Conflicts in and around Space: Reflections on ‘Mosque Conflicts’

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-63
Author(s):  
Martin Lundsteen
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Spatial Logic

Abstract The 21st century has seen increasing attacks directed at Muslim places of worship, a social problem that has resulted in a whole array of investigations. This article suggests that the majority of this research on mosque conflicts fails to address the entrenched class dynamics and shifting geography of capitalist accumulation. Consequently, it complements this research by analysing the first mediatised conflict of its kind in Spain, the protest against the construction of a purpose-built mosque in Catalonia, Premià de Mar. The case demonstrates that the opposition was in fact a racist attack against Muslims answering to the economic interests of the local bourgeoisie. The ones acting it out, a section of the local working class, was convinced that this symbol of migrant presence would be a degrading feature that would jeopardise their recent social upward mobility. Hence it is fundamentally an expression of how racist logic is embedded in the spatial logic of capitalism in the 21st century.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

The Hopscotch of Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Ashwin Desai ◽  
Goolam Vahed
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Home Life ◽  
Indian Family ◽  
Extended Families ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The 1960S

In this chapter, we delve into the lives of working class women, many of whom obtained jobs in the clothing and textile industry from the 1960s, and whose incomes were crucial for upward mobility. It reveals how they negotiate life in an environment of extended families and patriarchal relations and how paid work offered them freedoms from the strictures of home life. Of particular relevance is showing how post 1990 the opening of the economy to cheap imports affected the lives of working class women and in turn, what consequences this had for Indian family life.

Empire and ethnocentric education

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Sally Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Working Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
21St Century ◽  
White People ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
School Teaching ◽  
Invented Traditions ◽  
Trade Wars

Chapter I notes that while necessarily selective of historical events, explanations for the 2016 Brexit vote, trade wars, race and migrant antagonisms and hatreds must start with the British Empire, especially in the later 19th century when power and wealth were concentrated in a white world. Racial ignorance and assumptions of national superiority have continued into the 21st century. The chapter discusses the emergence of mass education from around 1870 which was influenced by events associated with imperialism and its ideologies. It records that British values and invented traditions, imbued with nationalism, militarism and racial arrogance, were filtered down from public schools to state secondary and elementary school. Teaching, textbooks and youth literature reflected and entrenched beliefs in the superiority of white people and distrust of foreigners. There were some signs that the white working class recognised a connection between imperial rule and their own class position.

Catholicism and Working-Class Activism in Providence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn Sterne
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
Political Organizing ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
New Americans ◽  
Lay Societies ◽  
The Church ◽  
Over Time

This chapter maintains that Catholic parishes were the most accessible and important institutions in Providence's ethnic, working-class neighborhoods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that as such, they played critical roles in politicizing new Americans. It was at church that the largest proportion of immigrants congregated on a regular basis. Parishes functioned not only as sources of spiritual solace but also as dispensers of charity, promoters of upward mobility, and centers of neighborhood life. Priests initially promoted lay societies to foster congregational loyalties, but over time the groups also served as political organizing spaces for Catholic women and men. For many, the Church served as a place where new Americans organized for change.

The Indian Diaspora in Malaya

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-269
Author(s):  
Ummadevi Suppiah ◽  
Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indian Diaspora ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Indian Populations ◽  
Indian Origin

The historiography of Malaya that deals with Indian diaspora rarely differentiates Indians on the basis of their ethnic3 origins and their relationships during the British era. The ethnic Indian populations during the British era comprised the majority Tamils, and the other groups such as the Telugus, Malayalees, Gujeratis, Chettiars, Sikhs and Indian Muslims. The ethnic groupings among those of Indian origin could be divided into three main economic classes: labour, business and civil service. This article focuses on the Chettiars as the group that comprised the business class and looks at their interactions with the other ethnic groups of Indian origin belonging to the labour class and civil service. This article demonstrates that although the Chettiar provided credit to other Indian ethnic groups, the moneylending system was one-sided, favouring only the Chettiar, who did not play a positive role in ensuring the overall socio-economic interests and welfare of working class Indians.

Elite Pasts and Subaltern Potentialities

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-141
Author(s):  
James Caron
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
21St Century ◽  
International System ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
New Construction ◽  
A Chain

In narrating Afghanistan's 21st century, future historians might bracket the first decade with the two Bonn conferences of 2001 and 2011: great-power delegates and handpicked elite Afghans meeting to plot Afghanistan's transitional place in the international system. In contrast, Afghan popular and intellectual cultures alike have often voiced alternate histories. For example, Malang Kohistani, a contemporary working-class singer of Kabul's hinterland, sees top-down Afghan integrations into globality not as a fundamentally new construction of institutions that promise prosperity for a nation-state and its people but rather as one more intrusive disruption—in a chain of similar events beginning over 2,000 years ago with Alexander—in everyday people's continuous, bottom-up efforts to ensure their livelihoods, in part through developing horizontally organized trade networks. And indeed it is not only post-2001 statist intervention that has attracted such popular responses, but this is also a longstanding critique among both urban and rural Afghan intellectuals. In some ways Malang Kohistani echoes Malang Jan, the renowned 1950s sharecropper-poet of Jalalabad, as well as various more elite authors.

From the Nightclub to the Living Room: Gender, Ethnicity, and Upward Mobility in the 1950s Party Records of Three Jewish Women Comics

Jews at Home ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 188-214
Author(s):  
Giovanna P. Del Negro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Home Based ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Women Comics

This chapter addresses mass-media culture, as the Jewish home-based value of laughing at oneself goes public with the rise of the recording of Jewish comedy acts. It explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott — three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It looks at how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive. That some of the prominent comedy recordings brought into living-rooms across America were by Jewish women brandishing a racy, Yiddish-tinged humour becomes significant in the context of the middle-class suburbanization that Jews were experiencing during the 1950s.

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