Working-class Experience Research Articles

Henry Moore: Neo-Working-Classicist

With his Family Group of 1948–49, Henry Moore seemed to have reneged upon his early-career commitment to modernist experimentation, pivoting towards a more representational style for this large public sculpture, his first major bronze, sculpted for and installed in one of the first purpose-built secondary modern schools of post-war Britain. The results aren’t easy to define stylistically. Figurative, certainly, but barely concealing a stockpile of references ranging across centuries and continents. In this essay I will explore the implications of Moore’s stylistic shift with respect to both the contexts of the work’s conceptualisation and Moore’s personal investment in the opportunities presented to work publicly in that context. Moore’s working-class origins will be identified as foundational in the formation of an ideology given plastic purpose in this period, whilst the narratives of working-class experience at mid-century will be drawn upon to account for the ways this work relates to that period of social change. Taking Andrew Causey’s identification of an affinity between Moore’s work at this time and Picasso’s ‘neo-classical’ period in the years after the Great War as a starting point, I will explore the consequence of Moore’s ostensibly retrogressive turn towards figuration with respect to the questions of context and intent that have informed writings on Picasso before proposing alternative terms on which Moore’s figurative turn might be understood, tied up with the socio-political upheavals of mid-century Britain. Banner Photograph: Acervo Judith Lauand, 'A artista Judith Lauand (à esq.) e o escultor britânico Henry Moore (à dir.) durante workshop para monitores da 2ª Bienal de São Paulo ministrado em dezembro de 1953' ['Artist Judith Lauand (left) and British sculptor Henry Moore (right) during a workshop for monitors at the 2nd São Paulo Biennial held in December 1953']. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

:Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class

:<i>Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class</i>

Reconciling habitus through third spaces: how do Roma and non-Roma first-in-family graduates negotiate the costs of social mobility in Hungary?

ABSTRACT This article explores how first-in-family-graduate Roma and non-Roma Hungarians from the working-class experience education-driven social mobility and reconcile the dislocation of their primary-habitus due to changing class through transiting a ‘third space’. Drawing on Bhabha’s and bell hooks’ development of this concept, we aim to unpack the different ways how class-changers, in moving between the social milieu of their origin and their destination, occupy a unique position between two fields. Their social position is described as one of social navigators with a bridging potential between social classes. We also investigate what part higher education plays in this distinct form of changing class and becoming incorporated into middle-class society through a third space for those academic high achievers who come from working-class families. Contrasting the experience of Roma with non-Roma first-generation graduates in Hungary, we draw attention to the different opportunities of reconciling conflicting class-related habitus along ethno-racial lines.

‘They burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why’

In this article we connect critical librarianship and its practices of information literacy (IL) with working-class experiences of higher education (HE). Although the research literature and professional body of knowledge of critical information literacy (CIL), is one of the most theoretically-developed areas of wider critical librarianship (Critlib) movement, working-class knowledge and experiences remain underrepresented. One reason for this is that the values, behaviour and assumptions of library and HE workers are shaped by a HE system which inculcates middle-class values and cultural capitals within students, and stigmatises working-class students as lacking or in deficit. Hegemonic, or non-critical, IL proselytises middle-class values and assumptions about academic practices and skills development including the notion of an ideal student with behaviour and markers of identity which reflect those most privileged by wider society. In contrast CIL, framed as the socially-just practice of IL is theoretically well-placed to support working-class library workers in destabilising this alongside middle-class accomplices. Employing Yosso’s (2005) concept of community and cultural wealth (CCW), we analyse how library workers can recognise working-class cultural wealth within the context of CIL and wider working practices. As such narrative accounts are lacking in the literature, we utilise collaborative autoethnography (CAE) (Chang et al., 2013) to consider and interpret our own experiences of libraries when we were university students ourselves, and more recently as HE workers of working-class heritage.

“I’m Doing This for Me:” Gendered Reasons for Enrolling in Postsecondary Education During a Time of Economic Uncertainty

ABSTRACT This study examines the gendered experiences of working class, nontraditional postsecondary students in the context of the Great Recession. Based on in-depth interviews with 75 students, and a longitudinal analysis of their academic transcripts 6 to 8 years later, we find that both men and women emphasized the importance of providing for their families. In the context of an economic downturn, interviewees were concerned about improving their job prospects with educational credentials to ensure greater financial stability. Yet whereas men focused primarily on financially providing for their families as their reason for enrolling in college, women emphasized both providing for their families and self-development. This blending of the perceived purposes of education suggests that women expressed a more complex, multifaceted understanding of their reasons for enrolling in education. This study has implications for not only the Great Recession but motivations for enrolling during other recessions, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Book Review: Lars Meier, Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class

Book Review: Lars Meier, <i>Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class</i>

Review of “Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class”

In the English-American rock band The Pretenders’ song “My City Was Gone,” Chrissie Hynde croons about no longer being able to recognize the landscape of her youth in Akron, Ohio as deindustrialization gave way to suburban sprawl. The song captures the familiar feeling of nostalgia for what once was, but it’s the lament of not being able to see herself reflected in a place that she once identified with that makes the song so poignant: “I was stunned and amazed/My childhood memories/Slowly swirled past/Like the wind through the trees.” This sentiment of backward-looking wistfulness—and the feeling that is evoked—is brought to life in Lars Meier’s Working-Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes. Far from Akron in the United States, Meier takes us into the similar world of South Nuremberg, Germany and introduces us to people who have lived and worked in the manufacturing sector that helped to build the city, but that is now declining as the city shifts its productive capacities more toward knowledge and service industries. His focus isn’t solely on what these workers feel about how their city has changed, but on the ways that they actually feel these changes. Class isn’t just a relational position; it has affective qualities as something that can be deeply felt, which is the core argument of the book.

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry by Joe William Trotter, Jr.

Reviewed by: African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry by Joe William Trotter, Jr. Cicero M. Fain (bio) African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry. By Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022. Pp. 176. $34.99 cloth; ebook $34.99) Joe William Trotter, Jr., ranks among the pantheon of America's most influential historians. For more than forty years, beginning with his 1985 work Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945, he has chronicled the African American experience, most profoundly on the centrality of the Black working class to America's economic, industrial, cultural, and political development. His pioneering and provocative work examining the intersections of race, class, labor, urbanization, and gender within diverse urban- and rural-industrial settings has challenged prevailing historiography and expanded our understanding of Black migration, labor relations, and community formation. It has also added important dimensionality, complexity, and agency to Black workers, families, and communities within the historical narrative. Arguably, Trotter's most enduring contribution to our understanding of the African American urban experience was his employment of the proletarianization model in Black Milwaukee as an alternative theoretical framework to the long-standing "ghetto synthesis" model. That study animated important dialog and debate in its prioritization of class over racial identification as the defining consciousness of the Black working-class experience. In a 2007 Journal of Urban [End Page 67] History essay, Trotter acknowledges some of the limitations of his proletarianization model. In it, he concludes, "were I to write Black Milwaukee today, I would seek to synthesize past and present intellectual currents in African American urban and labor historiography, pay closer attention to the relationship between different eras in the transformation of African American life, and offer a broader and more comprehensive case study of the Black urban experience."1 The culmination of these objectives are the five essays comprising his most recent book, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry. Encompassing nearly thirty years of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations, in the Appalachian coal fields, the collection reiterates the continuing relevancy of the proletarianization model as an analytical tool—in this instance, primarily in its examination of the working-class experience of Black coal miners within his homeplace of the southern West Virginia coal mining region. Here, as a boy, Trotter experienced the disproportional impact of technological, social, and political changes on Black workers, families, and communities after World War II, which caused unemployment and out-migration. This reassessment of the field since Black Milwaukee's publication embraces innovations in scholarship on racial, class, and gender dynamics of working-class formation as ways to reformulate the proletarianization model. In presenting the coronavirus as one of the rationales for its publication, the essays historicize the continuing vulnerability of poor and working-class Blacks and people of color who work and live in dangerous, racialized, and unhealthy environments. This collection cement's Trotter's status as the foremost historian on U.S. labor and working-class studies. Its summary of the history and historiography of Black coal miners in Appalachia posits the continuing theoretical applicability of the proletarianization model in the twenty-first century, points to new pathways to pursue to explore its utility, and underscores the continuing resonance of his [End Page 68] southern West Virginia upbringing on his scholarship. Highly readable, meticulously researched, and skillfully rendered, African American Workers is a worthy addition to Trotter's remarkable legacy. Cicero M. Fain CICERO M. FAIN, III is visiting diversity scholar at Marshall University and the author of Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story. His current book project is entitled Buffalo Soldier, Deserter, Criminal: The Remarkably Complicated Life of Charles Ringo. Footnotes 1. Joe William Trotter, Jr. "Black Milwaukee: Reflections on the Past Twenty Years," Journal of Urban History 33 (May 2007): 567. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society

HBO’s Euphoria and the complexities at play in the costumed representations of contemporary masculinities

This article discusses the language of screen costume and representations of masculinity via a close reading of the successful and critically acclaimed 2019 HBO drama series Euphoria. It considers three key characters, Rue, Nate and Fez, and how each of these characters makes visible certain cultural and sociological ideologies which concern and influence current debates around diverse masculinities, social class and creative subjectivity. It is argued that the production team behind Euphoria employs creative acts of appropriation to articulate and explore the diversity of masculine lived experience within the restricted language of television. This is evidenced through the character of ‘Rue’, who sits in opposition to all other characters identified as feminine or transitioning in both narrative context and, significantly, costuming. ‘Rue’ is therefore explored as the masculine articulation and/or manifestation of the creator – Sam Levinson’s subjective position. ‘Nate’ is explored in relation to the currency of damaging stereotypes of dominant masculinity within television drama and how misconceptions around gendered identities work to reinforce, perpetuate and normalize problematic behavioural traits. It is suggested that we need to expand understandings of ordinary clothing or costume as a language, how meaning is articulated within this language and how the materiality of ordinary or unexceptional dress evolves and mutates and becomes a set of unquestioned yet dangerous symbols or significations. ‘Fez’ will be examined in response to Henri Lefebvre’s 1960s ideas around moments of contestation, alongside a discussion of the role that the body and clothing play in marking out or positioning ideas around the intersection of social class and masculinity which can be applied to differing, global manifestations of social hierarchies. Readings of ‘Fez’ highlight middle-class insecurities around subjective value and distance from working-class experience and are played out through the character’s costuming.

The Voice of the Absent? The Link Between Descriptive and Substantive Representation of the Working Class in Western Europe

Recent research has revealed a considerable representation gap disadvantaging the lower social class in the political process. However, we know little about the underlying mechanisms of this bias or the measures that could compensate for it. Combining cross-national data from a general population survey and an elite-level survey, the present article addresses this knowledge deficit by looking at one potential determinant of working-class underrepresentation: the unequal composition of parliaments. Building on arguments for descriptive representation, I argue that members of the working class experience similar living situations and life chances that form their preferences. Consequently, working-class politicians may be better suited to representing working-class views. The results confirm lower congruence levels between the political elite and working-class citizens. However, class-based preference gaps among politicians are relatively small, and politicians’ social class appears to have a limited impact on compensating for the representational inequality of the working class.

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Lars Meier, Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class. London/New York: Routledge 2021, 192 S., gb., 141,00 €

Article Lars Meier, Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class. London/New York: Routledge 2021, 192 S., gb., 141,00 € was published on September 1, 2022 in the journal Soziologische Revue (volume 45, issue 2).

Pursuing the Individual in Working-Class History

AbstractThe individual is still rare in working-class history, and, when we find them, they are often, like Bebel and Lula, exceptional. We are interested in them as leaders of vital mass movements and because they had an important impact on their societies. But another part of the promise of biographies like these is the opportunity to approach the personal dimensions of working-class experience through an individual life. Bringing the two biographies together highlights the diversity of working-class experience. Bebel developed in a racially homogeneous society while Lula was a mixed-race person shaped in race-conscious Brazil. Bebel thrived as a small-shop artisan while Lula thrived as a skilled worker in a mass production factory. I also compare and contrast these two subjects with two American labor radicals, the socialist leader Eugene Debs and William Z. Foster, a key figure in the Communist Party of the US. The importance of individual psychology and the homosocial worlds of these subjects might have played a greater role here, while the ubiquitous learning of both men raises the problem of working-class intellectual history, another subject that has not received enough attention from labor historians.

Book Review: Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes. Feelings of Class

Book Review: Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes. Feelings of Class

Book review: Working class experiences of social inequalities in (post‐) industrial landscapes feelings of class, by LarsMeierRoutledge, 2021. ISBN: 9780429458408; £27.74 (EPub)

Social Policy & AdministrationEarly View BOOK REVIEW Book review: Working class experiences of social inequalities in (post-) industrial landscapes feelings of class, by Meier, Lars Routledge, 2021. ISBN: 9780429458408; £27.74 (EPub) Lee Gregory, Corresponding Author Lee Gregory lee.gregory@nottingham.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0002-5484-1273 University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Correspondence Lee Gregory, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. Email: lee.gregory@nottingham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Lee Gregory, Corresponding Author Lee Gregory lee.gregory@nottingham.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0002-5484-1273 University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Correspondence Lee Gregory, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. Email: lee.gregory@nottingham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12833Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Re-forming pleasure: working-class aesthetic experience in Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir

Re-forming pleasure: working-class aesthetic experience in Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir

Hard Times, Property Crimes, and the Perils of Making Shift: The Working Poor in Jacksonian-Era Cumberland County, Pennsylvania

Hard Times, Property Crimes, and the Perils of Making Shift:The Working Poor in Jacksonian-Era Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Michael B. McCoy (bio) Abstract This essay draws on an uninterrupted stretch of indictment records from 1827 to 1846 to consider the relationship between hard times and property crimes in rural Pennsylvania. Focusing on working poor defendants, the piece illustrates how struggling men and women used petty crime as a makeshift response to material hardship and how such a strategy often led to more hard times. By examining the ways in which economic conditions and crime together shaped the lives of laboring people in a rural setting, this essay adds to the rich historiographies of working-class experience and crime in Pennsylvania. Demonstrating that rural crime was born of the same struggle for survival as it was in the Jacksonian city, the essay ultimately suggests that, amid capitalist transformation, the material lives of urban and rural working people—if they were ever that different—grew increasingly uniform. Property Crime, The Working Poor, Jacksonian Economy, Rural Poverty, Makeshift Strategies James gutshall was no stranger to hard times. The Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, "laboring man" was perennially poor, owned little in the way of personal property, was consistently absent from the tax rolls, and struggled to support his "wife and large family." In January 1833, with his prospects few and his problems many, Gutshall crafted a crude $7 promissory note and went shopping at John Ross's Dickinson Township store. Riddled though it was with errors, the note was evidently passable enough to allow him to walk out of Ross's store with eight yards of fabric, three handkerchiefs, one bandana, three pounds of coffee, three rolls of tobacco, and a two-dollar credit toward future purchases. Realizing his mistake, Ross quickly sought the assistance of John Auld, a [End Page 55] justice of the peace. Auld ordered the sheriff to undertake a "diligent search in the day time" of Gutshall's home, secure any or all of the goods in question, and bring Gutshall before the justice "to be examined . . . and further to be dealt with according to the law." The next day, Gutshall was arrested and confined to the county jail. More than two months would pass before he would face trial. Appearing before the quarter sessions in April, Gutshall was swiftly indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three months' confinement, saddled with a $21 fine, and ordered to pay court costs. Already grim, Gutshall's financial situation deteriorated in the months following his conviction. From his jail cell in June 1833, he petitioned the court of common pleas for relief from mounting debts and legal fees. Time lost to imprisonment left him and his family with mounting debts to local storekeepers. Unable to work, he could not pay his court-imposed fine, let alone the ever-increasing jailers' fees. Freed sometime after his August 12, 1833, insolvency hearing, Gutshall turned his attention to recovering from the economic consequences of conviction. Lost time, lost wages, and a damaged reputation would, however, haunt him for years to come; in 1837, he would again seek the aid of the insolvency court.1 Confronted by the uncertainties and material hardships that attended the Jacksonian economy, Gutshall had few options for patching the holes in his family's budget—all of them temporary, and none of them very good.2 For Gutshall, and poor men and women like him, making ends [End Page 56] meet in the face of poverty and an uncertain market for their labor often meant making shift: relying upon a handful of short-term strategies, both licit and otherwise, including the poorhouse, outdoor relief, charitable assistance, buying on credit, and petty crime.3 Faced with the struggle for subsistence, Gutshall turned to property crime, a decision that led not to relief but instead to deeper financial hardship. Gutshall's experiences as a working man and a defendant offer insight into the convergence of economic insecurity and crime in the lives of rural working people.4 Indeed, his story, and the stories of those like him, illustrate how the working poor used crime as a makeshift response to material hardship and the...

Review of Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class by Lars Meier

Review of <i>Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class</i> by Lars Meier

A Lesson in Class: the working-class experience of Anthropology

This paper focusses on socio-economic class structures, as they relate to the study and practice of anthropology. More specifically, it discusses the ways that working-class or financially precarious anthropologists (students, researchers and teachers) negotiate tensions found within the British university. It is concerned with the current climate of ‘diversity’ in education, and the role that socio-economic inequity plays in these discussions. This paper seeks to make room for class; it asks what we can learn from giving voice to the insidious silence that plagues it, in a context of neoliberal identity politics (Wrenn, 2014), ensuing ethnicist diversity practices (Brah, 1991), and what I would call ‘cursory diversity’ - what Sara Ahmed refers to as a ‘hopeful performative’ (2010, p.200). It is argued that anthropology as a discipline must start attending to the ways that financial precarity and social class impact the subjects that study, not just the subjects of study, by reflecting on the venacularity of the academy and the discipline itself. It achieves this through exploring the vernacularity of the working-class anthropologists’ experiences in relation to the prism of ‘diversity’; how class refracts to produce multiple forms of experience, of assimilation, and of exclusion - as well as resistance to such enclosure.