The working-class student in the university: Does anyone really care?

1971 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Schleifer ◽  
Joseph Katz ◽  
Asa Knowles ◽  
Nevitt Sanford
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The University

Jude the Obscure

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
Jude The Obscure ◽  
Do So

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?' Jude Fawley, poor and working-class, longs to study at the University of Christminster, but he is rebuffed, and trapped in a loveless marriage. He falls in love with his unconventional cousin Sue Bridehead, and their refusal to marry when free to do so confirms their rejection of and by the world around them. The shocking fate that overtakes them is an indictment of a rigid and uncaring society. Hardy's last and most controversial novel, Jude the Obscure caused outrage when it was published in 1895. This is the first truly critical edition, taking account of the changes that Hardy made over twenty-five years. It includes a new chronology and bibliography and substantially revised notes.

The decline and fall of a working classicist

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Clare
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Employment Structure ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Academic System ◽  
Class Background ◽  
University Experience ◽  
The University

Although the academy tends not to recognize it, scholars and students from working-class backgrounds are automatically at a disadvantage. To demonstrate both sides of the university experience, I provide here a detailed, personal account of my journey from undergraduate to postgraduate to post-Ph.D. researcher. I pay special attention to my chosen subject of classics and ancient history, an area of study with its own set of class-based problems – for while those from working-class backgrounds might be (and are) subject to classism in any discipline, the seemingly inherent elitism of the classics and ancient history field makes it doubly hard for the underprivileged to succeed. I begin by illustrating how ‘working-class knowledge’ of popular culture granted me access into an otherwise closed, exclusionary set of subject materials and go from here to detail how such work is undervalued by the field, before ending on the violent effects that the all-too-familiar casualized employment structure has on those would-be academics who lack access to family wealth, savings and freedom of opportunity/action. Ultimately, I try to show how that – no matter how hard you try – if you are from working-class background, you are highly unlikely to succeed in the modern-day academic system.

Ugliness and Beauty: the Politics of Landscape in Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
North West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Open Fields

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

scholarly journals Theoretical and empirical links between trade unions and democracy

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Lucio Baccaro ◽  
Chiara Benassi ◽  
Guglielmo Meardi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Core ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Union Democracy ◽  
The University

This special issue wants to honour the memory of Giulio Regeni, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge who was assassinated while he was conducting field research on independent trade unions in Egypt. This introduction and the following articles focus on the theoretical, empirical and methodological questions at the core of Regeni’s research. Unions have traditionally been regarded as crucial for representing the interests of the working class as a whole and for building and sustaining industrial and political democracy; however, there is a debate about the conditions under which unions can be effective, and the role of unions’ internal democracy is particularly controversial. The article discusses the theoretical linkages between trade unions, democratization and union democracy and concludes with a reflection on the new concerns about the risk of conducting field research on these issues raised by Regeni’s death.

scholarly journals Punkty, czyli złuda modernizacji

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Marcin Kula
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Origin ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World

The author’s remarks on Agata Zysiak’s book Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście [Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a Working-Class City] (2016) primarily concern the question of social advance through education and Zysiak’s outline of this process in Poland after the Second World War. As a participant of that process — first as a student, and later as a teacher — the author suggests that it should be viewed from the perspective of historical sociology.

Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Marc James Léger
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
The University ◽  
Four Discourses

Abstract In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to Peter Bürger’s historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the “institution art,” a new “avant garde hypothesis” becomes possible for today’s age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

scholarly journals Social Class, Identity and the ‘Good’ Student: Negotiating University Culture

2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Pearce ◽  
Barry Down ◽  
Elizabeth Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Participation Rates ◽  
University Culture ◽  
University Experiences ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
The University

Through the use of narrative portraits this paper discusses social class and identity, as working-class university students perceive them. With government policy encouraging wider participation rates from under-represented groups of people within the university sector, working-class students have found themselves to be the objects of much research. Working-class students are, for the most part, studied as though they are docile bodies, unable to participate in the construction of who they are, and working-class accounts of university experiences are quite often compared to the middle-class norms. This paper explores how working-class students see themselves within the university culture. Working-class students' voices and stories form the focus of this paper, in which the language of ‘disadvantage’ is dealt with and the ideologies of class identity explored.

scholarly journals Resistance through realism: Youth subculture films in 1970s (and 1980s) Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Weiner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Youth Subculture ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
The University ◽  
Class Youth ◽  
Made In

Film scholars have argued that the British social realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect the concerns articulated by British cultural studies during the same period. This article looks at how the social realist films of the 1970s and early 1980s similarly reflect the concerns of British cultural studies scholarship produced by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s. It argues that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ approach to stylised working-class youth subcultures is echoed in the portrayal of youth subcultures in the social realist films Pressure (1976), Bloody Kids (1979), Babylon (1980) and Made in Britain (1982). This article explores the ways in which these films show us both the strengths and weaknesses of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ work on subcultures.

‘Nice Girls’: the Vic Gives a Voice to Women of the Working Class

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Woodruff
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Company Policy ◽  
The University

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue ofTheatre Quarterly(1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, TheStaffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary,Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.

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