scholarly journals Youth, Dirt, and the Spatialization of Subjectivity: An Intersectional Approach to White Rural Imaginaries

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Rural Youth ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Poor White ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Pure White

Abstract. Canada’s rural idyll is embedded within the colonial legacy of a white settler society; however, little research has examined how class and gender uphold this articulation of rurality and whiteness. This article draws on ethnographic research with white, working-class rural youth to develop an intersectional analysis of rural imaginaries. The analysis shows how youth construct their own rural identities through racialized representations of urban and global “others.” I argue that these racist place-narratives must be understood in the context of competing discourses of rurality in Canada: the romanticized pure white rural of colonial history, and the pathologized poor white rural of a cosmopolitan future. Even as youth locate their gendered performances within the rural idyll, they are marked as “dirts” by their classed, rural status. By inscribing racist discourses onto others, youth resist the classist imagery projected onto their community and thereby re- claim a pure white rural idyll.

The Peer Group’s Agency in a Brazilian School

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Cinthia Torres Toledo ◽  
Marília Pinto de Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
School Engagement ◽  
Peer Groups ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Educational Trajectories ◽  
Schooling Process ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban State

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.

Decolonization and Coloniality in Human Development: Neoliberalism, Globalization and Narratives of Indian Youth

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 207-221
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Global South ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
American Psychology ◽  
Urban Indian

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?

MESSY FREE-FOR-ALL OR AN “AHA!” MOMENT?: REFLECTIONS ON AN HIV AWARENESS PROGRAM WITH AFRICAN NEWCOMER YOUTH

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Susan Frohlick ◽  
Adey Mohamed
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Knowledge To Action ◽  
Design And Implementation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Awareness Program ◽  
Hiv Awareness ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This paper traces a collaboration between a White settler anthropologist and Black community liaison and researcher in the design and implementation of HIV awareness strategies. Based on ethnographic research with young people from African newcomer communities who settled in Winnipeg, Canada, their sense that HIV did not exist in Canada was the impetus for our movement of knowledge-to-action. Rather than deliver the facts to them as a passive audience, we created space and time for a series of youth-led conversations that were effective, emotional, corporeal, and socially dynamic. From our respective positionalities, we reflect on the impact of the awareness activity. What at times felt like “a free-for-all” fostered an awareness by the young people, as active agents, of the complexities of HIV as “more than a virus,” especially its racialized underpinnings.

Voices of Angels

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Country Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Representations Of Women

Chapter 6 traces the musical and lyrical developments of honky-tonk in the late 1930s and 1940s with Al Dexter, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams and remained a predominant mode of country music after World War II, right when Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard contributed to the musical discourse. These female artists, taking over male-defined and often parodic representations of women, developed narratives that articulated class-specific voices couched in the metaphors of sexual and material desire, heartache, and loss juxtaposed with 1950s ideals of domesticity. Examining the particulars of musical style and vocal expression, this chapter argues that female artists in their various enactments of the honky-tonk angel, the angry, jilted housewife, the single mother, and the forsaken lover disclosed the paradoxes of class and gender and helped to lift the cloak of invisibility shrouding working-class women.

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.

Worlds Apart

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-81
Author(s):  
Eli Revelle Yano Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
Distant Interactions ◽  
Latino Workers ◽  
And Gender

This chapter brings readers further into the workplace by examining how coworker dynamics reinforce the extant social organization of higher-end restaurants, and ultimately how workers themselves understand their differences. The author details how educated white servers and working-class Latino cooks enact symbolic boundaries against the other that close off two distinct worlds of work by race, class, and gender. The racialized and classed boundaries that employees enact lead to strained and distant interactions, and can disrupt the flow of service in very real ways. More importantly, symbolic barriers decrease the likelihood that workers themselves feel they are able to access jobs for which they do not fit. This disproportionately affects Latino workers by further miring them in the lowest-paying and least visible jobs in the workplace.

Never Happier in Her Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Social Ethic ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Border Culture ◽  
Poor White

This chapter explores the lives of working-class and poor white women of the border South. Their story reveals the potential of border culture—how it gave a voice and agency to women whose stories could be more easily suppressed in a less fluid community. The border created fertile ground for ideas of mutuality and individualism. While this led many to pursue friendship, love, and partnership in their relationships, elite and middle-class husbands and wives of the border South still often adhered to a social ethic which dictated certain gendered behaviors to men and women. In working-class society, however, these philosophies gave women a greater sense of independence and authority, allowing them to push the boundaries of the household and assert themselves in new ways.

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