Working-class Populations Research Articles

The Violent Remaking of Jeddah

A massive urban renewal project in Jeddah, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia, has entailed the demolition of many historic quarters with substantial immigrant and working-class populations. Neighborhoods have been targeted with little warning or provision of compensation or alternative housing for many displaced residents. The project is intended to create modern new districts as part of a national economic agenda, but it risks erasing the unique cosmopolitan character of the Red Sea port city.

Backlash against “identity politics”: far right success and mainstream party attention to identity groups

ABSTRACT Far right parties often attack efforts to promote equality for historically marginalized groups like women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQIA+ people, suggesting that “identity politics” takes away valuable resources from native working class populations. Do mainstream parties respond to far right challenges by shifting which groups in society they give attention to? Our main argument is that mainstream parties facing a rising far right party accommodate by de-emphasizing historically marginalized identity groups and emphasizing the working class. Using a mixed methods approach, we demonstrate that mainstream parties threatened by the far right shift positive attention away from non-economic identity groups and towards the working class. Their response is conditioned by party ideology (Social Democratic parties driving the decline) and electoral fortunes. Qualitative evidence from Denmark and Sweden sheds light on how far right party growth is shifting the content of manifestos: we find that mainstream parties threatened by the far right increasingly sideline ascriptive identity-related issues. When they do give attention to identity groups like women, it is often to promote nativist, anti-immigrant agendas.

The fringe is the centre: Racism, pseudoscience and authoritarianism in the dominant English education policy network

The term ‘chumocracy’ has been used to describe a tendency within the UK's Conservative government to appoint friends and allies to key public positions; this image seriously underestimates the scale and influence of networks that shape policy and supply individuals to key roles. This paper maps networks that converge around conservative and sometimes extreme views on race and education. These networks include media figures, academics, public officials and a range of campaigning organisations. They are characterized by an authoritarian ideology, including hereditarian and pseudoscientific beliefs, that views Black and working-class populations as unstable and threatening. They shape policies that seek to silence critical debate about structural racism, while promoting an education characterised by intensified testing, selection, curricular control and strict discipline.

Perceptions of Diseases of Despair by Members of Rural and Urban High-Prevalence Communities

<h3>Importance</h3> Diseases of despair (ie, mortality or morbidity from suicidality, drug abuse, and alcoholism) were first characterized as increasing in rural White working-class populations in midlife with low educational attainment and associated with long-term economic decline. Excess mortality now appears to be associated with working-class citizens across demographic and geographic boundaries, but no known qualitative studies have engaged residents of rural and urban locales with high prevalence of diseases of despair to learn their perspectives. <h3>Objective</h3> To explore perceptions about despair-related illness and potential intervention strategies among diverse community members residing in discrete rural and urban hotspots. <h3>Design, Setting, and Participants</h3> In this qualitative study, high-prevalence hotspots for diseases of despair were identified from health insurance claims data in Central Pennsylvania. Four focus groups were conducted with 60 community members in organizations and coalitions from 3 census block group hotspot clusters in the health system between September 2019 and January 2020. Focus groups explored awareness and beliefs about causation and potential intervention strategies. <h3>Main Outcomes and Measures</h3> A descriptive phenomenological approach was applied to thematic analysis, and a preliminary conceptual model was constructed to describe how various factors may be associated with perpetuating despair and with public health. <h3>Results</h3> In total, 60 adult community members participated in 4 focus groups (44 women, 16 men; 40 White non-Hispanic, 17 Black, and 3 Hispanic/Latino members). Three focus groups with 43 members were held in rural areas with high prevalence of diseases of despair, and 1 focus group with 17 members in a high-prevalence urban area. Four themes emerged with respect to awareness and believed causation of despair-related illness, and participants identified common associated factors, including financial distress, lack of critical infrastructure and social services, deteriorating sense of community, and family fragmentation. Intervention strategies focused around 2 themes: (1) building resilience to despair through better community and organizational coordination and peer support at the local level and (2) encouraging broader state investments in social services and infrastructure to mitigate despair-related illness. <h3>Conclusions and Relevance</h3> In this qualitative study, rural and urban community members identified common factors associated with diseases of despair, highlighting the association between long-term political and economic decline and public health and a need for both community- and state-level solutions to address despair. Health care systems participating in addressing community health needs may improve processes to screen for despair (eg, social history taking) and codesign primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions aimed at addressing factors associated with distress. Such actions have taken on greater urgency with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The neo‐nationalist ascendency: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed

The neo‐nationalist ascendency: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed

“Nothing corresponding to it in China”: Asian Food at London’s International Health Exhibition, 1884

ABSTRACT This paper considers Britain’s first large-scale Chinese restaurant, situated within the 1884 International Health Exhibition in London. It asks what cultural work this Chinese restaurant and associated tearoom performed by considering two interrelated factors that governed the relationship between Britain and the British Empire, Europe, and the United States and China in the 1880s: The first is the recovery of exhibition culture’s key role in the globalization of “foreign” food. Restaurants like those at the “Healtheries” presented “high culture” versions of Asian food in stark contrast to eateries catering to working-class populations in Limehouse and American/Australian Chinatowns and camp kitchens. The exhibitions worked to elevate Chinese people above stereotyped dog- and cat-eating “universal omnivores.” The second revolves around the situating of China (and Japan) as modern through these exhibition restaurants and their location within an exhibition emphasizing hygiene and industry. I explore how the outward-facing displays of culture and esthetics at such expositions functioned within the networks of diplomacy surrounding Western informal imperialism in China, Qing Dynasty pushback, and intra-Asian competition, alongside new understandings of imperial culture as syncretic and absorptive.

Sociomaterial struggle: An ethnographic analysis of power, discourse, and materiality in a working class unemployment support organization

Using the ontological lens of sociomateriality with the theoretical notion of struggle, this critical ethnography explores interactions within an unemployment support organization run by white collar workers who train working class populations for skilled blue collar occupations. Results illustrate how sociomaterial struggle is enacted in two ways: struggle against embodied others and struggle against discursive forces. The first theme, struggle for control, occurs between blue collar trainees and white collar trainers. Second, the struggle for upward mobility, occurs when trainers and trainees struggled alongside one another in collaboration toward the goal of upward mobility. Participants' struggles organize in a complex combination of materiality and discourse throughout this unemployment support organization, mirroring social class relations in the United States.

Framing Food Access: Do Community Gardens Inadvertently Reproduce Inequality?

Alternative food programs have been proposed as solutions to food insecurity and diet-related health issues. However, some of the most popular programs-farmers markets and community-supported agriculture-overwhelmingly serve White and upper-middle-class individuals, exacerbating food security and health disparities. One explanation for the mismatch is the way in which alternative food programs are framed: Language used to encourage participation may reflect priorities of upper-middle-class and White populations who create and run these programs while lacking resonance with food-insecure populations. This literature, however, lacks consideration of how lower-cost, more participatory programs-community gardens-are framed. We therefore explore the framing of community gardens through a quantitative content analysis of the descriptions, missions, and goals provided by community garden managers across Minnesota (N = 411). Six frames were consistently present in the community garden statements: greater good, community orientation, healthy food access, food donation, self-empowerment, and symbolic food labels. Greater good and community orientation were significantly more likely to be used than any other frames. Taken together, our findings suggest that community gardens may be welcoming toward a diversity of participants but still have room to improve the inclusivity of their frames. The common use of a community orientation suggests the unique ability of community gardens among alternative food programs to benefit Black, Latino, and working-class populations. However, the most common frame observed was "greater good," suggesting one mechanism through which community gardens, like other types of alternative food programs, may be reproducing inequality through alienation of food-insecure populations.

Identidad barrial y medios de comunicación

In this paper, we will analyze the Spanish digital press’s discourse surrounding the Lavapies neighborhood in downtown Madrid, Spain. This neighborhood is characterized by its concentration of working class and immigrant populations, and is currently undergoing a process of transformation due to specific revitalization policies. Because of this, Lavapies has been subject to diverging discourses surrounding its identity, with communications media playing a key role as creator of images portraying social reality. Through a methodology based on Critical Discourse Analysis, we will examine the articles published during a six-month period in the local Madrid newspaper Madridiario and in the national online news sites El Pais, El Mundo, and ABC, paying special attention to their representations and appraisals of both the neighborhood and its people.

The Economic Geography of Xenophobic Populism: Causes and Implications

The current rise of xenophobic populism has a distinct geography. With some exceptions it tends to be concentrated in regions that are outside the main growth activities of the modern economy. Attention has focused on old manufacturing and mining areas in decline, and therefore with relatively poor, working-class populations. However, voting for rightwing populist parties is also strong in certain prosperous areas, which despite their relative wealth, are outside the most dynamic sectors. Both types of area can therefore be covered by the term often used to describe the new populist heartlands – “left behind” – but with rather different implications. In the following we shall examine in turn these issues: the geography of populism; its relationship to the geography of economic sectors; and the kinds of public policthat are relevant to tackling emerging geographical inequalities.

Neoliberal Fascism as the Endpoint of Casino Capitalism

This article explores neoliberal fascism as a distinctive political formation within the current historical moment. In doing so, it first analyzes neoliberalism as a project that has since the 1970s destroyed all the commanding institutions of democracy while consolidating power in the hands of a financial elite. In addition, it analyzes neoliberalism as a movement, that produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism creates the conditions for right wing extremists to mobilize the anger of white disenfranchised working class populations by both appealing to the economic injustices they experience while simultaneously blaming and directing their frustrations towards non-white minority groups such as immigrants, blacks, and Muslims. It is precisely this merging of the social, political, and economic hardships produced by neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of the discourse of white supremacy to divert attention from its worst excesses and failures that a neoliberal fascism is produced. More specifically, I argue that in the face of 40 years of neoliberalism with its production of massive inequality, a frontal attack on the welfare state, and the erosion of civic institutions and culture, there has been a resurgence of fascist discourses and a populist fascist political movement. Neoliberal fascism represents the conjoining of the most extreme elements of casino capitalism with the discourses of racial cleansing, and white nationalism. The article concludes by examining how atomization, fear, and anxiety have become the breeding grounds of fascism and what it means to revive education as a central tenet of politics so as to address the task of not simply resisting oppressive economic structures, but also what it means to engage in the massive challenge of changing individual and collective consciousness as a precondition for collective struggle and the building of new social movements.

Concrete and council housing

It is commonly appreciated that issues of ‘class’ are significant to Brutalist architecture, yet in the two main trends of today’s Brutalist critical revival, the place and features of class are sidelined or obscured. Addressing that problem, this article proposes an original concept of ‘class architecture’ through analysis of the social and aesthetic form of Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by ‘New Brutalist’ architects Alison and Peter Smithson and currently undergoing demolition. The concept of class architecture is developed here in two ways. First, it appraises the imagistic aspects of the estate’s route to demolition, as the urban ejection of working-class populations is cloaked and lent motive force by its repackaging as a ‘blitz’ on the putative ‘concrete monstrosities’ of post-war estates. Second, class architecture reconstructs how class – a fraught and unstable condition, ever pulled out of shape – is modulated in Robin Hood Gardens’ built form. Through these two aspects of class architecture, the article seeks to reclaim the aesthetics of Brutalism from discourses of abjection and the burgeoning ‘middle-class Brutalism’ that would cleanse concrete modernism of its working-class dimensions. Based on three years’ research at Robin Hood Gardens, the article enlists the Smithsons’ critically neglected methodology of the ‘as found’ and draws on interviews with residents, site observation, photography, and the Smithsons’ architectural writing.

Different Institutions and Different Values: Exploring First-Generation Student Fit at 2-Year Colleges.

First-generation (FG) college students (students for whom neither parent has a 4-year degree) face a number of challenges as they attempt to obtain a post-secondary degree. They are more likely to come from working-class backgrounds or poverty (Reardon, 2011) and attend lower quality high schools (Warburton et al., 2001) while not benefiting from the guidance of a parent who successfully navigated the path to higher education. FG college students also contend with belonging or “fitting in” concerns due a perceived mismatch between their own values and the values implicit in institutions of higher education (Stephens et al., 2012a). Specifically, prior research has demonstrated that FG college students face an unseen disadvantage that can be attributed to the fact that middle-class norms of independence reflected in American institutions of higher education can be experienced as threatening by many FG students who have been socialized with more interdependent values commonly espoused in working-class populations. The present research examines this theory (cultural mismatch theory) in the understudied context of 2-year colleges and tests if a values-affirmation intervention (i.e., an intervention that has shown promise in addressing identity threats and belonging concerns) can be effective for FG college students at these 2-year campuses. By considering the tenets of cultural mismatch theory in the creation of the values-affirmation interventions we were able to vary different aspects of the intervention in order to examine how its effectiveness may depend on the nature and magnitude of a perceived cultural mismatch. Results from surveying faculty and students at 2-year colleges indicated that compared to traditional 4-year institutions, the norms of 2-year colleges and the motivations of FG students may be different. That is, FG student motives may be more consistent (and thus less mismatched) with the cultural context of 2-year colleges which could result in fewer belonging concerns when compared to FG students at 4-year institutions. This may carry implications for the efficacy of values-affirmation interventions and could help explicate why FG students in the current sample perceived a greater match with their college when they reflected on their interdependent values.

The Other Battle of Algiers

The Other Battle of Algiers

Narratives of peripheralisation: Place, agency and generational cohorts in post-industrial Estonia

Research on spatial polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe has tended to focus on macro-economic processes that create certain places and people as peripheral and has highlighted the socioeconomic impact of peripheralisation, while paying only limited attention to local experiences and responses. Drawing on a multiscalar conception of peripheralisation processes, the article examines the making of socio-spatial inequalities from the perspective of the periphery and foregrounds the narrative practices through which actors negotiate peripheralisation processes, focusing on the case of Narva, a former industrial city in Estonia’s Northeastern region. In the face of negative structural dynamics, actors rework their peripheral status by articulating a positive sense of belonging, claiming recognition based on their work and trying to exert control over their futures. The paper particularly highlights generational differences within these narrative responses to spatial inequalities. While older working-class populations’ narratives are shaped by collective and place-based resilience, the post-socialist generation employs more individualised strategies in the face of peripheralisation and exercises agency by detaching themselves from place. Analysing these responses, the article draws attention to constrained agency as well as cultural differentiation within peripheral communities.

Languages discourses in Australian middle-class schools: parent and student perspectives

ABSTRACTMuch of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class schools in Australia to demonstrate how a complex amalgam of elite, cultural identity and/or trade language discourses came into play to explain the choice (or not) to study a language and the choice of specific languages. For many of the parents languages provided a limited form of ‘civic multiculturalism’, as a means of better understanding and respecting the ‘other’. We argue that the value attributed to high status languages via this discourse, means their continued presence in schools hoping to attract middle-class parents, but their relative absence in schools with largely working-class populations, where more ‘practical’ concerns dominate.

Hipsters on Our High Streets: Consuming the Gentrification Frontier

Gentrification involves the displacement of working class populations, a phenomena most obviously manifest in the transformation of residential landscapes. But this is also palpable in the changes visible on many shopping streets, with locally-oriented stores serving poorer populations and ethnic minorities being replaced by ‘hipster’ stores such as ‘real coffee’ shops, vintage clothing stores and bars serving microbrews. These stores have been taken as a sign that the fortunes of struggling shopping streets are improving, with the new outlets often depicted as offering a better range of healthy, green and ‘authentic’ consumption choices than the shops they displace. However, this paper argues that we need to resist this form of retail change given it typically represents the first stage of a more thoroughgoing retail gentrification process, remaining suspicious of forms of hipster consumption which, while aesthetically ‘improving’ local shopping streets in deprived areas, actually encourage the colonisation of neighbourhoods by the more affluent.

Consumption, silicosis, and the social construction of industrial disease.

In the wake of the bacterial revolution after Robert Koch identified the tuberculosis bacillus, medical and public health professionals classified the various forms of consumption and phthisis as a single disease--tuberculosis. In large measure, historians have adopted that perspective. While there is undoubtedly a great deal of truth in this conceptualization, we argue that it obscures almost as much as it illuminates. By collapsing the nineteenth-century terms phthisis and consumption into tuberculosis, we maintain that historians have not understood the effect of non-bacterial consumption on working-class populations who suffered from the symptoms of coughing, wasting away, and losing weight. In this essay, we explore how, in the nineteenth century, what we now recognize as silicosis was referred to as miners' "con," stonecutters' phthisis, and other industry-specific forms of phthisis and consumption. We examine how the later and narrower view of the bacterial origins of tuberculosis limited the medical professions' ability to diagnose and understand diseases caused by industrial dust. This paper explores the contention that developed at the turn of the century over occupational lung disease and tuberculosis and the circumstances that led to the unmasking of silicosis as a disease category.

El derecho a la salud y la política social precarizada: desafíos de la dimensión terapéutica en el trabajo social

In Puerto Rico there are a series of changes occurringin Social Work (SW), among these, the proliferationof Clinical Social Work (CSW), and related to this, the therapeutic dimension of the profession, whichrequires an analysis of the context. In this paper we propose that these changes are related to the delegitimization and rupture of Social Work, and the functionality that CSW offers to the NeoliberalState. The dismantling of the Welfare State, led by the financial capital, has shifted the human rights guaranteed by the State to the market, to be sold through services offered by the private sector. Thus, drawing social policy away from its universal character, to be focused and precarized for low income or unemployed working class populations. In the health field, it involves the transformation of public services to be purchased through private health insurance. These new capitalist regulatory mechanisms are driving the liberal practice of the profession, the increase in self-help approachesand coaching, and the strong emphasis on the psychologizing of the “social question”.

Children left behind in romania: anxiety and predictor variables.

Children left behind while their parents immigrate or travel for employment are becoming a widespread phenomenon for economic reasons, creating potentially stressful and inadequate developmental support for a substantial portion of some countries' working class populations. This study assessed the emotional status and coping skills of two matched samples of 163 Romanian children left behind and 163 comparable children living with their parents. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children, the Anger Expression Scale for Children, the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire, and the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist were utilized. Higher anxiety and depression were observed in left-behind children compared to the control group living with parents. Hierarchical multiple regression supported the relevance of coping strategies, controlled for sociodemographic characteristics, to help explain anxiety in left-behind children. Strategies to promote psychological health and general well being are discussed.