Thinking Through Class and Gender in the Context of Working Class Studies

Antipode ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda McDowell
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-178
Author(s):  
Allison Hurst ◽  
Tery Griffin ◽  
Alfred Vitale

In 2008, the Association of Working-Class Academics was founded in upstate New York by three former members of the Working-Class/Poverty-Class Academics Listserv. The Association had three goals: advocate for WCAs, build organizations on campuses that would support both working-class college students and WCAs, and support scholarship on issues relevant to class and higher education. The Association grew from a small handful to more than 200 members located in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany. In 2015, it was formally merged with the Working-Class Studies Association, and continues there as a special section for WCSA members. This is our collective account of the organization, told through responses to four key questions. We hope this history will provide insight and lessons for anyone interested in building similar organizations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Kim Case

Patricia Hill Collins (1986) labels herself as an ‘outsider within’ due to her intersectional standpoint as a Black woman sociology professor in the ivory tower. In contrast to the ‘outsider within’ lens, I theorize my own social location as an ‘insider without’ due to a complex matrix of identities within the classed academic cultural context. Using counter storytelling, I explore my insider without location through analysis of my journey across the ‘working-class academic arc.’ In the working-class academic arc described below, I apply intersectional theory (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1989) by connecting my personal experiences with existing working-class studies scholarship. The arc process culminates in my development of critical intersectional class consciousness and actions of resistance. By introducing this three-phase arc, I hope to raise awareness of the invisible academic class culture which invalidates working-class ways of being and knowledge production.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel

Chapter 6 traces the musical and lyrical developments of honky-tonk in the late 1930s and 1940s with Al Dexter, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams and remained a predominant mode of country music after World War II, right when Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard contributed to the musical discourse. These female artists, taking over male-defined and often parodic representations of women, developed narratives that articulated class-specific voices couched in the metaphors of sexual and material desire, heartache, and loss juxtaposed with 1950s ideals of domesticity. Examining the particulars of musical style and vocal expression, this chapter argues that female artists in their various enactments of the honky-tonk angel, the angry, jilted housewife, the single mother, and the forsaken lover disclosed the paradoxes of class and gender and helped to lift the cloak of invisibility shrouding working-class women.


2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Paul Thompson ◽  
Ken Plummer ◽  
Neli Demireva

This chapter traces the engine of the pioneers' success and discusses their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. It begins by analyzing how the pioneers' were influenced by the communities where they grew up. Looking at the pioneers' families as a whole, even though this generation for which unprecedented university expansion brought rare opportunities for upward mobility, the chapter examines the pioneers' working-class families and old Oxbridge intellectual aristocracy. It notes that some of the key factors which brought them opportunities were due to national social changes and international events. The chapter also looks at how the older generation generally benefitted from Second World War experiences that took them out of their social-class cocoon. The chapter then discusses the pioneers who chose to explore other cultures rather than to research their own communities. It emphasizes social class injustice, racism, and gender injustice.


Author(s):  
Eli Revelle Yano Wilson

This chapter brings readers further into the workplace by examining how coworker dynamics reinforce the extant social organization of higher-end restaurants, and ultimately how workers themselves understand their differences. The author details how educated white servers and working-class Latino cooks enact symbolic boundaries against the other that close off two distinct worlds of work by race, class, and gender. The racialized and classed boundaries that employees enact lead to strained and distant interactions, and can disrupt the flow of service in very real ways. More importantly, symbolic barriers decrease the likelihood that workers themselves feel they are able to access jobs for which they do not fit. This disproportionately affects Latino workers by further miring them in the lowest-paying and least visible jobs in the workplace.


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