As the security state grows in power and dominance, commercial and financial interests increasingly penetrate our social existence. Neoliberalism, the Security State, and the Quantification of Reality addresses the relationship between these two trends in its discussion of neoliberalism, financialization, and managerialism, with a particular focus on the decline of professionalism, the restructuring of tertiary education, and the university's abandonment of the humanities. Additionally, David Lea links these developments with the failings of democratic institutions, the growth of the disciplinary society, and the emergence of the security state, which relentlessly governs by extraordinary fiat dividing, disempowering and excluding. Lea identifies one such linkage inthe common form of rationality, which underlies contemporary approaches to reality. Others have noted that one of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years or so has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena. Moreover, A.W. Crosby has attributed Europe's unprecedented imperial success, which began in early European Modernity, to a paradigmatic shift from a qualitative world view grounded in Platonic and Neo-Platonic idealism to a more quantitative world view. Nevertheless, this quantitative approach towards the natural and social worlds alienates humans from other species and even from ourselves and fails to represent life as we actually experience it. While a quantitative world view may have facilitated imperial success and the interlocking exercise of power and authority by the state and the economically empowered, this instrumental form of thinking rationales, strategies and facilitates policies that restrict and vitiate individual autonomy to create a seamless controlled conformity. This form of thinking that relies on the quantification of natural and social phenomena creates a value free equivalency, which at the same time invidiously divides society into the wealthy and the impoverished, the advantaged and the exploited, the politically included and the excluded.

Each of them is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time. Today's superclass has achieved unprecedented levels of wealth and power. They have globalized more rapidly than any other group. But do they have more in common with one another than with their own countrymen, as nationalist critics have argued? They control globalization more than anyone else. But has their influence fed the growing economic and social inequity that divides the world? What happens behind closeddoor meetings in Davos or aboard corporate jets at 41,000 feet? Conspiracy or collaboration? Deal-making or idle self-indulgence? What does the rise of Asia and Latin America mean for the conventional wisdom that shapes our destinies? Who sets the rules for a group that operates beyond national laws? Drawn from scores of exclusive interviews and extensive original reporting, "Superclass "answers all of these questions and more. It draws back the curtain on a privileged society that most of us know little about, even though it profoundly affects our everyday lives. It is the first in-depth examination of the connections between the global communities of leaders who are at the helm of every major enterprise on the planet and control its greatest wealth. And it is an unprecedented examination of the trends within the superclass, which are likely to alter our politics, our institutions, and the shape of the world in which we live.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Egypt experienced swift economic growth resulting from a regional oil boom. Oddly, this economic growth hardly registered in Egyptian public discourse, which continuously claimed that the country was experiencing multiple economic, social, and cultural crises. This book sets out to investigate this discrepancy and to offer a revisionist history of the period. It documents the massive socio-economic mobility in Egypt by analysing relevant statistical data and ethnographic evidence, indicating the changes in the employment structure and the spread of mass consumption. Relli Shechter further examines a wide array of cultural resources, such as Egyptian academic writing, the press, the cinema, and the literature, in which critics lamented 'what went wrong' in Egypt. By doing so, he offers a local version of a wider Middle Eastern and international story: the global formation of middle-class societies whose members strove for respectable lives with only partial success.

A deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics. The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own - the promise at the heart of the American Dream - is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will instinctively rise up, the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics. In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people. We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

It must be acknowledged that any solutions to anthropogenic Global Climate Change (GCC) are interdependent and ultimately inseparable from both its causes and consequences. As a result, limited analyses must be abandoned in favour of intersectional theories and practices. Emergent Possibilities for Global Sustainability is an interdisciplinary collection which addresses global climate change and sustainability by engaging with the issues of race, gender, and class through an intersectional lens. The book challenges readers to foster new theoretical and practical linkages and to think beyond the traditional, and oftentimes reductionist, environmental science frame by examining issues within their turbulent political, cultural and personal landscapes. Through a variety of media and writing styles, this collection is unique in its presentation of a complex and integrated analysis of global climate change and its implications. Its companion book, Systemic Crises of Global Climate Change, addresses the social and ecological urgency surrounding climate change and the need to use intersectionality in both theory and practice. This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and both undergraduate and post-graduate students in the areas of Environmental Studies, Climate Change, Gender Studies and International studies as well as those seeking a more intersectional analysis of GCC.

Efforts to build bottom-up global labor solidarity began in the late 1970s and continue today, having greater social impact than ever before. In Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States Kim Scipes-who worked as a union printer in 1984 and has remained an active participant in, researcher about, and writer chronicling the efforts to build global labor solidarity ever since-compiles several articles about these efforts. Grounded in his research on the KMU Labor Center of the Philippines, Scipes joins first-hand accounts from the field with analyses and theoretical propositions to suggest that much can be learned from past efforts which, though previously ignored, have increasing relevance today. Joined with earlier works on the KMU, AFL-CIO foreign policy, and efforts to develop global labor solidarity in a time of accelerating globalization, the essays in this volume further develop contemporary understandings of this emerging global phenomenon.

Over the last three decades, millions of people have slipped through a loophole in the American dream and become downwardly mobile as a result of downsizing, plant closings, mergers, and divorce: the middle-aged computer executive laid off during an industry crisis, blue-collar workers phased out of the post-industrial economy, middle managers whose positions have been phased out, and once-affluent housewives stranded with children and a huge mortgage as the result of divorce. Anthropologist Katherine S. Newman interviewed a wide range of men, women, and children who experienced a precipitous fall from middle-class status, and her book documents their stories. For the 1999 edition, Newman has provided a new preface and updated the extensive data on job loss and downward mobility in the American middle class, documenting its persistence, even in times of prosperity.

Class Counts combines theoretical discussions of the concept of class with a wide range of comparative empirical investigations of class and its ramifications in developed capitalist societies. What unites the topics is not a preoccupation with a common object of explanation, but rather a common explanatory factor: class. Four broad themes are explored: class structure and its transformations; the permeability of class boundaries; class and gender; class consciousness. The specific empirical studies include such diverse topics as the sexual division of labour in housework, gender differences in managerial authority, friendship networks in the class structure, the expansion of self-employment in the United States in the past two decades, and the class consciousness of state and private-sector employees. The results of these studies are then evaluated in terms of how they confirm certain expectations within the Marxist tradition of class analysis and how they pose challenging surprises.

What do we mean by social class in the 21st century? University of Brighton sociologists Laura Harvey and Sarah Leaney and award-winning comics creator Danny Noble present an utterly unique, illustrated journey through the history, sociology and lived experience of class. What can class tell us about gentrification, precarious work, the role of elites in society, or access to education? How have thinkers explored class in the past, and how does it affect us today? How does class inform activism and change? Class: A Graphic Guide challenges simplistic and stigmatising ideas about working-class people, discusses colonialist roots of class systems, and looks at how class intersects with race, sexuality, gender, disability and age. From the publishers of the bestselling Queer: A Graphic History, this is a vibrant, enjoyable introduction for students, community workers, activists and anyone who wants to understand how class functions in their own lives.

'Hough's conversational prose reads like the voice of a blues singer, taking breaks between songs to narrate her heartbreak in verse, cajoling her audience to laugh to keep from crying' - The New York Times 'Hough's writing will break your heart' - Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women 'Each one told with the wit of David Sedaris, and the insight of Joan Didion' - Telegraph 'This moving account of resilience and hard-earned agency brims with a fresh originality' - Publishers Weekly Searing and extremely personal essays from the heart of working-class America, shot through with the darkest elements the country can manifest - cults, homelessness, and hunger - while discovering light and humor in unexpected corners. As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe but it wasn't until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond "The Family." Along the way, she's loaded up her car and started over, trading one life for the next. Here, as she sweeps through the underbelly of America--relying on friends, family, and strangers alike--she begins to excavate a new identity even as her past continues to trail her and color her world, relationships, and perceptions of self. At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave, and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one's past when carving out a future.

Aylan, Isis, Begum, Grenfell, Trump. Harambe, Guantanamo, Syria, Brexit, Johnson. COVID, migrants, trolling, George Floyd, Trump! Gazing over the fractured, contested territories of the current global situation, Watkin finds that all these diverse happenings have one element in common. They occur when biopolitical states, in trying to manage and protect the life rights of their citizens, habitually end up committing acts of coercion or disregard against the very people they have promised to protect. When states tasked with making us live find themselves letting us die, then they are practitioners of a particular kind of force that Watkin calls bioviolence. This book explores and exposes the many aspects of contemporary biopower and bioviolence: neglect, exclusion, surveillance, regulation, encampment, trolling, fake news, terrorism and war. As it does so, it demonstrates that the very term 'violence' is a discursive construct, an effect of language, made real by our behaviours, embodied by our institutions and disseminated by our technologies. In short, bioviolence is how the contemporary powers that be make us do what they want. Resolutely interdisciplinary, this book is suitable for all scholars, students and general readers in the fields of IR, political theory, philosophy, the humanities, sociology and journalism.

China's commercial film industry can be used as a map to understand how class is interwoven into the imaginations that inform and influence social change in Chinese society. Film consumption is important in this process, particularly for young adult urbanites that are China's primary commercial cinema patrons. This book investigates the web between the representation of class themes in Chinese film narratives, local audience reception to these films, and the socialisation of China's contemporary class society. Bringing together textual analyses of narratives from five commercially exhibited films: Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang: 2010), Lost on Journey (Yip: 2011), Go Lala Go! (Xu: 2011), House Mania (Sun: 2011) and The Piano in the Factory (Zheng: 2011); and the reception of 179 Chinese audiences from varying class positions, it investigates the extent to which fictional narratives inform and reflect current class identities in present-day China. Through group discussions in Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Lanzhou and Taiyuan, the author searches for audiences beyond major cities that are typically the focus of film consumption studies in China. As such, the book reveals not only how deeply and widespread the socialisation of China's class society has become in the imaginations of Chinese audiences, but also what appears to be a preference of both audiences and filmmakers for the continuation of China's new class society. Revealing the extent to which cinema continues to play a key role in the socialisation of class structures in contemporary Chinese society, this book will be important for students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Film Studies, Communication Studies, as well as observers of China's film industry.

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

In Yountsville: The Rise and Decline of an Indiana Mill Town , Ronald Morris and collaborators examine the history and context of a rural Midwestern town, including family labor, working women, immigrants, and competing visions of the future. Combing perspectives from history, economics, and archeology, this exploration of a pioneering Midwestern company town highlights how interdisciplinary approaches can help recover forgotten communities. The Yount Woolen Mill was founded during the pioneer period by immigrants from Germany who employed workers from the surrounding area and from Great Britain who were seeking to start a life with their families. For three generations the mill prospered until it and its workers were faced with changing global trade and aging technology that could not keep pace with the rest of the world. Deindustrialization compelled some residents to use education to adapt, while others held on to their traditional skills and were forced to relocate. Educators in the county seat offered Yountsville the opportunity to change to an education-based economy. Both the educators and the tradesmen associated with the mill believed their chosen paths gave children the best opportunities for the future. Present-day communities working through industrialization and deindustrialization still push for educational reform to improve the lives of their children. In the Midwest, many stories exist about German immigrants working in urban areas, but there are few stories of immigrants as capitalists in rural areas. The story of the Yount family is one of an immigrant family who built an industry with talent, labor, and advantage. Unfortunately, deindustrialization, dislocation, adaptation, and reuse were familiar problems in the Midwest. Archeologists, scholars, and students of state and local history and the Midwest will find much of interest in this book.

In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing, Harland Prechel examines how social structural arrangements that extended corporate property rights and increased managerial control opened the door for misconduct and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had become by the end of the century, when the bank and energy sectors developed political strategies to participate in financial markets. His account adopts a multilevel approach that considers the political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded to answer two questions: how did banks and financial firms transition from being providers of capital to financial market actors? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market participants to engage in high-risk activities? After careful historical analysis, Prechel examines how organizational and political-legal arrangements contribute to current record-high income and wealth inequality, and considers societal preconditions for change.

The Life Work of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden (eds. Ulbe Bosma and Karin Hofmeester), presents the latest developments in the history of labor and capitalism. As part of Global Labor History, Jan Lucassen, Magaly Rodrigues Garcia, Sidney Chalhoub, and Willem van Schendel discuss new concepts of work and workers, including sex workers, slaves in Brazil, and voluntary communal laborers in North-East India, while Andreas Eckert shows the relevance of area studies. Jurgen Kocka presents a history of capitalism and its critics to date, Pepijn Brandon analyzes Marx's ideas on the link between free and coerced labor, and Jan Breman looks at the effects of capitalism on rural solidarity through the lens of Tocqueville.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, more than 14 million U.S. homeowners filed for foreclosure. Focusing on the hard-hit Sacramento Valley, Noelle Stout uncovers the predacious bureaucracy that organized the largest bank seizure of residential homes in U.S. history. Stout reveals the failure of Wall Street banks' mortgage assistance programs-backed by over $300 billion of federal funds-to deliver on the promise of relief. Unlike the programs of the Great Depression, in which the government took on the toxic mortgage debt of Americans, corporate lenders and loan servicers ultimately denied over 70 percent of homeowner applications. In the voices of bank employees and homeowners, Stout unveils how call center representatives felt about denying appeals and shares the fears of families living on the brink of eviction. Stout discloses the impacts of rising inequality on homeowners-from whites who felt their middle-class life unraveling to communities of color who experienced a more precipitous and dire decline. Trapped in a Kafkaesque maze of mortgage assistance, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders, as seemingly mundane bureaucratic dramas came to redefine the meaning of debt and dispossession.

First published in 1939 and long out of print, this book remains unique as the only full and detailed account by a social anthropologist of a complete pagan Polynesian ritual cycle. This new single-volume edition omits some of the Tikopia vernacular texts, but includes a new theoretical introduction; postscripts have also been supplied to some of the chapters comparing the performances of 1928-9 with those witnessed by Professor Firth on his second visit to Tikopia in 1952. There is a specially written Epilogue on the final eclipse of the traditional ritual, based on a third visit by the author during the summer of 1966.

What if we could imagine hierarchy not as a social ill, but as a source of social hope? Taking us into a "caste of thieves" in northern India, Nobody's People depicts hierarchy as a normative idiom through which people imagine better lives and pursue social ambitions. Failing to find a place inside hierarchic relations, the book's heroes are "nobody's people": perceived as worthless, disposable and so open to being murdered with no regret or remorse. Following their journey between death and hope, we learn to perceive vertical, non-equal relations as a social good, not only in rural Rajasthan, but also in much of the world-including settings stridently committed to equality. Challenging egalo-normative commitments, Anastasia Piliavsky asks scholars across the disciplines to recognize hierarchy as a major intellectual resource.

In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing, Harland Prechel examines how social structural arrangements that extended corporate property rights and increased managerial control opened the door for misconduct and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had become by the end of the century, when the bank and energy sectors developed political strategies to participate in financial markets. His account adopts a multilevel approach that considers the political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded to answer two questions: how did banks and financial firms transition from being providers of capital to financial market actors? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market participants to engage in high-risk activities? After careful historical analysis, Prechel examines how organizational and political-legal arrangements contribute to current record-high income and wealth inequality, and considers societal preconditions for change.

Seven years since his death (2013), Nelson Mandela still occupies an extraordinary place in the global imagination. Internationally, Mandela's renown seems intact and invulnerable. In South Africa, however, his legacy and his place in the country's history have become matters of contention and dispute, especially amongst younger black South Africans. The essays in this book analyse aspects of Mandela's life in the context of South Africa's national history, and make an important contribution to the historiography of the anti-apartheid political struggle. They reassess: the political context of Mandela's youth; his changing political beliefs and connections with the Left; his role in the African National Congress and the turn to armed struggle; his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and their political relationship. By providing new context, they explore Mandela as an actor in broader social processes such as the rise of the ANC and the making of South Africa's post-apartheid constitution. The detailed essays are linked in a substantial introduction by Colin Bundy and current debates are addressed in a concluding essay by Elleke Boehmer. This book provides a scholarly counterweight both to uncritical celebration of Mandela and also to a simplistic attribution of post-apartheid shortcomings to the person of Mandela. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

There are two narratives of the American class structure: one of a country with boundless opportunities for upward mobility and one of a rigid class system in which the rich stay rich while the poor stay poor. Each of these narratives holds some truth, but each overlooks another. In Privilege Lost, Jessi Streib traces the lives of over 100 youth born into the upper-middle-class. Following them for over ten years as they transition from teens to young adults, Streib examines who falls from the upper-middle-class, how, and why don't they see it coming. In doing so, she reveals the patterned ways that individuals' resources and identities push them onto mobility paths-and the complicated choices youth make between staying true to themselves and staying in their class position. Engaging and eye-opening, Privilege Lost brings to life the stories of the downwardly mobile and highlights what they reveal about class, privilege, and American family life.

The book's central focus explores several "myths" associated with American entrepreneurship: the idea that small business owners are "job creators"; that entrepreneurs are the "backbone" or "engine" of the economy; that entrepreneurship provides a path of economic mobility for immigrants, ethnic and racial minorities, and women; that the Horatio Algiers "rags to riches" story is possible for anyone willing to work hard. Instead, I provide a critical perspective that challenges these myths of American enterprise, arguing that successful entrepreneurship requires access to social and economic capital resources and support that are often distributed along the lines of race, class, and gender in the highly stratified American economy and society.

**Explore the fascinating history of the real Downton Abbey as the Crawley family saga makes its way on to the big screen with Downton Abbey, the major motion picture** 'An excellent depiction of English aristocratic life ... a compelling portrait' Publisher's Weekly * * * * * * The follow-up to the international bestseller Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, this book moves the story into the 1920s, and focuses on the remarkable American heiress who came to reign at Highclere Castle. Sometimes the facts are even more extraordinary than the fiction ... This book tells the story of Lady Catherine, a beautiful American girl who became the chatelaine of Highclere Castle, the setting for Julian Fellowes' award-winning drama Downton Abbey. Charming and charismatic, Catherine caught the eye of Lord Porchester (or 'Porchey', as he was known) when she was just 20 years old, and wearing a pale yellow dress at a ball. She had already turned down 14 proposals before she eventually married Porchey in 1922. But less than a year later Porchey's father died suddenly, and he became the 6th Earl of Carnarvon, inheriting a title and a Castle that changed both their lives forever. Catherine found herself suddenly in charge of a small army of household staff, and hosting lavish banquets and weekend house parties. Although the couple were very much in love, considerable challenges lay ahead for Catherine. They were immediately faced with the task of saving Highclere when debts threatened to destroy the estate. As the 1920s moved to a close, Catherine's adored brother died and she began to lose her husband to the distractions London had to offer. When the Second World War broke out, life at the Castle would never be the same again. Drawing on rich material from the private archives at Highclere, including beautiful period photographs, the current Countess of Carnarvon transports us back to the thrilling and alluring world of the 'real Downton Abbey' and its inhabitants.