Rethinking the Boundaries of Class: Labor History and Theories of Class and Capitalism

This article examines how the field of labor and working-class history has conceptualized class and assesses theories of class that can help us develop maximally illuminating concepts. Labor historians, particularly those whose work employs a transnational, gender, or racial lens of analysis, have advanced our understanding of how working people's lives are shaped by class. By connecting that scholarship to class theory, the article argues for reconceptualizing class to focus on the complex ways capitalism generates class relationships, embedding race, gender, and other historical dynamics within its formative parameters. It relies on work by Tithi Bhattacharya and Stuart Hall to articulate a specific vision of class relations under capitalism. Finally, the article concludes with praxis by applying Hall's and Bhattacharya's insights to the challenges academic knowledge workers face today amid the crisis of higher education, which is growing more pressing as a result of the economic disaster related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It concludes by addressing how our conceptualizations of class could shape efforts to build broad solidarities among knowledge workers in higher education.

What’s the Matter with Labor History?

The events of September 11 changed American politics in ways that continue to reverberate today—including the way we think and talk about working-class conservatism. The author describes how the aftermath of 9/11 shaped his own developing interests in American labor and working-class history, and how it continues to shape his research agenda as a scholar of postwar America.

Ireland's Working-Class Literature: Neglected Themes, Amphibian Academics, and the Challenges Ahead

Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest. With the publication of A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2017), Declan Kiberd could write that its focus on ‘an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people’, would ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. This essay asks a number of timely questions in that regard: What is the likely shape of that future debate, in terms of class and culture in Ireland, and what are the lacunae that will guide research and publishing priorities for those who engage with it in academia and the arts? What has been achieved in terms of the recent scholarly inquiry into working-class writing and what are that inquiry's blindspots and limitations? The international contexts, historical breadth, categorical limitations, and institutional and societal challenges are all surveyed in this necessarily short sketch of some of the major issues.