5. Working-class Community Life and Social Relationships

1973 ◽  
pp. 94-120
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Class Community

What’s Good for George Sánchez Is Good for Boyle Heights: Regenerative Scholarship, Urban Racism, Gentrification, and East LA Interchange

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Pollution ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Boyle Heights ◽  
Good For ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Deed Restrictions ◽  
Class Community

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.

Mary Barton

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Community

‘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.

scholarly journals Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042098512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Folkes
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Occupational Position ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Class Community

Discussions around social mobility have increasingly gained traction in both political and academic circles in the last two decades. The current, established conceptualisation of social mobility reduces ‘success’ down to individual level of educational achievement, occupational position and income, focusing on the successful few who rise up and move out. For many in working-class communities, this discourse is undesirable or antithetical to everyday life. Drawing upon 13 interviews with 9 families collected as part of an ethnographic study, this article asks, ‘how were social (im)mobility narratives and notions of value constructed by residents of one working-class community?’ Its findings highlight how alternative narratives of social (im)mobility were constructed; emphasising the value of fixity, anchorage, and relationality. Three key techniques were used by participants when constructing social (im)mobility narratives: the born and bred narrative; distancing from education as a route to mobility; and the construction of a distinct working-class discourse of fulfilment. Participants highlighted the value of anchorage to place and kinship, where fulfilment results from finding ontological security. The findings demonstrate that residents of a working-class community constructed alternative social mobility narratives using a relational selfhood model that held local value. This article makes important contributions to the theorisation of social mobility in which it might be understood as a collective rather than individual endeavour, improving entire communities that seek ontological security instead of social class movement and dislocation.

The Meaning of the Working Class in Africa

1972 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Cautious Approach

The purpose of this article is largely methodological, in that it aims to sketch an analytical approach to the question of differentiation rather than to provide an empirical analysis. There are clear reasons for approaching the issue in this way. We need to know what the term ‘working class’ means, whether there are divisions within it which significantly influence the behaviour of those affected by them, and the forms which these divisions take. In other words we want to know whether it is stratified. To assume that it is so is to take as given the answers to questions which should be asked. We need to know whether social relationships in any situation are arranged into strata and, if they are, whether they have consistent relationships and are ranked in terms of superiority according to some pre-selected criterion. It is because these questions are not usually asked that studies of social stratification largely consist of fitting empirical data into a predetermined mould. To start by questioning the existence of differentiation is a very modest, cautious approach.

West Drumoyne: Blue-Collarland

Scheming ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 56-72
Author(s):  
Seán Damer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Community

This chapter describes how West Drumoyne became Glasgow’s first scheme to house the “general needs” of ordinary manual workers as a result of John Wheatley’s imaginative 1924 Housing Act. But there was acute conflict over what kind of houses should be built in the scheme, with the ILP wanting cottage-style houses as in Mosspark, and the ruling Moderates insisting on only tenement-style housing. Because of their majority on the Corporation, the Moderates – a Tory-Liberal coalition - won the argument. This was an example of sheer class prejudice, but nevertheless, the scheme was a happy and popular working-class community.

Folk Performing Arts, Community Life, and Well-being: Why shishimai Matters in Toyama, Japan

Paragrana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-153
Author(s):  
Yoko Nagao
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The State ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Local Perception ◽  
Close Observation ◽  
Arts Community ◽  
Integrative Social

Abstract There is a growing awareness in Japan that well-being is closely linked to social relationships. It is often expressed as a call for tsunagari, relationships with a willing mutual involvement. This paper examines what kind of tsunagari can be fostered through folk performing arts which are rooted in a longstanding belief in a sacred beast represented as shishi (lion). The theory of ritualization is employed to approach shishimai (lion dance) as practice which is inextricably connected to the local perception of well-being. The close observation of hamlets carrying out shishimai in Toyama reveals that it reflects the state of a community and of its members, and often generates intimate and integrative social relations. They not only provide useful resources to attain well-being but are also extended to the symbolic and spiritual dimensions.

Refusals, Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-506
Author(s):  
Jaye Johnson Thiel ◽  
Bessie P. Dernikos
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literacy Educators ◽  
Class Community

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies as a way to think and feel blackness, that is, to create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects. We argue that tuning into the sonic—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators thinking with affect to sense and develop nonhumanist ways of knowing/being/doing literacy, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential dangers of reinscribing whiteness. We propose that retheorizing affect in relation to blackness is necessary for literacy education, research, and ultimately, collective healing and justice.

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