Troubling national commemoration in Dublin, London and Liverpool: ANU Production and CoisCéim Dance Theatre’s These Rooms

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen E. Till
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Public Outreach ◽  
Easter Rising ◽  
Civilian Women

The cultural production These Rooms challenged traditional nationalistic commemorations of war and rebellion during the ‘Decade of the Centenaries’. Created by the Dublin-based ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre, and funded by the Irish and UK governments, this series of theatre/dance performances, installations and public outreach projects in unconventional urban venues ran from 2016 to 2019 in Dublin, London and Liverpool, cities with mixed British and Irish populations. Fragmentary, embodied stories about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin communicated the perspectives of working-class Irish civilian women and confused young British soldiers through intimate domestic encounters that productively disrupted heroic narratives. Audiences were instead invited to create temporary communities of encounter and ‘unlearn’ dominant concepts supporting colonial, imperial and national spaces–times. As a critical agonistic artistic intervention, These Rooms offered more inclusive ‘potential histories’ and forms of belonging across political, social and temporal borders during the geopolitically uncertain times associated with Brexit.

A working-class artist is something to be

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenn Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Real Power ◽  
The Real ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Rightful Place ◽  
Cultural Sector

The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them. It takes as its focus the filmmaker Alan Clarke and the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who were at the height of their success in the 1980s. It also considers the writers Darren McGarvey and Nathalie Olah, whose work has achieved prominence in recent years. It is through this focus I hope to demonstrate the long continuum of challenges for working-class creatives. This article also considers how, on the occasions when they are allowed the space they deserve, working-class artists have created powerful shifts in cultural production. Finally, it details some of the changes needed for working-class people to be able to take their rightful place in contributing to cultural life and the societal risks involved if they are denied that place.

‘What about the Boys?’: Schooling, Class and Crisis Masculinity

1996 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máirtín Mac an Ghaill
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Sex Role ◽  
School Level ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
Gender Images

Currently there is growing professional concern in education about ‘boys’ schooling underachievement'. At the same time, popular representations are emerging in the media that position boys as the new victims of institutional gender discrimination. Implicit in these accounts is the notion of fixed gender categories for girls and boys that are in the process of changing. In contrast, recent feminist research on schooling has shown the limits of earlier sex role models of socialisation, that operated with fixed gender images of male and female pupils. It is suggested in this paper that there is a need to draw upon this literature, in order to develop a more sophisticated framework of male identity formation at a school level. The emerging thesis of ‘boys’ underachievement' needs to be located within this framework, that suggests that schools make available a range of femininities and masculinities that young people come to occupy. This paper focuses upon an exploration of the cultural production of white working-class male students. More specifically there is a critical examination of a crisis masculinity experienced by specific sectors of young working class men, who are low academic achievers and have little prospect of future work. Of particular concern here is that new modes of school masculinity are being constructed at a time of retreat from social class analysis in critical accounts of schooling.

scholarly journals Light, mind and spirit: Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour revisited on and beyond its 40th anniversary

Ethnography ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Trondman ◽  
Anna Lund
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
40Th Anniversary ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Educational Sciences

This article is an introduction to a Special Issue dedicated to Paul Willis’s classic Learning to Labour at its 40th anniversary, and beyond. His theoretically informed and theorizing ethnographic study is read, explored, and utilized all around the globe. Its use also stretches across the borders of social, cultural and educational sciences and to manifold research areas and settings. Besides laying out its main content, that is, the answers to the question of how working-class kids let themselves get working-class jobs, this article argues that the most significant contribution of Willis’s study is the way it illuminates, both theoretically and empirically, the meaning of cultural production and cultural autonomy in the midst of ongoing social reproduction of class. This introduction ends by presenting the eight contributions to the actual Special Issue, and with an invitation to Paul Willis himself to take issue with cultural production and cultural autonomy.

Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Marc James Léger
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
The University ◽  
Four Discourses

Abstract In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to Peter Bürger’s historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the “institution art,” a new “avant garde hypothesis” becomes possible for today’s age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

The Environmental Roots of Urban Renewal in Boston

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Michael J. Brennan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Environmental Agents ◽  
Environmental Focus ◽  
Analytical Approaches

This essay argues that discourse related to residents of Boston’s South End as environmental agents justified the removal of minority and working-class residents from the neighborhood, and, in particular, the New York Streets section in the 1950s. It combines analytical approaches of urban ecology and traditional elements of social history to examine how the neighborhood orientated to the city in an economic sense, how residents created a mixed-use neighborhood, how social institutions functioned as contested spaces of cultural production, how settlement house workers created a framework of discourse about the South End, how negative perceptions of working-class and minority residents coalesced across American life, and how city officials activated the discourse to create the first steps of urban renewal in Boston. The conclusion examines how minority groups understood environmental factors to be central to urban renewal and how social justice groups took an environmental focus in their activism.

“D.C. is mambo sauce”: Black cultural production in a gentrifying city

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashanté M. Reese
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Black Residents ◽  
Dialectical Relationship

Centering mambo sauce as both a cultural staple and a metaphor for struggles over ownership in Washington, D.C., this article explores mambo sauce’s role in constructing a D.C. identity. Drawing on data from ethnographic interviews and newspaper headlines, I argue that, against the background of intense and consistent gentrification that has left the city’s population younger, whiter, and wealthier, mambo sauce becomes a lens through which to examine larger tensions related to race, class, and power. Specifically, I examine mambo sauce as a form of Black cultural production to explore the dialectical relationship between how mambo travels well beyond the carryout restaurants in Black working-class neighborhoods and the displacement of Black residents in the gentrifying city.

scholarly journals THE CONSTRUCTS OF MASCULINITY IN THE CULTURE OF RUSSIAN WORKING-CLASS YOUTH

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 558-566
Author(s):  
T. Gavrilyuk
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Age Cohorts ◽  
Technical Maintenance ◽  
Analytical Review

Purpose: The study is aimed to research the means and patterns of masculinity constructing in the working-class culture of modern Russia. Both the practices of producing its multiple forms in daily interaction and the stable structures of social inequality, which consolidate gender order at the institutional level, have been considered. The article also provides an analytical review of current studies of the working-class masculinity regimes in post-industrial societies. Methodology: The empirical base of the research is represented by the mass survey of 1534 respondents living in the Ural Federal District of Russia. The participants were working-class young people aged 16 to 29 years and occupied in the field of industry, technical maintenance, and customer service. The processing of research results was carried out using a statistical package IBM SPSS Statistics Version 20. Main Findings: It was found that the remaining structural disproportion between sectors of the economy in the level of remuneration and the gender composition of workers determines translation and reproduction of the male breadwinner pattern that has power in the family on the basis of control over economic resources. Applications of this study: The results of the study can be used in the teaching of sociology, gender studies, and cultural studies; it can also be applied by local policymakers while developing social policy programs targeted on the regarded social group. Novelty/Originality of this study: In the current research we have examined a specific group at the intersection of three stratification features: social class (the working class representatives), gender (men’s and women’s view of the masculine construct) and age (the youth of three age cohorts). The attention was paid both to the cultural production of multiple forms of masculinity and to the continued dominance of social inequality and suppression’ structures.

Music, the Fête de l’Humanité, and Demographic Change in Post-War France

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Public Outreach ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines music's role in the Fête de l'Humanité, an annual festival organized by L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's principal organ. Beyond generating revenue and mobilizing support for the Party, the Fête has long served an important ritual function, fostering a sense of camaraderie among participants. Music has proven particularly effective in this regard, offering a medium through which one's membership in an imagined (communist) community could be experienced. The chapter focuses on the Fête's transformation during the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw the Party struggle to broaden its electoral appeal beyond its working-class base. By expanding the range of musics featured at the event, its organizers sought to address an increasingly diverse electorate. Yet the Party's reliance on the Fête as an instrument of public outreach proved problematic, given that the image of inclusiveness it projected masked rather than resolved the Party's long-term demographic difficulties.

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