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Why is social class still important in the twenty-first century, and in what ways? This text challenges claims that class is ¿dead¿ by exploring how it comes to manifest itself in our everyday lives, whether in the bedroom or the gym, on social media sites or in the music charts. Taking a distinctive new approach that combines theory with application, it moves class debates beyond traditional measurements of stratification and mobility to consider how seemingly disconnected processes that have a material and cultural impact on our everyday lives are woven through with class inequality and identity.
This book reconnects class and the urban through an ethnographically detailed analysis of a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification which historicises class formation, critiques policy processes and offers a new sociological insight into gentrification from the perspective of working-class residents. This ethnography of everyday working-class neighbourhood life in the UK serves to challenge denigrated depictions which are used to justify the use of gentrification-based restructuring. By exploring the relationship between urban processes and working-class communities via gentrification, it reveals the ‘hidden rewards’ as well as the ‘hidden injuries’ of class in post-industrial neighbourhoods.
Focusing on the working-class experience of gentrification, this book re-examines the enduring relationship between class and the urban. Class is so clearly articulated in the urban, from the housing crisis to the London Riots to the evocation of housing estates as the emblem of ’Broken Britain’. Gentrification is often presented to a moral and market antidote to such urban ills: deeply institutionalised as regeneration and targeted at areas which have suffered from disinvestment or are defined by ’lack’. Gentrification is no longer a peripheral neighbourhood process: it is policy; it is widespread; it is everyday. Yet comparative to this depth and breadth, we know little about what ...
Classed Intersections examines the salience, transformation and tension of class analysis at a crucial juncture in its return to and reinvention of sociological agendas. The contributors, including both established and emerging academics, examine class as produced through combined social, cultural and economic practices but are clear not to reify class over and above other paradigms; instead a number of key intersections are fore grounded including gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The collection draws on a variety of methodological positions, including in-depth interviews, ethnographies, and auto-biographical approaches. It scrutinizes classed intersections across a wide range of social spheres and practices, including education, the workplace, everyday life, citizenship struggles, consumption, the family and sexuality. Taken together, this volume will enhance efforts to establish 'new' working class studies both in the UK and around the world.
Austerity, a response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain.In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expos� of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.
It is now over 50 years since the term ‘gentrification’ was first coined by the British urbanist Ruth Glass in 1964, in which time gentrification studies has become a subject in its own right. This Handbook, the first ever in gentrification studies, is a critical and authoritative assessment of the field. Although the Handbook does not seek to rehearse the classic literature on gentrification from the 1970s to the 1990s in detail, it is referred to in the new assessments of the field gathered in this volume. The original chapters offer an important dialogue between existing theory and new conceptualisations of gentrification for new times and new places, in many cases offering novel empirical evidence.
The 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, along with similar campaigns across the UK, catalysed rent restrictions and eventually public housing as a right, with a legacy of progressive improvement in UK housing through the central decades of the 20th century. With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago. Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, this book asks what housing campaigners can learn today from a proven organisational victory for the working class. A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
Engaged Urbanism showcases the exciting ways in which urbanists are responding to this question and working towards fairer cities. Its authors offer succinct, candid and carefully illustrated commentaries on the trials and successes of risk-taking research, revealing how they collaborate across fields of expertise, inventing or adapting methods to suit bespoke situations. Featuring novel uses and combinations of practice-from activism, architectural design and undercover journalism, to film, sculpture, performance and photography- in a diversity of cities such as Beirut, Johannesburg, Kisumu, London and Rio de Janeiro, Engaged Urbanism demonstrates how some of the greatest challenges for present and future populations are being rigorously and creatively addressed.
Exploring the issues of class through in-depth studies of housing, sport, art, music and politics in Britain, Class and Everyday Life persuasively demonstrates the pervasive influence of class on everyday life and the need to centre a radical understanding of class within emancipatory political movements. The need for a more expansive understanding of class is politically urgent. There is a disconnect between descriptive and analytical approaches to class and the politics of class and realities around how class is lived. Discourse has been shaped by top-down frameworks of analysis and measurements which have stripped the study of class of its political radicalism. This book makes the case fo...
Marshall Berman was a political theorist, urbanist, and public intellectual that gave a generation a way to think about what it means to be modern. He offered a vision of Marx as a preeminent modernist and humanist, which served as a touchstone for his exploration into the complexity of our modern world and lives. Marshall was singularly capable of seamlessly weaving together the ideas of Dostoevsky and Kurtis Blow, the experiences of St. Petersburg and the South Bronx. In so doing, he helped make sense of the maelstrom of modern life into which we are born, and helped buttress a sense of optimism in the midst of a chaos in which all that is solid melts into air.Adventures in Modernism: Thin...