Yearning to Labour? Working-Class Men in Post-Industrial Britain

2017 ◽  
pp. 53-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren Nixon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Post Industrial

Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592098729
Author(s):  
Amalia Z. Dache ◽  
Keon M. McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Education Pipeline ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Narrative Mapping

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.

Gentrification and neighborhood melancholy. Collective sadness and ambivalence in Dortmund’s Hörde district

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Artificial Lake ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
The Phoenix

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.

Imagining post-industrial Britain

Barry Hines ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Forrest ◽  
Sue Vice
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Father's Experience ◽  
Post Industrial

This chapter explores Hines’s conception of Britain after the miners’ strike, and the difficulty he experienced in fictionalising those divisive events. While his 1994 novel The Heart of It is a metafictional account of a writer’s coming retrospectively to understand the strike through his father’s experience, three plays Hines wrote about it remain in draft form and never appeared in the public realm. Both Shooting Stars (1990) and Born Kicking (1992), take unexpected views on Hines’s staple subject of football and its social role, in relation respectively to the effect of unexpected wealth on a working-class man, and what happens if the footballer is a woman. Elvis Over England (1998), Hines’s last published novel, is a road journey undertaken by an unemployed steelworker who starts to confront his past by means of Elvis’s songs. Although critics and Hines himself predicted that Elvis Over England would end up on the screen, it was never filmed.

Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty

2012 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Transitions To Adulthood ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Post Industrial

Past research in both the transitions to adulthood literature and cultural sociology more broadly suggests that the working class relies on traditional cultural models in their construction of identity. In the contemporary post-industrial world, however, traditional life pathways are now much less available to working-class men and women. I draw on 93 interviews with black and white working-class young people in their 20s to 30s and ask, in an era of increasing uncertainty, where traditional markers of adulthood have become tenuous, what kinds of cultural models do working-class young people employ to validate their adult identities? In contrast to previous studies of working-class identity, I found that respondents embraced a model of therapeutic selfhood—that is, an inwardly directed self preoccupied with its own psychic development. I demonstrate that the therapeutic narrative allows working-class men and women to redefine competent adulthood in terms of overcoming a painful family past. Respondents required a witness to validate their performances of adulthood, however, and the inability to find one left many lost in transition.

scholarly journals Class identity of the working-class youth in contemporary Russia

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 839-854
Author(s):  
V. V. Gavrilyuk ◽  
T. V. Gavrilyuk
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Active Processes ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
Post Industrial

The article considers the social self-identification of the Russian working youth and its class identity. The relevance of the topic is due to the need to search for basic indicators of the identity of the working class in the post-industrial era as connected with the fundamental differences between wage labour in the service sectors from the labour of industrial workers. The article presents an overview of contemporary concepts of multiple and fragmented identity, outlines the main vectors of controversy in the debates on identification processes and identity politics in contemporary societies; describes the basic features of the identification of the working class in the post-industrial era - the nature and content of labour; ownership of property and participation in the management of the enterprise. The contemporary working class is defined as a nonhomogeneous entity with internal differentiation determined by such factors as the form of employment, sphere of employment, income level, lifestyle and cultural capital. The empirical part of the research was implemented in the Ural Federal District in 2018 based on the mass and expert surveys. The results of the study prove that there are active processes of class formation in the Russian society; therefore, we need to revive the class approach to the description of the social structure. More than 50% of young people from the traditional industrial working class still identify themselves as members of this social group, while the same applies only to every third worker of routine service; and identification with the middle class loses popularity. The empirical data show the paradoxical nature of the working-class thinking and the instability of its basic orientations. The contradictory assessments and statements of the respondents confirm the vagueness of their class consciousness and the instability of their class identity.

scholarly journals Working-class and Memory Policy in Post-Industrial Cities: Łódź, Poland, and Tampere, Finland, Compared

2020 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Magdalena Rek-Woźniak ◽  
Wojciech Woźniak
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Experiments ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Post Industrial

AbstractŁódź and Tampere share an industrial and political past. Part of the Russian empire, the cities became major textile hubs crucial for Tsarist industrial economy.1 The cities were also Red strongholds. Historically, they can be seen as socio-economic “experiments” and “islands of modernization” within largely rural societies. Since the 1980s (in case of Tampere) and the 1990s (in case of Łódź) both cities have undergone substantial social and economic transformations connected with the collapse or decline of traditional industries. How do the two cities choose to represent their working-class heritage today? This essay compares how city museums in Tampere and Łódź represent their working-class history in selective and contradictory ways.

How Not to Aim the Camera Downward. Representing the Feminized Working Poor

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olympia Contopidis
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Working Poor ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Feminine Ideals ◽  
Post War ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The Welfare State

The identity of the working-class woman is a particularly precarious one, as stereotypical western feminine ideals are not associated with any of the archetypical trades of the working class, which has instead embodied the masculine ideal of the manual, industrial labourer. In this essay, I argue how the struggle of working-class femininity extends to gender roles of the (former) working class more generally, investigating how this becomes apparent in photographic representations of council housing communities in contemporary art, taking Richard Billingham’s body of work Ray’s a Laugh (1996) and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work The Notion of the Family (2001-14) as case studies. Both Billingham’s and Frazier’s work deal with the identity of the working poor from the inside: they represent the decline of the working class and the demise of blue-collar communities, lacking investment and falling prey to the dismantling of the welfare state. The image of the post-war, post-industrial (and post-feminist) underemployed female has been analysed principally by sociologists and media studies researchers in relation to reality TV programmes, which produce and represent the working class female body as abject. I will therefore employ cultural theory as well as sociological research studies by Beverly Skegg, Imogen Tyler, and Angela McRobbie to identify stereotypes of working-class femininity in visual culture to then assess their relationship to lens-based artistic representations of the working class. The analysis of working-class masculinity and its place in the post-industrial, precarious labour market has been even more limited especially regarding art (let alone photography), with the exception of Angela Dimitrakaki’s essay "Masculinity, Art, and Value Extraction" (2019). The article draws on her discussion as well as on Norbert Trenkle’s "The Rise and Fall of the Working Man" (2008) to investigate Frazier’s and Billingam’s depictions of male family members and show how the decline of the working class, through deindustrialisation, precarisation, and the dismantling of the welfare state, has impacted the image of working-class masculinity.

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