilience, capacity-building, and empowerment in crisis response and community harm mitigation initiatives. Findings from this study also present a model for enhancing the role of FQHCs to facilitate community organizing and engagement for health equity.

Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice”: A Special Issue of QED

Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice”: A Special Issue of <i>QED</i>

Stories from London's Docklands: Heritage Encounters, Deindustrialization, and the End of Empire

AbstractThis article analyzes the activism of Eastside Community Heritage in London's Docklands, circa 1997 to 2003, following its establishment by community activists concerned by the British National Party's electoral success in the postindustrial area. Eastside attributed local racism to deindustrialization and unaccountable, exclusionary redevelopment. Aiming to recenter solidarity against economic injustice—thereby countering racism—and to challenge redevelopers’ neglect, the group published booklets celebrating the area's working-class past. But the project's archived oral histories show that residents remembered an area forged by different ideals. Their nostalgia was for participation in empire through the docks as much as for an idealized working-class community. Residents rarely distinguished between the interconnected losses of imperial purpose and social cohesion. I frame these tensions as a heritage encounters, making three key arguments. First, memories of youth in the imperial metropole informed residents’ perceptions of the late twentieth-century nation, despite recent scholarly efforts to separate them temporally and conceptually. Second, contrary to their predominance within histories of postwar class identity, deindustrialization and urban change were popularly understood within a larger, postimperial narrative of local and national decline. Finally, a close reading of this project offers a vivid case study into the fragility of British multiculturalism in the 1990s and 2000s.

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

‘Notes on a Community Struggle’ Big Flame, the Kirkby rent strike and the ‘mass struggle of housewives’

ABSTRACT This article uses a spatial framework to explore socialist and feminist activism by mixed sex revolutionary organisation Big Flame (1970–1984). It focuses on a Big Flame ‘base group’ embedded within the working class community of Kirkby, Merseyside. It adds to the growing historiography on women-centred community-based organising to situate Big Flame amongst the groups across Europe engaging in activism around spaces for new types of politics. Activists used ‘the second front’ to engage with feminist debates and challenge gendered discourses. These initiatives, as well as having a socio-psychological impact on the activists themselves also formed part of what was to be the ‘personal and collective liberation’ which Gerd-Rainer Horn outlined as a key legacy of 1968. This article will suggest that Big Flame’s prioritisation of feminism and experience enabled them to blur the boundaries between the private, public, social and intimate everyday experience. The use of oral history interviews sheds light on the inner world of activists’ subjective experience as they navigated the complexities of the discursively connected structures of gender and class. Women in Big Flame documented their own autonomous feminist experience and as Big Flame made the personal political for working-class women on the estates, these expressions made their unseen activism as women visible.

New York’s housing justice movement: facing the COVID eviction cliff edge

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted the deep-rooted links between poor housing and poor health, particularly for working class communities of colour, for whom the right to the city is systemically undermined by unaffordable, precarious and sub-standard housing. This paper examines these issues against the background of a grassroots movement against evictions in New York during 2021. It describes and discusses the organisation, tactics and strategies of that movement as it attempted to challenge the dominance and norms of the real estate industry. It suggests that the pandemic engendered a radical shift in the demands of tenant and housing justice organisations, which led to New York being virtually eviction free for 22 months. While this success partly arises from the particular circumstances of New York, it is argued that there are lessons to be learned for housing campaigns elsewhere. However, questions are raised about the extent to which ‘professionalised activism’ represents a sustainable model and the capacity for local mobiisations to influence national political forces at a time of unprecedented volatility in an age of crisis capitalism.

Early-life adversity is associated with poor iron status in infancy.

Exposure to early-life adversity (ELA) and iron deficiency early in life are known risk factors for suboptimal brain and socioemotional development. Iron deficiency may arise from and co-occur with ELA, which could negatively affect development. In the present study, we investigated whether ELA is associated with iron deficiency in infants receiving no iron supplementation. This study is a secondary analysis of extant data collected in the 1990s; participants were healthy infants from working-class communities in Santiago, Chile (N = 534, 45.5% female). We measured stressful life events, maternal depression, and low home support for child development during infancy and assessed iron status when the infant was 12 months old. Slightly more than half of the infants were iron-deficient (51%), and 25.8% were iron-deficient anemic at 12 months. Results indicated that ELA was associated with lower iron levels and iron deficiency at 12 months. The findings are consistent with animal and human prenatal models of stress and iron status and provide evidence of the association between postnatal ELA and iron status in humans. The findings also highlight a nutritional pathway by which ELA may impact development and present a nutritionally-focused avenue for future research on ELA and psychopathology.

Working-Class Institutions, Amazon and The Politics of Local Economic Development in Western Queens

In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of two locations for their second headquarters. While there had certainly been criticism and organizing against the proposed deal, given that it had the vocal support of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, most New Yorkers had assumed that the deal would be implemented. Then, rather surprisingly, on February 14th, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the deal and its decision not to come to LIC. This article uses the case of Amazon and other large scale developments in western Queens to discuss the conflictual and often messy politics of local economic development (LED) in working class communities. It argues that urban studies pays too little attention to how and why working class organizations participate in the politics of LED; and often thereby shape the enacted policies of LED.

“‘For Your Freedom and Ours’: Polonia and the Struggle for Polish Independence,” special issue, Rocznik Przemyski 55, no. 3 (23)

“‘For Your Freedom and Ours’: Polonia and the Struggle for Polish Independence,” special issue, <i>Rocznik Przemyski</i> 55, no. 3 (23)

Labour Market in Crisis: The Moral Economy and Redundancy on the Upper Clyde, 1969–72

The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in of 1971–2 is examined here within a moral-economy analysis of the longer history of deindustrialisation. Working-class expectations of security and voice in Scotland were cultivated by the management of industrial job losses from the late 1950s onwards. Labour governments were more trusted custodians of this moral economy than Conservative governments. Edward Heath’s Conservative government, elected in 1970, violated the moral economy by allowing unemployment to accelerate, with particularly punishing effects in Glasgow. A labour market crisis materialised in 1970 before UCS went into liquidation in 1971. This article revisits an academic survey of men who took voluntary redundancy from UCS in 1969 and 1970, before market conditions deteriorated. Their unexpected experience of downward occupational mobility transgressed the moral economy and was a previously-unremarked factor in the mobilisation of the work-in against further job losses. The episode widened the political gulf between Scotland and England. Conservative policy-makers were discredited in working-class communities in Scotland before Margaret Thatcher and her governments embarked on their reckless management of deindustrialisation from 1979.

Defining Conjunto Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre

Defining <i>Conjunto</i> Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre

Health Insurance Literacy Perceptions and the Needs of a Working-Class Community.

Background:Despite increases in the number of insured Americans, consumers continue to face barriers in accessing care. Low levels of health insurance literacy (HIL) are associated with suboptimal use of health insurance coverage. There remains a need to further contextualize the relationship between HIL and access to care, especially among insured working-class people.ObjectiveThis study was conducted to understand the pathways through which HIL affects health care decision-making and access to care in an urban working-class population.Methods:Using a qualitative descriptive approach, we conducted five focus groups with 45 adult residents of South Louisville, Kentucky. The questions explored participants' experiences of insurance enrollment, use, and health care system navigation, as well as their perceptions and needs regarding accessing health insurance information. Using inductive thematic analysis, transcripts were open coded independently by team members, a focused coding framework was agreed upon, and emergent themes were identified through constant comparison techniques.Key Results:Most participants placed high value on their insurance, considering it the most important benefit employers offer. Despite having adequate HIL, most participants expressed frustration with the amount of time and effort they spent to determine the best insurance plan, obtain covered health services, and settle claims, often with ineffective results. Despite having insurance, cost considerations influenced many participants' decisions to accept certain tests or treatments, in some cases resulting in delayed or foregone care.Conclusions:The findings of this qualitative study indicate that obtaining health care is strongly influenced both by the individual context of HIL knowledge, experience, and life circumstances, and by the structural context of the complex, bureaucratic, and costly health care system. Interventions to improve HIL should include practical examples and real-life scenarios, because HIL gained from experiential narratives was the most useful in navigating the health care system.[HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice. 2022;6(2):e61–e69.]Plain Language Summary: By conducting focus groups with a working-class population, this study contextualizes the pathways through which HIL affects consumers' health care decision-making and access to care. Findings demonstrate that obtaining health care is strongly influenced both by the individual context of HIL knowledge, experience, and life circumstances, and by the structural context of the complex, bureaucratic, and costly health care system.

Producing gentrifiable neighborhoods: race, stigma and struggle in Berlin-Neukölln

Through a case study of an immigrant dense working-class neighborhood in Berlin, this article asks how racial and territorial stigmatization figure into state-enabled financialized gentrification and resistance against it. While there is a discussion on territorial stigmatization in the gentrification literature, this debate remains understated in the emerging financialized gentrification literature and rarely connects to race. Debates on resistance to financialization, in turn, while being attuned to the detrimental effects of stigmatization on struggle, pay little attention to the role of the local state as a producer of stigma. In this article I draw together debates on financialization, state-enabled gentrification and racial and territorial stigma to suggest that the local state, through its oppressive classifications and racialized representations of urban space, contributes to preparing the symbolic and material structures on which finance capital is able to flourish, not only by normalizing displacement, but by hampering resistance and demobilizing local working-class communities.

The role of working-class communities and the slow violence of toxic pollution in environmental health conflicts: A global perspective

Analysing a sample of 3,033 environmental conflicts around the globe, we compared conflicts reporting no human health impacts to those reporting health impacts linked to toxic pollution. Our study suggests four main findings. First, health impacts are a key concern for working-class communities. Second, the long-term effects of toxic pollution undermine communities' ability to act preventively. Third, industrial activities, waste management and nuclear energy conflicts are more likely to report health impacts than other economic activities. Last, mobilising groups are reluctant to consider the closure of a polluting project a successful outcome because of the persistence of toxic pollution across time. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of what we have termed ‘environmental health conflicts’ (EHCs).