Nontraditional in Every Way

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-193
Author(s):  
La Shonda Mims
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Personal Story ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Transformative Approach

This chapter explores a white, working-class, southern evangelical lesbian journey through academia, and examines the varied meanings of “nontraditional” in the academy. A discussion of labor and the disproportionate role women perform in contingent, nurturing, and supportive roles suggests that in spite of feminist revolutions, the labor of nontraditional women continues to bolster tradition in academia. Although written as a personal story, this narrative highlights broad challenges faced by faculty and students who enter higher education as first-generation learners. Embracing the struggles faced by students and faculty with nontraditional identities can be a transformative approach to pedagogy, introducing students to the historical role of privilege in U.S. society.

Linking Moralisation and Class Identity: The Role of Ressentiment and Respectability in the Social Reaction to ‘Chavs’

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Le Grand
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
White Working Class

This paper aims to link two fields of research which have come to form separate lines of inquiry: the sociology of moralisation and studies on class identity. Expanding on recent papers by Young (2009 , 2011 ) and others, the paper argues that the concepts of ressentiment and respectability can be used to connect moralisation processes and the formation of class identities. This is explored through a case study of the social reaction in Britain to white working-class youths labelled ‘chavs’. It is demonstrated that chavs are constructed through moralising discourses and practices, which have some elements of a moral panic. Moreover, moralisation is performative in constructing class identities: chavs have been cast as a ‘non-respectable’ white working-class ‘folk devil’ against whom ‘respectable’ middle-class and working-class people distinguish and identify themselves as morally righteous. Moralising social reactions are here to an important extent triggered by feelings of ressentiment. This is a dialectical process where respectability and ressentiment are tied, not only to the social control of certain non-respectable working-class others, but also to the moral self-governance of the moralisers.

Decentering the “White Working Class”

Populism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-209
Author(s):  
Meghana Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Extended Analysis ◽  
Affective Experiences ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Affective Support ◽  
Productive Engagement

AbstractThis essay is a review of William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascim, and thus an extended analysis of the intersection of affect, race, class, and democracy. Connolly explores the role of negative affective contagion in mobilizing aggrieved white working class communities and argues for more inclusive pluralistic democracy and the use of positive affective democratic contagion to resist fascism. But he limits the radical potential of his argument because he focuses primarily on the white working class, thereby paying too little attention to the negative affective experiences of the trauma of racism. He should also interrogate not only fascist but also other types of negative affective support for Trump. I frame the essay as an invitation for productive engagement and conversation with Connolly.

The Working Class in the Future of the Third World

1973 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sandbrook
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Third World ◽  
Social Force ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The Third World

The historical role of the working class has recently been subject to reassessment. Frequently repudiated are the Marxist views that the proletariat constitutes either, as Marx's and Engels' classic scheme would have it, the revolutionary social force in capitalist societies, or, as Lenin believed, the pre-eminent element in a revolutionary alliance with the poorest strata of the peasantry, or, finally, as Mao holds, the leadership cadres needed to mobilize the downtrodden peasant masses into conscious, revolutionary action. Consider, for instance, the meager role attributed to the working class in Barrington Moore's brilliant effort, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, to delineate three historical routes to modernity.

scholarly journals Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Duncan Money ◽  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
White Workers

Abstract This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

‘A Little Crow in the Tree’: Growing Inequality and White Working-Class Politics in the U.S.

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-145
Author(s):  
Lawrence Eppard ◽  
Arlie Hochschild ◽  
Richard Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

There have been troubling trends in economic inequality, deprivation, and insecurity in the U.S. since the 1970s. This inequality and insecurity has left the American social fabric ‘fraying at the edges,’ in the words of Joseph Stiglitz. Scholars have recently begun focusing their attention on phenomena which are reflective of and associated with this fraying social fabric: the increasing economic insecurity and emerging ‘politics of resentment’ of the White working class in the U.S. This piece contains excerpts from interviews that Lawrence Eppard conducted with two important scholars, Arlie Hochschild and Richard Wilkinson, who have explored these issues in their work in different ways. The interviews touch on a variety of topics, including growing inequality and its social consequences, the role of government in addressing inequality, White working-class resentment, the impact of racism and sexism on White working-class attitudes and politics, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political polarization, and dominant American notions of freedom. Much of the discussion focuses on Hochschild’s work in Strangers in Their Own Land and Wilkinson’s work with Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level.

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