scholarly journals Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education

Sociology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1140-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vik Loveday
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
And Gender

Based on empirical research with participants from working-class backgrounds studying and working in higher education in England, this article examines the lived experience of shame. Building on a feminist Bourdieusian approach to social class analysis, the article contends that ‘struggles for value’ within the field of higher education precipitate classed judgements, which have the potential to generate shame. Through an examination of the ‘affective practice’ of judgement, the article explores the contingencies that precipitate shame and the embodiment of deficiency. The article links the classed and gendered dimensions of shame with valuation, arguing that the fundamental relationality of social class and gender is not only generative of shame, but that shame helps in turn to structure both working-class experience and a view of the working classes as ‘deficient’.

‘I don’t want to go to a crummy little university’: social class, higher education choice and the paradox of widening participation

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Byrom
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Summer School ◽  
Widening Participation ◽  
Education Choice ◽  
School Based ◽  
Institutional Habitus ◽  
Participation In Higher Education

Whilst there has been growing attention paid to the imbalance of Higher Education (HE) applications according to social class, insufficient attention has been paid to the successful minority of working-class young people who do secure places in some of the UK’s leading HE institutions. In particular, the influence and nature of pre-university interventions on such students’ choice of institution has been under-explored. Data from an ESRC-funded PhD study of 16 young people who participated in a Sutton Trust Summer School are used to illustrate how the effects of a school-based institutional habitus and directed intervention programmes can be instrumental in guiding student choices and decisions relating to participation in Higher Education.

scholarly journals Social-Class Disparities in Higher Education and Professional Workplaces: The Role of Cultural Mismatch

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole M. Stephens ◽  
Sarah S. M. Townsend ◽  
Andrea G. Dittmann
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Cultural Barrier ◽  
Cultural Mismatch ◽  
Cultural Ideal ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
And Performance

Differences in structural resources and individual skills contribute to social-class disparities in both U.S. gateway institutions of higher education and professional workplaces. People from working-class contexts also experience cultural barriers that maintain these disparities. In this article, we focus on one critical cultural barrier—the cultural mismatch between (a) the independent cultural norms prevalent in middle-class contexts and U.S. institutions and (b) the interdependent norms common in working-class contexts. In particular, we explain how cultural mismatch can fuel social-class disparities in higher education and professional workplaces. First, we explain how different social-class contexts tend to reflect and foster different cultural models of self. Second, we outline how higher education and professional workplaces often prioritize independence as the cultural ideal. Finally, we describe two key sites of cultural mismatch—norms for understanding the self and interacting with others—and explain their consequences for working-class people’s access to and performance in gateway institutions.

Life stories: biography and creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Paul Thompson ◽  
Ken Plummer ◽  
Neli Demireva
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
University Expansion ◽  
Second World

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.

Cognitive Consistency and Class Identification: Study of Social Perception

1972 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-330
Author(s):  
H. Wayne Hogan ◽  
C. Boyd Loadholt
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Semantic Differential ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Cognitive Consistency ◽  
Evaluation Scores ◽  
Class Identification ◽  
Psychological Concepts

Using the Semantic Differential, 46 undergraduates evaluated as theoretically expected 12 social-psychological concepts as they themselves felt about each concept and as they thought hypothesized members of four social-class categories would evaluate them. The evaluation scores of the generally working-class Ss were much more similar to those projected onto the middle and upper classes than those attributed to the lower and working classes.

Tightening bonds and professional access

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Payne
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Participation Rate ◽  
Student Diversity ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Occupational Outcome ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Personal Qualities

This chapter extends the sceptical discussion of meritocracy to higher education, and access to employment. The professions’ partially successful attempt to achieve a closed shop restricts entry by those from less advantaged homes, and the less academically skilled of their own children. Data on qualifications and ‘personal qualities’ required for recruitment show detailed connections between social and cultural capital, and occupational outcome, are complicated. Higher education is status stratified: not all degrees are equal. The Higher Education Initial Participation Rate (‘HEIPR’) exaggerates the number of graduates; other statistical sources do not include data on social class. Increasing student diversity does not automatically increase mobility: working class students continue to be disadvantaged once they enter university. Meritocratic and individualistic explanations of mobility are inadequate.

scholarly journals How does parental time relate to social class in a Nordic welfare state?

2021 ◽  
pp. 000169932110520
Author(s):  
Anne Lise Ellingsæter ◽  
Ragni Hege Kitterød ◽  
Marianne Nordli Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Parental Time ◽  
Childcare Time ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
The Relationship

Time intensive parenting has spread in Western countries. This study contributes to the literature on parental time use, aiming to deepen our understanding of the relationship between parental childcare time and social class. Based on time-diary data (2010–2011) from Norway, and a concept of social class that links parents’ amount and composition of economic and cultural capital, we examine the time spent by parents on childcare activities. The analysis shows that class and gender intersect: intensive motherhood, as measured by time spent on active childcare, including developmental childcare activities thought to stimulate children's skills, is practised by all mothers. A small group of mothers in the economic upper-middle class fraction spend even more time on childcare than the other mothers. The time fathers spend on active childcare is less than mothers’, and intra-class divisions are notable. Not only lower-middle class fathers, but also cultural/balanced upper-middle class fathers spend the most time on intensive fathering. Economic upper-middle and working-class fathers spend the least time on childcare. This new insight into class patterns in parents’ childcare time challenges the widespread notion of different cultural childcare logics in the middle class, compared to the working class.

Class and gender as a laughing matter? The case of Roseanne

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Senzani
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Critical Humor

AbstractThe aim of this study is to investigate the role of humor in challenging hegemonic discourses on social class and gender, as they are reproduced in the popular sitcom format. Mindful of sitcoms' entrenched role in the audience's commodification process, the study explores whether a form of critical humor on social class and gender can emerge in the TV palimpsest. For this purpose, the study will look specifically at the sitcom Roseanne and at the public persona of Roseanne Barr. The study adopts a “multiperspectival approach” that considers all three elements of production, text and reception. First, Roseanne will be historically contextualized to understand the contradictions with which working-class representations are fraught. Secondly, a textual analysis will be performed to assess the extent to which class and gender are used as sources of humor and for which functions; finally, metatexts and viewers' responses will be analyzed considering the tensions between hegemonic and oppositional meanings attached to the sitcom. The case study of Roseanne will show that, in spite of obvious containment strategies—often through the secondary plotline and the metatexts, the sitcom provided its audience with critical humor to challenge hegemonic representations of class and gender.

Thirty Years on from Women on the Line and Girls, Wives, Factory Lives

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 174-177
Author(s):  
Anna Pollert
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Everyday Realities ◽  
Agency And Structure ◽  
Insight Into

What is the lived experience of routine wage labour? Why does it matter? In the mid-1970s, Miriam Glucksmann/Ruth Cavendish, committed as a socialist and feminist and frustrated at the political isolation of academia from working class life, went to find out. She worked in a factory, and while not originally intending to write about it, ended up producing a rich ethnography: Women on the Line. Why was it important, and does it remain so? In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson explained his choice of title: “Making, because it is the study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.” It is this interaction between agency and structure that is important to understanding how consciousness, identity, and action work—including the possibilities of challenging the status quo. Glucksmann gained the insight into what it felt like to “work on the line”; how work felt, the memories, experiences, everyday realities of her work colleagues; the control of the labour process, class and gender relations and collectivity; how wage exploitation operated; and resistance, including unionization, a dispute, division, and defeat.

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