Hope, Affect, Mobility

Author(s):  
Alvaro Jarrín

This chapter examines the narratives of upward mobility through beauty that are interwoven throughout diverse forms of Brazilian media—from journalistic accounts of recently discovered models to the carefully crafted storylines of soap operas and televised beauty pageants. It compares these accounts with ethnographic research among working-class parents who send their daughters to talent agencies or modeling schools. These girls' parents and teachers pin their hopes on performances of beauty because they understand the female body itself as a form of capital that promises a better future. This affective promise of a better future, however, becomes a moral injunction as well, sexualizing and racializing, in very particular ways, the poor women who are said to deserve upward mobility, emphasizing virtuous sexual behavior, European features, and straighter hair as essential components for success.

Author(s):  
Lisa Mckenzie

This chapter draws upon ethnographic research within working-class communities in Nottingham and East London, families which rely upon public services, welfare benefits, and social housing. Since 2010 they are being subject to harsh cuts in their welfare benefits and also social goods through austerity policy linked to the banking crash of 2008. Rather than focus upon the economic situation of the poorest, this chapter addresses the key argument that there has been a significant change in the representation of working-class people, who have been negatively re-branded and stigmatised over the last 30 years. Successive governments have connected economic poverty with cultural and aspirational poverty. Austerity has been a constructed narrative that centres upon removing poverty by removing the practices, and the culture of the poor. The chapter argues that this rhetoric does the work that is needed in order to push through and justify inequalities. Those inequalities have taken the working class from positions of relative stability into serious precarity and undermined their ability to exert agency.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 772-779
Author(s):  
T.Vinsela Jeev

During the DMK regime many welfare schemes for implemented for women especially. This schemes for developments for socio and economic activities for women. The poor women, widows, physically challenged were benefited their schemes. The government allotted lot of sewing machines, Free school books, Midday meal schemes, Small scale Industry, Self help groups, Boating supply for fisher mans and many women teachers were appointed in Elementary school, Middle school, High schools. Women’s were appointed in police Department and also so many schemes for the development of socio and economic condition of the poor women people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Cinthia Torres Toledo ◽  
Marília Pinto de Carvalho

Black working-class boys are the group with the most significant difficulties in their schooling process. In dialogue with Raewyn Connell, we seek to analyze how the collective conceptions of peer groups have influenced the school engagement of Brazilian boys. We conducted an ethnographic research with students around the age of 14 at an urban state school in the periphery of the city of São Paulo. We analyzed the hierarchization process between two groups of boys, demonstrating the existence of a collective notion of masculinity that works against engagement with the school. Well-known to the Anglophone academic literature, this association is rather uncommon in the Brazilian literature. We have therefore attempted to describe and analyze here the challenges faced by Black working-class Brazilian boys to establish more positive educational trajectories.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell

‘It's the masters as has wrought this woe; it's the masters as should pay for it.’ Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.


Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 097300522110008
Author(s):  
H. S. Shylendra

As a new generation development programme, the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) has sought to promote collectives of the poor women as the corner-stone of its strategy for livelihood promotion. The livelihood enhancement is meant to be actualised through a multi-dimensional strategy of livelihood protection and promotion. The paper hypothesised that despite their avowed goal, the collectives of women are bound to face enormous challenges in the livelihood promotion in the absence of an integrated approach more so in the context of neoliberalism. The findings of the paper corroborate the hypothesis to a great extent. Contrary to the theoretical visualisation of institutionalists, collectives of poor have faced challenges in their self-reliant emergence. The intervention has emerged more as a minimalist microfinance with inherent limitations regarding poverty alleviation. The paper concludes that the collectives of NRLM have a long way to go before they can emerge as strong livelihood promoting agencies. Sustained support to build the capacities of the fledging collectives, a reversal of the top–down elements of their multi-tier structure and the strong need for greater role clarity for the collectives along with professional support are some of the policy suggestions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 207-221
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia

In this article, I argue that globalization is interwoven with colonialism and coloniality and both psychology and human development are shaped by the enduring legacy of Eurocentric colonial knowledge. In particular, I draw on my ethnographic research in Pune, India, to show how the transnational elite, middle- and working-class urban Indian youth are engaging with new practices of globalization. I examine how particular class practices shape youth narratives about globalization and “Indianness” generally, as well as specific stories about their self, identity, and family. This article is organized around three questions: (a) How has Euro-American psychology as a dominant force supported colonization and racialized models of human development? (b) What kind of stories do urban Indian youth from varied classes tell about their identity formation in contexts of neoliberal globalization? (c) How can we create and promote models of human development and psychology that are inclusive of the lives of people who live in the Global South?


1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Goldstrom

Throughout the nineteenth century, books, pamphlets and periodicals offered widely-ranging advice to the working class. One theme, appearing about 1820, was political economy: ‘Next to religion’, a royal commission reported, ‘the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes’. And Richard Whately, former Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, now archbishop of Dublin, urged similarly the need to teach political economy to the poor : ‘The lower orders’, he said, ‘would not … be, as now, liable to the misleading of every designing demagogue … If they were well grounded in the outlines of the science, it would go further towards rendering them provident, than any other scheme that could be devised.’


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