POLITICS AND PRAXIS IN CANADIAN WORKING-CLASS ORAL HISTORY

This article is an attempt to comprehend deindustrialisation and the impact of plant downsizing and closures in Scotland since the 1970s through listening to the voices of workers and reflecting on their ways of telling, whilst making some observations on how an oral history methodology can add to our understanding. It draws upon a rich bounty of oral history projects and collections undertaken in Scotland over recent decades. The lush description and often intense articulated emotion help us as academic “outsidersˮ to better understand how lives were profoundly affected by plant closures, getting us beyond statistical body counts and overly sentimentalised and nostalgic representations of industrial work to more nuanced understandings of the meanings and impacts of job loss. In recalling their lived experience of plant run-downs and closures, narrators are informing and interpreting; projecting a sense of self in the process and drawing meaning from their working lives. My argument here is that we need to listen attentively and learn from those who bore witness and try to make sense of these diverse, different and sometimes contradictory stories. We should take cognisance of silences and transgressing voices as well as dominant, hegemonic narratives if we are to deepen the conversation and understand the complex but profound impacts that deindustrialisation had on traditional working-class communities in Scotland, as well as elsewhere.

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Working-Class Autobiography, c.1970–1985

10.1093/oso/9780198812579.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Oral History ◽

Political Activism ◽

Domestic Service ◽

Political Education ◽

Post War ◽

Class Divisions ◽

Community Publishing

This chapter examines working-class autobiographies and oral history testimonies created in the 1970s by the ‘history from below’, oral history, and community publishing movements. It finds that most working-class autobiographers felt that class divisions had weakened and changed radically in the post-war years: they identified improvements in housing, the NHS, education, and the power of workers as key alterations. The disappearance of live-in domestic service was a particularly powerful symbol of the changes that had taken place. Though none thought class had disappeared, many thought class divides were less powerful. While some working-class autobiographers wrote that their experiences made them instinctive socialists, in fact political activism did not flow straightforwardly from experience, but was the result of political education and context. Working-class experience was highly diverse, and as this became clear to many in the community publishing movement, it led to changes in their activist practice in the 1980s.

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From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980. Lynn Y. WeinerLabor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. Susan LevineA Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940. Elizabeth Roberts

Signs ◽

10.1086/494396 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 173-175

Author(s):

Nancy Schrom Dye

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Working Class ◽

Labor Force ◽

Oral History ◽

Gilded Age ◽

The United States ◽

Female Labor ◽

Working Mother ◽

History Of ◽

Working Class Women

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Speaking to the ‘Hard Men’: Masculinities, Violence and Youth Gangs in Glasgow, c. 1965–75

Nine Centuries of Man ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474403894.003.0014 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Angela Bartie ◽

Alistair Fraser

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Identity Formation ◽

Oral History ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Historical Context ◽

Youth Gangs ◽

Masculine Identity ◽

Popular Representations ◽

Oral History Interviews ◽

The City

This chapter unites perspectives from history and sociology in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind the persistent image of the Glasgow ‘hard man’, while also interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Drawing on oral history interviews with individuals involved in violent territorialism – specifically through street-based ‘gangs’ of young men – c. 1965-1975, it contrasts popular representations of the Glasgow ‘hard man’ with the lived experiences of those living and working in the city at that time. Focusing specifically on Easterhouse, it highlights the prominence of ‘the street’ in narrative accounts of masculine identity formation for young working-class men and links this to the specific social, cultural and economic composition of the locale. Overall, it argues that such ‘street’ masculinities should be understood in historical context, recognising the influence of local cultures of machismo on the persistence of forms of masculine identity.

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Stephen Humphries. Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1981. Pp. viii, 279. $19.95

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/ahr/88.1.116 ◽

1983 ◽

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Oral History ◽

Childhood And Youth ◽

History Of

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Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People

Historical Materialism ◽

10.1163/1569206x-12341413 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 23 (2) ◽

pp. 189-227 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jeffery R. Webber

Keyword(s):

Social Movements ◽

Working Class ◽

Oral History ◽

Political Development ◽

The People ◽

Analytical Imprecision ◽

Urban Guerrillas ◽

The 1960S ◽

Historical Periods ◽

Dual Power

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.

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