Working-class Communities Research Articles

“Ne’er Were Heroines More Strong, More Brave”: Victorian Factory Women Writers and the Role of the Working-Class Poet

ABSTRACT Self-identified women factory poets remained a rare phenomenon within the larger mid-Victorian outpouring of working-class verse, publishing mostly after 1846 and more frequently after 1860. This article examines the verses of four mid-Victorian women poets, self-identified as factory workers, who published a significant body of work either in periodicals or in published volumes. The poems of all four—“Marie”, Ellen Johnston, Fanny Forrester, and Ruth Wills—are autobiographical in cast; all record personal difficulties or depression, and each poet responded self-consciously to her working- and middle-class audiences. Although only Johnston and Forrester refer to the specifics of factory labour within their poems, all of these writers affirm their solidarity with their fellow workers, celebrate the heroism of survival under difficulties, and support politically reformist causes such as independence movements or abolition. All four assert the special mission and subject matter of the working-class poet and thus the significance of their own verses as a form of personal self-validation, a witness to otherwise unrecorded lives, and a tribute to their wider working-class community.

Show Me Your Watch, and I’ll Tell You Where You Work: Obtaining Scarce Goods via the Workplace in 1960s Socialist Hungary

In the field of consumption history there is growing interest in informal shopping practices, smuggling, and black-market activities in state socialist societies. Yet, little emphasis has been placed on how the foremost socialist workplace, the factory, became a crucial hub for smuggled goods and the extent to which workers played a role within it. This article explores local Budapest court cases from the beginning of the 1960s using the methodological insights of everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte). The cases show that white-collar workers (and in rare cases blue-collar workers) with a command of foreign languages frequently acted as middlemen in making transactions. This specific cultural capital put white-collar workers in a position to gain profit over and above their usual state salary, often contradicting wage hierarchies set by the state. At the same time, blue-collar workers embraced informal shopping possibilities at the factory in a climate of diversifying consumer expectations. This article examines how informal practices of selling and obtaining goods transformed relations among workers and created a new social hierarchy within working-class communities.

The Queen’s Loyal ‘Others’ –the Metropolitan Jewish and Catholic Hierarchies, the Communal Press and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897

ABSTRACT This article examines the Jewish and Catholic experience of acceptance, rejection and discrimination in late nineteenth-century Britain through the lens of the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in the summer of 1897. Arguing that the Anglo-Jewish and English Catholic hierarchical discourses created at the time of the Jubilee reveal the continuing profound insecurities felt by the minority leaderships, the article will dissect the various ‘stories’ created around the events of the Jubilee, particularly in London. It will consider in turn how narratives were created stressing Victoria’s personal role of liberator; how a premium was placed by the hierarchies on the different demographic strands of the minority communities behaving in aropriate ‘English’ class roles; and how this narrative was complicated – first by Irish nationalism and migrant Jewish radicalism, and secondly by the prejudices of the wider British establishment. Ultimately it will contend that the events of the Jubilee revealed a continued exclusion of Jewish and Catholic groups from the British ruling class, and that anti-Catholic sectarianism and antisemitism was not solely a matter of economic discrimination and physical violence against working-class communities, but also subtler forms of prejudice against more prosperous Jews and Catholics.

Feasibility and Preliminary Efficacy of an Occupational Therapy Intervention for Older Adults With Chronic Conditions in a Primary Care Clinic.

Occupational therapy can play a role in primary care management of chronic diseases among older adults. To assess the feasibility of delivering a primary care occupation-focused intervention (Integrated PRimary care and Occupational therapy for Aging and Chronic disease Treatment to preserve Independence and Functioning, or i-PROACTIF) for older adults with chronic disease. Feasibility study comparing i-PROACTIF with complex care management using a two-group randomized controlled trial design with data gathered at baseline and during and after the 8-wk intervention. Family medicine clinic serving an urban, low-income, working-class community. Feasibility indicators were recruitment, retention, utility of clinical assessments, and acceptability of interventions assessed through feedback surveys completed by patients and primary care providers (PCPs). Patient outcomes, including perspectives on chronic illness care, occupational performance, and overall well-being, were collected using standardized, validated measures and analyzed descriptively. Eighteen adult volunteers, ages ≥50 yr, with heart disease, arthritis, and uncontrolled diabetes completed the study. Ten PCPs completed feedback surveys. i-PROACTIF focuses on preserving functional independence, is based on the Person-Environment-Occupation framework, and consists of two assessment sessions and six weekly treatment sessions. Recruitment goals were achieved, with an 86% retention rate. Clinical measures unearthed deficits in areas that were unreported or underreported by patients. Participants reported being extremely satisfied with the intervention. Physicians and nurses also supported the intervention. Both groups showed improved scores on most outcomes. Delivering and evaluating i-PROACTIF was feasible and acceptable. Future efficacy trials are needed before it can be used in clinical settings. The results of this study can inform future occupational therapy interventions and clinical trials in primary care for older adults with chronic conditions.

The Blue Cultural Fix: Water-Spirits and World-Ecology in Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto and Pepetela’s O Desejo de Kianda

Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the ‘cultural fix’ and ‘fixed-labour-power’, this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the figure of the female water-spirit features as an index for two contrasting modes of knowing the ocean. In Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto (1936), the water-spirit is registered as a passive and incomprehensible extra-human entity that looms over the poverty of the text’s working-class community of dockworkers with an ominous and mysterious edge. By contrast, the water-spirit in Pepetela’s novel O Desejo de Kianda (1995) is angry, active and only too immediate, seeking revenge for the extractivist violence carried out in the name of neoliberalism. Activating a broadly hydro-materialist framework, I argue that these differing conceptions of the water-spirit carry with them very different socio-ecological implications, and directly intersect with contemporary debates over hydrological crisis, the privatisation of the oceans and the enclosure of the water commons.

The Lived Experiences of Community Caregivers Who Use Integrative Mind-Body-Spirit Practices

This article demonstrates the use of integrative mind-body-spirit practices as experienced by a group of caregivers from a poor, working class community on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. The social work profession in South Africa has been influenced by Western models of practice that do not necessarily respond to the needs of many communities. To be more responsive to communities and to provide a holistic and integrative approach, this study demonstrates the contribution that integrative mind-body-spirit practices can make to social work interventions with communities. Sixteen women participated in a qualitative study that sought to understand how they experienced and interpreted the use and benefits of integrative mind-body-spirit practices. Interpretive phenomenology was used as the research design to explore how the participants made sense of and gave meaning to their experiences. The participants were first empowered with integrative mind-body-spirit practices and implemented these as homework over a period of sixteen weeks. The data were collected through focus group sessions, using a topic guide to facilitate the group discussions. The data were analysed using an interpretive phenomenological analysis. The findings demonstrated that the use of integrative mind-body-spirit practices provided the participants with the tools for self-healing and wellness that were self-nurturing beyond basic survival. Integrative mind-body-spirit practices provided them with tools and techniques to manage their day-to-day lives better. The author concludes that social workers must be introduced to integrative mind-body-spirit practices as an additional set of tools and techniques to have at their disposal, and that does not rely on talking only.

Visioning a queer documentary: Huang Hui-chen’s Small Talk

ABSTRACT Small Talk, a 2016 Taiwanese feature-length documentary film, records the process by which the director, Huang Hui-chen, attempts to repair the traumas that have alienated her from her mother A-nu, a butch Taoist priestess, through a series of recorded conversations and monologues. Critical concern over the ethics of the documentary, largely concerning issues of informed consent, arose quickly after its premiere. Such critiques, however, assume the existence of an omnipotent, monophonic, and dominant documenter and thus fall prey to a linear understanding of history that disregards the dynamic tactics deployed by the individuals documented in the film. The film never solely represents A-nu’s history, but rather consistently features the improvisatory process of filming itself. Furthermore, this queer documentary allegorizes what I call a queer khan-bong practice and a reflexive backstage. The former refers to a local practice of resistance that appropriates Taoism, folklore, and the popular codes of working-class queer communities; the latter encapsulates a semiotic networking among a feminine community, which constantly reflects upon its own operation and structure. It is through these two tactics that Small Talk activates an approach to queer documentary that underscores the ways in which queer histories are constructed and mediated.

“The Whole Damn System Is Guilty”: Urban Violence, the Principal Contradiction of Racial Capitalism, and the Production of Premature Death in Oakland, California

Discourses of “urban violence” are deployed in reaction to the mobilizations advanced by working-class communities of color following extrajudicial police murders. This discourse delegitimates these mobilizations while pathologizing said communities by insisting that “urban violence,” not police murders, is a more pertinent issue. This article takes seriously the claims made during the Oscar Grant “moment”— a period of popular struggle — that “the whole damn system is guilty.” This article uses Gramscian conceptualizations of socio-historical activity, organic and conjunctural, along with public health and socio-economic measures, to counter the obfuscating discourse of “urban violence” by illustrating the structural violence that communities in Oakland endure and contest. The sum of this structural violence constitutes the principle contradiction of racial capitalism, which produces premature death for working-class communities of color in Oakland. The extrajudicial police murder of Grant in Oakland catalyzed the blossoming open of this contradiction into an intensified moment of struggle.

Listening to the Old City

The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.

Multicultural Wilderness

AbstractWilderness parks in the United States are often described as landscapes of leisure for affluent white nature tourists. This article challenges that interpretation by exploring visitation to the Cook County Forest Preserves and the Indiana Dunes State Park, two Chicago-area wilderness parks that during the early twentieth century attracted far more visitors than all of the national parks combined. The author argues that if we turn our gaze from rarefied and far less-visited parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone to the wilderness parks created just outside of major metropolitan centers, we can clearly see that early-twentieth-century wilderness landscapes attracted a far more cosmopolitan audience than commonly assumed. Moreover, the author shows that marginalized Chicagoans were not simply passive consumers of wilderness. Drawing on theorists and historians of mass-culture reception, the author makes the case that new immigrants, children of the foreign-born, African Americans, and industrial workers appropriated these Chicago wilderness parks in much the same way that they borrowed and creatively rewrote Jazz-Age mass-culture entertainment such as Hollywood films. Far from places that Americanized immigrants and neutralized class tension, Chicago-area wilderness parks became important sites for the production and reproduction of subaltern national, ethnic, and working-class communities.

Transforming traditional views of school leadership for school-community collaboration: a PALAR approach

ABSTRACT Schools in poor working class communities in South Africa face a myriad of equity challenges that impact negatively on their ability to achieve basic school functionality. Yet, within such communities, there exists a wealth of valuable local knowledge and support that can be mobilised to assist school leaders, not only to bring about school improvement but also to reimagine effective schooling. However, the process of integrating such support into a school requires a reconsidering and repositioning of traditional views of school leadership. As a school leader, I embarked on a research journey, with 15 community volunteers, to understand how to integrate their work into the daily functioning of our school. I share my learning from the process of action learning with the community volunteers. I use the seven guiding principles of participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) to validate my claims to knowledge. The key findings indicate the value that PALAR holds for the development of a reflexive school leadership praxis that supports community agency towards school and community development. The conclusions drawn contribute to educational leadership theory by providing an evidence-based example of how an action learning process can facilitate collaboration between school leadership and community members.

Parental influence and HE decision making: The continuing power of local culture

ABSTRACT This case study illustrates why a group of young adults from a working-class community in the UK choose not to participate in HE despite having the necessary qualifications. It highlights the impact that parents have on HE participation decisions, and the network of social connections participants are able to mobilise from their parents. It shows how objective social structures such as the family can influence values, cultural rules and decision making, both directly and indirectly. It was found that, although parents were initially supportive of Higher Education (HE) participation, they appeared to quickly exhibit collective expectations and socially inculcated beliefs pertaining to employment and the need to make money. The socialisation that took place in the family made participants believe that non-participation was best and that employment was the right thing to do. This case study utilises the work of Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam, with findings being drawn from a set of semi-structured interviews with 33 young adults. This article enhances our understanding of the influence of parents on HE decision making because it provides details about the way that parental influence works both directly and indirectly.

Accusers of capitalism: masculinity and populism on the Scottish radical left in the late twentieth century

ABSTRACTScotland offers a valuable case study of the ways in which a combination of transnational and national structural changes can open up national articulations of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to subaltern contestation. During the late twentieth century, the subjection of an imagined industrial community to both global capital flows and state planning priorities produced opportunities for the re-articulation of hegemonic masculinity as a means of securing subaltern agency within a counter-movement against neoliberalism. The defiant but respectable left-wing ‘hard man’ – a signifier of collective morality and populist counter-legitimacy against state and market – was mobilized by leaders espousing an often explicitly gendered vision of respectable militancy. This article identifies three such leaders: Jimmy Reid, Jim Sillars and Tommy Sheridan. Each leader advocated resistance to market forces and the state by personally embodying a traditional masculine authority rooted in the cultural imaginary of industrial working-class communities. This article examines the parameters of Scottish left-wing populism before analysing its decline in the late twentieth century. Under devolution this populism has been displaced by a more inclusive ‘civic’ nationalism less comfortable with gendered and militant rhetoric, as the social basis of masculine left populism has been eroded.

A megastructure in Singapore

AbstractThe People's Park Complex is one of two megastructures built in the early 1970s as prototypes for a new “Asian city of tomorrow” designed to humanize the urban expansion of Singapore through the creation of affective ensembles and connections, and would serve as an alternative to the state's forcible relocation of the population to alienating, cookie-cutter high-rise new towns. While the envisioned model of an expansive, affective urbanism failed to materialize in these megastructures, I examine how the transnational migrant and working-class communities that use the complex engage in other forms of affective placemaking that disrupt the narratives and temporalities in the state's recuperation of the surrounding old city by the state as a heritage and tourist district. I illuminate how affect can serve as an analytic to reorient a unilinear notion of architectural failure toward new temporalities, imaginations, and futurities.

Free City! Reclaiming City College of San Francisco and Free Education for All

Public education is a main target of the assault on the public sector; recently corporate education reformers have expanded their agenda to include the open-access community colleges, which enroll 40 percent of U.S. college students. City College of San Francisco was threatened with closure for resisting this policy agenda. The faculty union, students, and community groups led by people of color waged and won a five-year battle to save it. Although not unscathed, today the college is open, accredited, and free. In the continuing war on working-class community institutions, this struggle offers valuable lessons for coalitions of labor and social movements.

“Excavating Labor History”: Exploring Class Struggle through Archaeology and Material Culture

Archaeology conducted at sites of labor offers the possibility for new modes of historical inquiry. As a method of recovering unrecorded aspects of the past, archaeology provides a vital set of tools for understanding the everyday lives of peripheralized laborers, immigrants, and working-class communities. As both a material science and a social science, it opens this history up to new research questions. Furthermore, the tactile quality of material evidence recovered through archaeology affords researchers new ways to engage public audiences on a variety of levels. The National Park Service’s Labor Archeology of the Industrial Era National Historic Landmark Theme Study offers one framework and context for assessing the significance and integrity of the nation’s sites of labor. Public archaeology projects, such as the Lattimer Archaeology Project in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, on the site of an immigrant shantytown that witnessed a notorious labor massacre, represent another example of the literal and figurative excavation of labor and working-class history. Performed in collaboration local stakeholders, the project used the tools of archaeology and material culture to link historical oppression to present-day injustices in one postindustrial community.

Concept Paper, Becoming. Michelle Obama (2018).

This review of the book Becoming, by Michelle Obama (2018) combines a discussion of a highly popular political memoir together with insight into Ms. Obama’s educational and legal professional trajectories and her important family roots in the “Great Migration” from the Jim Crow South to Southside Chicago. The publisher announced that over 3 million copies had been sold within weeks of its November, 2018 release. Reviews of the book abound, including most notably a review by Isabel Wilkerson, the Chicago Bureau Chief of the NY Times who is the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” That review captures the historical aspects of the memoir extensively, remarking poignantly that the book depicts Ms. Obama’s “improbable journey from there to the White House.” Wilkerson states that added to this poignancy, the term “first lady” is a linguistic gender anomaly for an African American woman because “the very idea of a black woman as first lady of the land, well, that would have been unthinkable….” “There were restrooms for ‘white ladies’ and often, conversely, restrooms for ‘colored women.’” This review, therefore, focuses on the anomalies of the racial history that led Michelle Obama to defy stereotypic expectations, graduate from an elite magnet Chicago High School, complete her education at Princeton and Harvard Law School, work at Sidley Austin and public interest jobs, and become the first black woman to become first lady. One major point of the book is that the public really never knew or tried to know the black working-class community where Ms. Obama grew up and her mother Marian Robinson says it best in speaking about the potential of Chicago Southside youth, “The South Side is filled with kids like that.”

Beatie Bryant’s Quest for her Roots through Self Discovery and Expression: A study of Sir Arnold Wesker’s “Roots”

The Wesker Trilogy is critically acclaimed as one of the most ambitious project by a young playwright under the age of thirty years. The trilogy in its broader aspect reflects the situation of the working class community after the Second World War was over. Roots is the central play of the famous trilogy which deals with the personal aspect of the humanitarian society. The story revolves around the protagonist of the play and gives an account of a fortnight in Beatie’s life. All her dreams shattering within a fortnight and her journey towards the path of self discovery become the central theme of the play. Beatie Bryant turns out to be the spoke person of the working class people and the play mainly focuses on the problems of working class in the 20th century. Beatie finally succeeds in librating herself from the fixed ideologies of society and finds a voice and thought of her own. She establishes her identity and her power of expression by asking questions and not by involving in some revolutionary acts.

The tale of two community gardens: green aesthetics versus food justice in the big apple

There has been a vibrant community gardening movement in New York City since the 1970s. The movement is predominantly located in working class communities of color and has fought for decades to turn vacant land into beneficial community spaces. However, many of these communities are struggling with gentrification, which has the potential to transform access to and use of community gardens in the city and the politics around them. Drawing on separate multi-year ethnographic projects, this article compares two community gardens in food insecure communities in Queens and Brooklyn: one that is undergoing gentrification and one that is not. We analyze how race and class transformations in each community shape the trajectories of urban agriculture spaces, specifically the ideologies, agricultural practices, and daily interactions among gardeners and as well as between gardeners and nongardeners. We find significant differences in how the two sets of community gardeners conceptualize the purpose of their gardens, particularly in constructing them as green spaces, agricultural production sites, and tools for achieving food justice. We argue that these differences can be best understood at the intersection of the personal histories of individuals, the organizational settings in which the gardens are embedded, and each neighborhood’s history of urban renewal and gentrification. Our findings show why some community gardens in food insecure communities adopt a food justice vision, while others do not, and how gentrification can amplify racial and class tensions within community gardens and between gardeners and nongardeners.

Bright by Duanwad Pimwana

Reviewed by: Bright by Duanwad Pimwana Janit Feangfu BRIGHT, by Duanwad Pimwana, translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2019. 184 pp. $16.95 paper; $8.99 ebook. Bright, written in 2002 by contemporary Thai novelist Duanwad Pimwana and translated in 2019 by Mui Poopoksakul, portrays the life of a five-year-old boy named Kampol in a working-class community on the east coast of Thailand. After a violent argument between his parents leaves him abandoned, Kampol is watched over by his various neighbors in a tenement house belonging to Mrs. Tongjan. The original Thai title, Changsamran, translates as “joy” and is the family name of Kampol. Poopoksakul’s translation of the name and title as “bright” instead of “joy” shifts the focus from an emotion to a description of the main character’s personality and spirit. Despite this change, by the time readers finish the novel, they will realize that joy scattered throughout dark, sad incidents is a major part of the story. Poopoksakul introduces readers to the world of Kampol with a map of Mrs. Tongjan’s community and a list of primary characters at the beginning of the book. This visual opening and the brief descriptive list give the context of a close-knit working-class community and transport readers to an unfamiliar place inhabited by characters who find joy in their predicaments and the mundanity of their hand-to-mouth lives. Poopoksakul brilliantly captures the precision of Pimwana’s style and the core of her novel from the opening sentence of the prologue: “The mundane has a hard time showing off its quiet allure” (p. 3). The prologue fuses a gentle touch of magical and social realism by having an unnamed woman from Mrs. Tongjan’s “ethereal house” climb on to the roof to look out over the tenement neighborhood with a bird’s-eye view (p. 5). On the third evening, “No one knows if she slipped off the roof or if she jumped” (p. 5). Pimwana’s expert hand establishes a whimsical yet realistic portrayal of a working-class community and invites the readers to follow along, look, and listen. Bright unfolds with an empathetic narrator who focalizes through the eyes of Kampol yet also observes the community from a narrative distance. The narrator’s delivery gives readers the autonomy to hear and interpret the voices of working-class Thai people at their best, worst, and everything in between. An early chapter, “Monopoly,” the longest one in the novel, lays the groundwork for the subsequent short episodes by showing that everyone in the community is involved with Kampol’s predicament. It presents Kampol metaphorically as a game piece being moved around his neighborhood by the dice of his neighbors’ good intentions. Their actions quickly become competitive kindness before souring once everyone realizes that Kampol will be in the care of the community for longer than [End Page 370] expected. Even so, the chapter ends with the giggling sound of Kampol and his friend, excited for their sleepover after the adults’ retreat to their respective apartments following a heated argument. Poopoksakul has done justice to the world that Pimwana created in Bright, accurately conveying the psychological complexities of her characters and contradictions in Thai society. The translator’s cultural sensitivity, keen perception, and creativity preserve the subtext embedded in the cultural background, characters’ conversational strategies, and the language itself. Her handling of personal pronouns and honorifics serves as a good example. Thai has a large number of these words that depend on relationships between speakers, their place in the social hierarchy, differing situations, and even emotional states. The nuance conveyed by these varying registers is not easily replaced by the personal pronouns available in English. Poopoksakul has done an exceptional job handling the translation with a precision and creativity that helps readers see beyond the surface of what is being said. Her explanations of proper nouns, Thai words left in the text, and complex cultural and linguistic situations enhance the readers’ experience. In an example from the chapter “Crickets,” Kampol receives two pairs of crickets to raise for potential income, but he names them and keeps them as pets instead...