The Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies is a timely volume that provides an overview of this interdisciplinary field that emerged in the 1990s in the context of deindustrialization, the rise of the service economy, and economic and cultural globalization. The Handbook brings together scholars, teachers, activists, and organizers from across three continents to focus on the study of working-class peoples, cultures, and politics in all their complexity and diversity.
The Handbook maps the current state of the field and presents a visionary agenda for future research by mingling the voices and perspectives of founding and emerging scholars. In addition to a framing Introduction and Conclusion written by the co-editors, the volume is divided into six sections: Methods and principles of research in working-class studies; Class and education; Work and community; Working-class cultures; Representations; and Activism and collective action. Each of the six sections opens with an overview that synthesizes research in the area and briefly summarizes each of the chapters in the section. Throughout the volume, contributors from various disciplines explore the ways in which experiences and understandings of class have shifted rapidly as a result of economic and cultural globalization, social and political changes, and global financial crises of the past two decades.
Written in a clear and accessible style, the Handbook is a comprehensive interdisciplinary anthology for this young but maturing field, foregrounding transnational and intersectional perspectives on working-class people and issues and focusing on teaching and activism in addition to scholarly research. It is a valuable resource for activists, as well as working-class studies researchers and teachers across the social sciences, arts, and humanities, and it can also be used as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses.
Author(s): Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Tim Strangleman
Series: Routledge International Handbooks
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Images
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Why working-class studies?
Organization of the Handbook
References
Part I Methods and principles of research in working-class studies
Section introduction: Methods and principles of research in working-class studies
Notes
References
1 Class analysis from the inside: Scholarly personal narrative as a signature genre of working-class studies
Claiming and complicating working-class perspectives
Positional authority as a working-class scholarly ethos
Building a community of practice
Personal narrative as agency
Personal problems
Notes
References
2 Reconceiving class in contemporary working-class studies
An ‘infinite fragmentation of interests and position’
‘Under construction’
‘Multiplication of the proletariat’: for Marxism in working-class studies
Seriality, living labor, and social reproduction
Notes
References
3 Mediating stories of class borders: First-generation college students, digital storytelling, and social class
Digital storytelling, voice, and power
Breaking silences on class
Narratives as subversive stories
Stories for equity and justice
Conclusions
Notes
References
4 The ‘how to’ of working-class studies: Selves, stories, and working across media
Working ethnographically
Rethinking methods: Getting personal
Rethinking methods: What stories can contribute to theory
Rethinking methods: Multimedia conversations
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II Class and education
Section introduction: Class and education
The rise and consequences of the escalator model
Understanding how education remains a gatekeeper
College as a collaborator
References
5 Class Beyond the Classroom: Supporting working-class and first-generation students, faculty, and staff
Introduction
Mismatch between social class cultures: Struggles of the working class in academia, and supporting success
Programs in support of first-generation and working-class students
Institutional context and organization of CBtC
CBtC efforts for faculty and staff: Sharing stories and building institutional support
CBtC efforts for students: The CBtC student group and the first-generation college student summit
Outcomes of CBtC: For students
Outcomes of CBtC: For faculty and staff participants
Strategies and discussion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
6 Working-class student experiences: Toward a social class-sensitive pedagogy for K–12 schools, teachers, and teacher ...
Social class and racialized identity
Popularized constructions of social class
Working-class bodies and school
Social class and critical pedagogy
‘Five principles for change’
Conclusion
Note
References
7 The pedagogy of class: Teaching working-class life and culture in the academy
The evolution of working-class studies
Introducing working-class studies
The working-class student
Integrating working-class studies
Conclusion
References
8 Being working class in the English classroom
Introduction
Tracking and the invidious consequences of being in the bottom sets
Reduced to a number: The impact of excessive testing and assessment on learner identities
A curriculum that marginalizes working-class knowledge?
Conclusion
References
9 Getting schooled: Working-class students in higher education
Psychological demands
Physical demands
Academic performance
Intervention techniques
Conclusion
Notes
References
10 Learning our place: Social reproduction in K–12 schooling
Theoretical frameworks
Segregation within and among schools
Cultural capital
The achievement gap
Investment in education
Social mobility
Access to college
Moving forward
References
Part III Work and community
Section introduction: Work and community
References
11 Deindustrialization and its consequences
The sources and limits of resistance
Cultural persistence versus erasure
Conclusion
Notes
References
12 Economic dislocation and trauma
The growing danger of dislocation
Traumas of dislocation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
13 Working-class studies, oral history and industrial illness
Oral history, working-class studies and illness
Work-health cultures, risk and the body
Living with illness, disability and death
From adversity to advocacy: Building an occupational disease movement
Blighted lives: Deindustrialization, job loss and illness
Concluding comments: What does oral history contribute?
References
14 Precarity’s affects: The trauma of deindustrialization
Loss of futurity
Precarity and grievability
Conclusion
Notes
References
15 Feeling, re-imagined in common1: Working with social haunting in the English coalfields
Introduction
Background
A social haunting
The Ghost Labs
Why New Working-Class Studies?
The projects
So, what really happens in the Ghost Labs? A roof fall, Boundary Road, and a ‘dark saviour’
An anticipatory poetics of forces and intensities
Feeling, held in common: A utopian grace?
Notes
References
Part IV Working-class cultures
Section introduction: Working-class cultures
References
16 There is a genuine working-class culture
Class blindness and the one right way of middle-class life
Notes
References
17 Class, culture, and inequality
What is a class culture?
Where do class cultures come from?
How cultures vary by class
Why class cultures matter
Lingering questions about class and culture
References
18 Post-traumatic lives: Precarious employment and invisible injury
When work hurts
On-the-job training in learned helplessness
Cognitive dissonance
The invisible ism: Classism
Avoidable human suffering: Repair the world
References
19 Activist class cultures
Activists’ class predispositions
Rooted and unrooted paths to activism
Class speech codes
Class and disempowerment
Four classed movement traditions
Approaches to leadership in classed movement traditions
Conclusion
Note
References
20 The Australian working class in popular culture
Historical context
Popular culture
Film
Television
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part V Representations
Section introduction: Representations of the working class
References
21 Writing Dubai: Indian labour migrants and taxi topographies
Introduction
Making labour migration visible
The oil encounter and genre
Urban imaginaries: Dubai Dreams and City of Life
Dystopian Dubai
Notes
References
22 The cinema of the precariat
The first cinema of the precariat: American migrant labor
The paradox of Chinese ‘internal’ migration
Waste and recycling in the First and Third Worlds
The Wal-Martization of the precariat
The precariat in virtual space
A precarious conclusion
References
23 The ‘body of labor’ in U.S. postwar documentary photography: A working-class studies perspective
Notes
References
24 Mapping working-class art
A new, incomplete map
Ways of seeing workers
What to look for: Intersecting and shaping elements
Beauty
Physicality of labor
Picturing working lives
The narrative impulse and historical consciousness
Communal sensibility
Representations of alienated labor or good work
Intent and audience
Visual languages and representational forms
Paintings and workers
Graphic arts and workers
Mexican revolutionary printmaking
WPA/FAP (Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project)
Photography and workers
The photographic collective and the individual imaginary
Culture and no conclusion
Art, walls, and resistance to walls
The commons as an alternative to the wall
Notes
References
25 ‘Things that are left out’: Working-class writing and the idea of literature
Unfinished business: Working-class writers and the ‘canon wars’
Reading differently: The idea of literature
Changing the ‘distribution of the sensible’: Working-class writing and form
References
26 Lit-grit: The gritty and the grim in working-class cultural production
Gritty space
Commodified grit
Evaluating gritty aesthetics
Notes
References
27 Mass incarceration, prison labor, prison writing
A brief history of penal labor
Prison writing
Notes
References
28 Marketing millennial women: Embodied class performativity on American television
Precarious post-feminist fantasies and embodied regulation
Networking the bawdy in America
Cable TV dinners: As American as apple pie
Reproducing the laboring female body
Notes
References
Part VI Activism and collective action
Section introduction: Activism and collective action
What are activism and collective action in working-class studies?
Efforts to hinder activism and collective action
Conclusion
Notes
References
29 From stigma to solution: Centering the community college through activism in the classroom and the community
Why the community college is such a critical site of potential activism for social change
Obstacles to activism at community colleges
Focusing on the classroom as a site of activism
Community college faculty and public scholarship as a form of activism
References
30 Border crossing with day laborers and affordable housing activists
Day labor in a global south
Temporary staffing agencies
Street corners
Nonprofit hiring halls
Marches and protest
Affordable housing development
Research accessibility
Working-class studies as border crossing
Notes
References
31 Finding class in food justice efforts
Food workers and labor
Working-class consumers
Local food movements and food sovereignty
Food activism/food justice at work
Finding class in food justice efforts
Notes
References
32 The mutual determination of class and race in the United States: History and current implications
Historical origins of white supremacy and racism
Reconstruction and its aftermath
Post-World War II anti-communism and the Second Reconstruction
Betrayal of the Second Reconstruction
Organizing in the Trump era
Notes
References
33 Documenting Lumbee working-class history: A service-learning approach
Race and class in the southeast
Taking it to the streets: Student learning redefined
Someplace like Pembroke: From the fields to the factory
Class reflections
Making working-class life public
Notes
References
34 Precarious workers and social mobilization in Portuguese call centre assembly lines
Introduction
Call centre assembly lines
Call Centre Workers
Social mobilization and trade unionism in call centres
Virtual collective action in call centres
Conclusion
Notes
References
35 Post-Fordist affect: Unions, the labor movement, and the weight of history
General Electric lies. Does it matter?
Affect and action
States and claims
References
Conclusion
Index
