Mapping Social Change through Youth Perspectives on Homosexuality in India

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keshia D'silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Knowledge Structures ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle Class Families ◽  
East West

Social representations theory (SRT) is considered a theory of social change, accounting for democratic transformations in knowledge. However, its applicability in the Global South, where there is a long history of subjugation, has not been sufficiently explored. This essay integrates the contributions of postcolonial theorists with the tools of SRT to track changes in knowledge structures among Southern youth. In doing so, it shows the limits imposed by an enduring colonial legacy and modern cultural imperialism on Southern youths’ ability to challenge hegemonic representations on their own terms. This is further illustrated by a case study on youth perspectives on homosexuality in India which utilizes data from interviews conducted in Bengaluru with three generations of middle-class families representing India’s three major religions. While the youth accepted homosexuality, elders displayed their resistance. Yet tolerance was perceived as a Western import, revealing an East-West divide in understandings of homosexuality.

The Rise and Fall of Ace Records: A Case Study in the Independent Record Business

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Mabry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Rock N Roll

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.

The Unspeakable Events at the Glasgow Music Halls, 1875

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 225-229
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kift
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Edition ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
National Perspective

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.

The New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-210
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Social Values ◽  
American Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Residual Space ◽  
Village Life ◽  
The Village

This chapter focuses on the New England village novel, a prestigious subgenre that figured in many of the midcentury’s critical assessments of what constituted “American literature” but that is now largely forgotten. Once important novels like Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869) tell us about middle-class social values and their investment in reform in their depictions of New England village life during this period of time. This chapter explores some of the contradictions inherent in locating idealized theological and social change within the residual space of the New England village. As a consequence of these contradictions, the utopia of the New England village novel becomes literally “no place,” frozen between nostalgia for a unified national community that never existed and hope that through reform the village could fulfill utopian possibilities for the nation. This genre also maps out the transformation of attitudes toward social reform from the picturesque utopianism of Judd’s Margaret to a much narrower vision of the transformative possibilities of the picturesque in Beecher’s post-Civil War novel, Norwood, a quarter of a century later. This transformation reveals the importance of the picturesque to an alternative history of the mid-nineteenth-century American novel and explores the rise and decline of middle-class use of the picturesque as an authoritative discourse to reshape spaces and enact social change in American life.

scholarly journals Agent of social change : a history of Canadian University Press

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Käthe Anne Lemon
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Student Newspaper ◽  
Political Role ◽  
News Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Student Newspapers

Canadian University Press (CUP) is a co-operative national student news group that produces a news service and unites student newspapers across the country. Since its establishment in 1938, CUP has brought campus newspapers from across the country together to share news and information as well as training with one another. From 1965 to 1991 CUP's policies stated that the major role of the student newspaper was to "act as an agent of social change." During this time CUP and its members took on an educative and active political role. Using CUP as a case study of a politically engaged press organization that saw its role as an active participant in the events it reported, this thesis illuminates the factors that can encourage a politically engaged press taking into consideration both theory and practice. This study examines the factors that made it possible for CUP to act as an agent of social change, how that role was interpreted, and the changes that resulted in the organization moving away from that role.

Family Histories, Reproduction, and Migration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ester Gallo
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Family Size ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Migrant Families ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The One ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Middle Class Families

Chapter six discusses how different family models— joint, nuclear, transnational, among others—are linked to class mobility among Nambudiri migrant families. The question of the relation between family size, sterilization and citizenship is analysed to show how sticking to the ‘one-child’ model is made meaningful by referring to a wider colonial history of family reproduction and creates dilemmas in the present. The chapter discusses how histories of procreation, childbirth, and care are recalled to illustrate the progressive move from a sterile community to a responsible community. While the sterile community describes a colonial past in which few Nambudiri children were born or accepted due to orthodox kinship norms, the responsible community accepts the sacrifice represented by sterilization in order to achieve models of modern motherhood and fatherhood. Changing family sizes, if combined with generational forms of migration, also produces anxieties among middle-class families on elderly and children care.

scholarly journals Canonical Generations and the British Left: The Narrative Construction of the Miners’ Strike 1984–85

Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 850-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nettleingham
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

‘Generations’ have been invoked to describe a variety of social and cultural relationships, and to understand the development of self-conscious group identity. Equally, the term can be an applied label and politically useful construct; generations can be retrospectively produced. Drawing on the concept of ‘canonical generations’ – those whose experiences come to epitomise an event of historic and symbolic importance – this article examines the narrative creation and functions of ‘generations’ as collective memory shapes and re-shapes the desire for social change. Building a case study of the canonical role of the miners’ strike of 1984–85 in the narrative history of the British left, it examines the selective appropriation and transmission of the past in the development of political consciousness. It foregrounds the autobiographical narratives of activists who, in examining and legitimising their own actions and prospects, (re)produce a ‘generation’ in order to create a relatable and useful historical understanding.

Making the middle class: schooling and social class formation

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Policy History ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
Middle Class Families

Purpose – As the Australian working class continues its decline, sociological and historical scholarship has begun to focus more on the middle class. The purpose of this paper is to explore the historiography and social theory concerning the middle class, and argues that the ways in which middle class families use schools have been a powerful force in the formation of that class. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews the author’s own work on this topic, the work of other scholars, and suggests a number of social practices that middle class families employ as they school their children. Findings – The ways that many families operate in relation to the schooling of their children constitute a significant set of social class practices, that in turn assist in the continuing formation of the middle class itself. The social and policy history of schooling can expose the origins of these practices. Research limitations/implications – This paper originated as an invited key-note address. It retains characteristics associated with that genre, in this case putting less emphasis on new research and more on a survey of the field. Originality/value – In the early twenty-first century, the relevance of social class analysis for understanding a great range of social and historical phenomena is in retreat. This paper argues the continuing importance of that kind of analysis.

scholarly journals Privileging the individual through the collective commitment: Parental strategies and dynamics of involvement in a middle-class school

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier González-Patiño ◽  
David Poveda
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
School Involvement ◽  
Educational Strategies ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
History Of ◽  
Collective Commitment ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Complex Scenario ◽  
Parental Strategies

<p>This paper attempts to contribute to the growing literature focusing on middle-class parents, their educational strategies and their role in the construction of socio-educational advantages/inequalities especially in the contexts of Spanish educational discourses, to the de-naturalization of middle-class parental ideologies and the educational policies that are presented as ideologically neutral but are closely aligned to this middle-class ideological complex.</p><p>The findings come from an action research project in a public (state-run) primary school in Spain, attempting to track and document the “natural history” of the various strategies of “school involvement” displayed by parents which range from collaboration with classroom, school and teacher-initiated activities, to surveillance of school policies and programming to open confrontation with the school administration and among parents.</p><p>This case study uncovers a complex scenario in a relatively homogeneous (in socio-economic and ethnic terms) site where parental dynamics of school involvement are varied and shaped by a complex and heterogeneous set of interests and beliefs that seriously invite to reconsider “school-family continuity” in middle-class settings. Additionally, we would also like to use the case study to raise some ethical and methodological questions in relation to the complexities of holding multiple identities and roles in the field.</p>

scholarly journals Louvre Abu-Dhabi or the Myth of Westernalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 194-200
Author(s):  
D. S. Litova
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Abu Dhabi ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Modern Identity

The study of the phenomenon of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (the Middle East Louvre Museum) from the historical and cultural points of view is relevant in several aspects. Firstly, the very fact of the creation of this museum is of interest. It operates as a kind of «successor» and «interpreter» of the Western tradition, which determines its Kulturträger activity. The history of the acquisition of the Mesopotamian collection by the Louvre Abu Dhabi serves as a case study. Secondly, based on this material it is possible to trace the main characteristics of modern identity-building strategies and the build-up of «soft power». Moreover, it allows to reveal how alternative cultural-centric versions of social development are elaborated. This alternative reconsiders the thesis of the dominance of the «center» not in favor of the West. The analysis of the original way of presenting the «Western» cultural content within the framework of the «nonwestern» cultural code allows us to raise the question of the probable relapse at a symbolic level of cultural imperialism. It has its reflections in the specifics of the organization of the museum space and the features of the exposition of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The analysis allows to predict more clearly the possible cultural consequences of the museum’s creation. Thirdly, an attempt to model the museum’s cultural practices through appeal to the concepts of «mythology» and «myth» developed by Roland Barthes is of a theoretical value. The modeling comprises culturological interpretation of the museum’s activities through the prism of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. It allows us to raise the questions regarding the possibilities and boundaries. E.g., whether traditional cultural symbols could be used as elements of «soft power». Furthermore, it becomes possible to describe the limited nature of «soft power» as a means of symbolic authority.

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