scholarly journals What’s Worth Knowing? Research and Instructional Impacts of Books on Working-Class Academics

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Jim Vander Putten
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Personal Essays ◽  
Online Tool ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Research Impacts

What are the research impacts and instructional impacts of books of essays on the perspectives of faculty from working-class backgrounds? To what extent are these books used in undergraduate or graduate courses? Previous research on the content of these edited volumes has been limited to manual constant comparative analyses that described book content. This study employed data analysis methods in the emerging field of altmetric sciences to investigate the impacts of books of personal essays about faculty from working-class backgrounds (N=11). Book-level and chapter-level analyses were conducted to measure research impact using the Altmetric Explorer online tool and instructional impact using the Open Syllabus Project Explorer online tool. Data analysis results on research impacts for books on working-class academics produced extremely low impact levels. Few books (N=4) generated patterns of attention and these patterns were limited in scope. Data analysis results on instructional impacts identified that each of the 11 books generated a Teaching Score, but all scores were minimal and indicated low impact levels. The results suggest that scholarship on faculty from working-class social origins is not being widely included in undergraduate or graduate course syllabi. Further, a large proportion of the book-level scholarship in the subject area of ‘faculty diversity’ has been limited to the constructs of race and gender. Issues involving faculty social origins have been largely omitted from curricula in this area and raises the important question: What is worth knowing?

Disability, Race, and Gender on the Stage in Antebellum America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenifer L. Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Freak Shows ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
And Gender

Antebellum Americans confronted anxieties about many issues, such as industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, that found expression in blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. In these performances, racial fears, gender worries, and the insecurities of an emergent working class combined with the specter of disability to assuage the concerns of white, working-class audiences partly by reinforcing whiteness, masculinity, and nondisability as markers of citizenship. From the “laughable limp” of an elderly, enslaved groom who inspired Thomas “Daddy” Rice to craft his infamous Jim Crow character to displays of the supposedly 161-year-old disabled body of Joice Heth, minstrelsy and freak shows routinely conflated race, gender, and disability on the antebellum stage. This practice reached its pinnacle with Thomas “Japanese Tommy” Dilward, one of only two black men to perform in blackface before the Civil War.

Race, Class, and Labor: White Skin Privilege and Oppression

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Harris
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Statistical Information ◽  
White Skin ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article examines the relationship of race and class using the lens of working-class experiences inside the US steel and auto industries. It focuses on the applicability of white skin privilege to the conditions of labor, and introduces the concept of comparative forms of oppression. Additionally, it considerations white skin privilege from the perspective of human rights, and ends with detailed statistical information and consideration of race and gender in relationship to various job categories.

Death and Dying in the Working Class

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
The United States ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Attitudes Toward Death ◽  
Working People ◽  
And Gender

In the broader field of thanatology, scholars investigate rituals of dying, attitudes toward death, evolving trajectories of life expectancy, and more. Applying a lens of social class means studying similar themes but focusing on the men, women, and children who worked for wages in the United States. Working people were more likely to die from workplace accidents, occupational diseases, or episodes of work-related violence. In most periods of American history, it was more dangerous to be a wage worker than it was to be a soldier. Battlegrounds were not just the shop floor but also the terrain of labor relations. American labor history has been filled with violent encounters between workers asserting their views of economic justice and employers defending their private property rights. These clashes frequently turned deadly. Labor unions and working-class communities extended an ethos of mutualism and solidarity from the union halls and picket lines to memorial services and gravesites. They lauded martyrs to movements for human dignity and erected monuments to honor the fallen. Aspects of ethnicity, race, and gender added layers of meaning that intersected with and refracted through individuals’ economic positions. Workers’ encounters with death and the way they made sense of loss and sacrifice in some ways overlapped with Americans from other social classes in terms of religious custom, ritual practice, and material consumption. Their experiences were not entirely unique but diverged in significant ways.

Resuscitating Class

1998 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonya O. Rose
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Leave Of Absence ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
The Rich ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

A sense of crisis and uncertainty seems pervasive among many social historians and historical sociologists who have studied the relationship between economic disadvantage and protest politics. Within the last five or so years, edited volumes and special issues of journals have encouraged scholars to “bring class back in,” to explore what some worry is the “end of labor history,” or to “rethink working-class history” in the wake of postmodernism, the turn to discursive and cultural analysis, and the growing number of scholars whose substantive interests involve issues of race and gender.Even those who celebrate the rich diversity of subject matters explored by contemporary labor and working-class historians are worried about scholars jumping ship because “engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas,” to quote Ira Katznelson (1994: 7). I myself have chosen to take a “leave of absence” from studying the mutual constitution of gender and class.

scholarly journals Don Quixote, Sweded by Michel Gondry in Be Kind Rewind (2008)

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 454-467
Author(s):  
Erin K. Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Arbitrary Sign ◽  
Poetic License ◽  
Intercultural Interactions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Film Making

Abstract In the spirit of poetic license from Be Kind Rewind (2008), this article argues that Michel Gondry’s film “swedes,” its playful neologism for ersatz remaking of Hollywood and classic films, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The feature follows the Sanchification of Jerry (Jack Black), Gondry’s Don Quixote, and Quixotification of Mike (Mos Def), Gondry’s Sancho, as they nostalgically wrong cinematic rights through sweding and try to save their working-class neighbourhood from condemnation and gentrification through community film making. Gondry swedes the Quixote through his engagement with major themes and operations in Cervantes’s classic, including nostalgia, story-telling, conflicts between reality and fantasy, authorship, the grotesque and carnivalesque, (anti-)heroes, race and gender-bending, genre, and addressees turned addressers. This article discusses Be Kind Rewind’s relationship to Hollywoodian and Cervantine classics through the theoretical frameworks of Julio Garcia Espinosa’s imperfect cinema and Foucauldian semiotics, respectively. Be Kind Rewind uses and abuses Hollywood stereotypes to re-purpose them for a critique of discriminatory practices. Where casting is concerned and where Michel’s characters diverge from Miguel’s, Be Kind Rewind advances that skin colour is not an arbitrary sign and that race has historical and contemporary meaning in intercultural interactions.

Marginalisation and inclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-154
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Local Labour ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
And Gender

This chapter draws upon social tenants’ housing histories and employment experiences to assess urban marginalisation with reference to class, race and gender. Since the 1970s, social housing estates in Western cities have been characterised by poverty, deprivation and stigmatisation. London’s public/social housing has increasingly accommodated deprived and socially marginalised groups including the poor, unemployed, sick and disabled, lone-parent families, ethnic minority groups, and the homeless (Hamnett). This process has been conceptualised as residualisation, social exclusion, and socio-tenurial polarisation. These conceptual frameworks are critiqued along three dimensions. First, they have under-emphasised the dynamic, spatial and inclusionary aspects of tenants’ labour market engagement; female residents often work in the local labour market, and such employment contributes towards working-class getting by and place belonging (Chapter 6). Second, estates have become more socially and ethnically diverse and inclusionary spaces (Sassen). Third, in terms of tenure preferences, council/social housing is valued because, unlike the private rental sector (PRS), it provides security at manageable rents. Contrary to the residualisation thesis regarding social renting, it’s the PRS which has consistently been the tenure of last resort for working-class Londoners. The final section focusses on the shifting relationship between homelessness and social renting.

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