Gated Communities

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-141
Author(s):  
John Wei
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Social Mobilization ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Queer Communities

This chapter focuses on the politics of proximity on locative mobile media that evoke the issue of social position and class affiliation, and on online and urban queer communities that are separated and segregated by class-related cultural capital and social privilege as “gated communities”. Mobilized queer cultures and desires are deeply structured and further complicated by social mobility and immobility through the myth of quality. Social and spatial gating and walling in China’s online and urban middle-class communities have functioned as vehicles of social inclusion and exclusion in the country’s ongoing post-suzhi transformations. This has significantly hindered the once-promising social mobilization and started to concretize existing social stratifications and segregations amid the ongoing social change.

The Myth of Quality

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
John Wei
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
The State ◽  
Queer Communities

This chapter deals with social inclusion and exclusion along the lines of cultural capital and social distinctions underlined by social class migration and mobilization. Drawing upon sociological analyses of various forms of human capital and academic inquiries into the issue of suzhi (“quality”), this chapter analyzes the ongoing social stratifications in China’s queer communities that have reproduced larger social inequalities. Through an investigation of an “upward” online queer community, it argues that the state-engineered discourse of suzhi has to some extent expired, but the lingering myth of “quality” continues to underline queer social distinctions and social interactions online and on the ground.

Middle-Class Voices, c.1969–1979

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Common Culture ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Distinction ◽  
Middle Class People

This chapter uses three different source bases to examine middle-class attitudes towards class and social change in the 1970s: interviews from Paul Thompson’s Edwardians oral history project, the journalistic study Voices from the Middle Class, by Jane Deverson and Katharine Lindsay, and the diaries of an upwardly mobile man, deposited with Mass Observation. It argues that some older middle-class people in the 1970s still thought of class as something given by birth and breeding, and still felt comfortable voicing class prejudices. However, even among older generations, some recognized that such attitudes were no longer widely acceptable. Younger generations of the middle classes were far more heterogeneous, and many younger middle-class people rejected class distinction and tradition. Social change, particularly the expansion of upward social mobility in the post-war decades, meant the middle classes were more heterogeneous and less bound by a common culture.

‘Social Change, Friendship and Civic Participation’

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaojun Li ◽  
Mike Savage ◽  
Andrew Pickles
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
British Household Panel Survey ◽  
Panel Survey ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Social

This paper studies the changing distribution of social capital and its impact on class formation in England and Wales from a ‘class structural’ perspective. It compares data from the Social Mobility Inquiry (1972) and the British Household Panel Survey (1992 and 1998) to show a distinct change in the class profiling of membership in civic organisations, with traditionally working-class dominated associations losing their working-class character, and middle-class dominated associations becoming even more middle-class dominated. Similar changes are evident for class-differentiated patterns of friendship. Our study indicates the class polarization of social capital in England and Wales.

Embodied memories of geographical and social mobility: White-collar women in post-communist films about Romania

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 278-294
Author(s):  
Andrea Virginás
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Simultaneous Presence ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Class Habitus

This article focuses on the ambivalent features of intellectual white-collar female characters in post-1989 films fully or partly produced in Romania ( The Oak, Fox-Hunter, The District, Sieranevada, Graduation and Toni Erdmann). Their ambivalence is examined in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s class habitus theory as interpreted by Tony Bennett and his colleagues, suggesting that the simultaneous presence of working-class, petit bourgeois and bourgeois/middle-class cultural capital types contributes to this effect. The performance of iconic actresses (from Maia Morgenstern to Sandra Hüller) is also situated within melodrama genre theory, a filmic template representing social mobility, often accompanied by travel. Finally, within the framework of mediated cultural remembrances the argument is made that these white-collar women may be incorporated into the category of ‘banal commemoration’ as developed by Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, making it possible for Romanians to process traumatic memories of mobility engineered by the communist and post-communist states.

Uncertain Success

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ranita Ray
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Food Preferences ◽  
Port City ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
School Work ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This chapter explores how Port City youth invest in displaying their socially mobile markers not only through school, work, and bourgeois heteronormative life but also through their everyday styles and consumptions. Youth performed class in their daily lives by producing mobility symbols in their leisure practices, clothing, music, vernacular, and food preferences. To manage their haphazard educational and occupational trajectories, the youth redefined mobility into goals that were achievable. While the majority of our understanding of youth regarding race/ethnicity, gender, and class is based on school ethnographies, a context in which students often perform class through memberships in groups that are part of a hierarchical order, this chapter frames meanings of class and youth cultural production by considering how youth perform social mobility in everyday life as they transition to adulthood. When highlighting how youth managed uncertain trajectories by redefining mobility, this chapter emphasizes the points of contact between the marginalized Port City youth and middle-class people who facilitated their access to middle-class cultural capital while also causing “hidden injuries” of class and race. Youth consumed certain foods, visited certain restaurants, watched shows, and even left Port City to claim membership in the middle class—and sometimes this further constrained opportunities.

Gentrification and its contentment: An anthropological perspective on housing, heritage and urban social change in Shanghai

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (7) ◽  
pp. 1561-1578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Non Arkaraprasertkul
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Selling Point

Based on ethnographic research during 2013–2015, this study describes an alternative form of gentrification in a traditional urban neighbourhood in Shanghai, unpacking how the notion architectural uniqueness of an urban heritage neighbourhood has imbued itself with cultural capital in the eyes of the new residents. By understanding how the original residents mobilise their knowledge of this particular selling point to benefit themselves economically by becoming renters, this study presents a case exemplifying a process of social change in which the ‘original residents’ themselves are active actors. The results of this process are the socioeconomic and ethic diversification of the neighbourhood as well as upward social mobility without any intervention by the local government or real estate developers. By suggesting an alternative process of gentrification in which not all residents are displaced unwillingly, this paper shows that the idea of gentrification demands more attention.

scholarly journals Escaping India’s culture of education: Migration desires among aspiring middle-class young men

Ethnography ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sancho
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Overseas Students ◽  
Social Responsibilities ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Culture Of Education

Research on Indian overseas students in Australia has shown that there is an intricate connection between class and migration processes. Yet most of this work has focused on the experiences of students already abroad. Research on the formulation of migration-decisions and class dynamics from the sending side has been slow to emerge. This paper fills this gap and locates the analysis of migration desires within the literature on the Indian middle classes. I demonstrate how a middle-class culture of education that articulates hegemonic experiences, aspirations, and trajectories drives many aspiring middle-class young men to consider migrating as an alternative path to social mobility. Migration emerges as a temporary strategy geared towards accruing economic and cultural capital necessary for the fulfilment of class-based personal ambitions and wider social responsibilities at home. Migration is shown to stretch the boundaries of processes of class formation that now straddles multiple sites, resources, and aspirations.

“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
West African ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Lesbian Relationships ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Headed Households

This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-headed households, gay and lesbian relationships, and networks of female friendship and civic engagement. Pym’s novels of the 1950s implicitly criticize the synchronic, functionalist anthropology of kinship tables that dominated the discipline in Britain, substituting an interest in a new anthropology that could investigate social change. Specific anthropological work on West African social changes underpins Pym’s English fiction, including several journal articles that Pym was editing while she worked on her novels.

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