This book brings the emergent interest in social class and inequality to the field of television studies. It reveals how the new visibility of class matters in serial television functions aesthetically and examines the cultural class politics articulated in these programmes. This ground-breaking volume argues that reality and quality TV's intricate politics of class entices viewers not only to grapple with previously invisible socio-economic realities but also to reconsider their class alignment. The stereotypical ways of framing class are now supplemented by those dedicated to exposing the economic and socio-psychological burdens of the (lower) middle class. The case studies in this book demonstrate how sophisticated narrative techniques coincide with equally complex ways of exposing class divisions in contemporary American life and how the examined shows disrupt the hegemonic order of class. The volume therefore also invites a rethinking of conventional models of social stratification.

Management & Workplace Culture Book of the Year, 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards A Publishers Weekly Fall 2020 Big Indie Book The dark side of the gig economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and how to make it equitable for the users and workers most exploited. When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work-giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability. Nevertheless, the basic model-a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech-holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.

Black Millennials is an edited collection of writings that speak to the unique experience of the black millennial surrounding aspects of identity, career, and social engagement in modern society and business. This book is unique in that it is written by black millennials who are using their knowledge and expertise to speak and give voice to a generation of people that is being overlooked in both research and in the community. This book aptly functions as the a start of a deeper conversation that needs to be had for a generation that is stuck in-between what the future can be and what the past has already created.

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.

What is 'the American Dream, ' and why is it ubiquitous in today's political rhetoric? In this thought-provoking book, Ghosh analyzes the integral role of the American Dream in contemporary American politics. He argues that the Dream's central political function is its ability to offer a politics of democratic inclusion that traces a middle ground between multiculturalism and state-neutrality. One compelling reason for the popularity of the concept is that its roots can be traced back to the primordial values of the nation: work, virtue, and happiness. Political elites across the ideological spectrum refer to the Dream in their appeals, but Ghosh concludes that in doing so they rely on very different interpretations of the Dream's basic tenets. Clear and evocative, The Politics of the American Dream is essential reading for both scholars and observers of contemporary American political culture.

In Langston Hughes' 'Mother to Son,' (1922), written at a time of dramatic disruption in the American economy and continued tyranny in the lives of Black people, urban and rural, the Mother pleads with the child not to give up. She tells the child that she has been 'a climbing on, reaching landings and turning corners.' Not only did the seven families chronicled in this unique study not give up, while both losing and gaining ground, they managed to sponsor a generation of children, several of whom reached the middle and upper-middle classes. Land, Promise, and Peril chronicles the actions, actors, and events that propelled legal racism and quelled it, showing how leadership and political institutions play a crucial role in shaping the pace and quality of exits from poverty. Despite great odds, some domestics, sharecroppers, tenants, and farmers and their children navigated pathways toward the middle class and beyond.

This book presents a class-based analysis of poststructuralism and race. The author positions this fundamental question at the heart of his project: why does race still work if it is commonly misunderstood to be a social construct? The answer is that race works because it operates like a commodity, and like any commodity, as long as it generates value (understood in the widest possible sense: economic, political, and cultural-ideological value), it will remain in circulation. This study should contribute to our understanding of race by linking questions of use value to exchange value.

This is a study of the daily life, concerns, and dynamics of aristocratic families in the France of the Third Republic. Elizabeth Macknight draws on a vast range of material from private archives to contest assumptions about the irrelevancy of the nobility under the republican regime. Within a challenging political and economic environment nobles were determined to protect their interests and conserve the integrity of the aristocratic way of life. The convictions that underpinned nobles' responses to government initiatives emerge from the sources with freshness and clarity. Macknight interweaves male and female perspectives to provide a very full account of familial activities and decision-making with attention to all stages of the human lifecycle. Nobles' experiences of parenting and grandparenting, sibling and cousin relations, marriage, property negotiations, and interaction with servants are brought to light in a vivid and engaging narrative. -- .

On November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.

New forms of transnational mobility and diasporic belonging have become emblematic of a supposed 'global' condition of uprootedness. Yet much recent theorizing of our so-called 'postmodern' life emphasizes movement and fluidity without interrogating who and what is 'on the move'. This original and timely book examines the interdependence of mobility and belonging by considering how homes are formed in relationship to movement. It suggests that movement does not only happen when one leaves home, and that homes are not always fixed in a single location. Home and belonging may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries. What is the relationship between leaving home and the imagining of home itself? And having left home, what might it mean to return? How can we re-think what it means to be grounded, or to stay put? Who moves and who stays? What interaction is there between those who stay and those who arrive and leave? Focusing on differences of race, gender, class and sexuality, the contributors reveal how the movements of bodies and communities are intrinsic to the making of homes, nations, identities and boundaries. They reflect on the different experiences of being at home, leaving home, and going home. They also explore ways in which attachment to place and locality can be secured - as well as challenged - through the movements that make up our dwelling places.Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration is a groundbreaking exploration of the parallel and entwined meanings of home and migration. Contributors draw on feminist and postcolonial theory to explore topics including Irish, Palestinian, and indigenous attachments to 'soils of significance'; the making of and trafficking across European borders; the female body as a symbol of home or nation; and the shifting grounds of 'queer' migrations and 'creole' identities.This innovative analysis will open up avenues of research an

In Class Paul Fussell explodes the sacred American myth of social equality with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit. This bestselling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark as Fussell shows us how our status is revealed by everything we do, say, and own. He describes the houses, objects, artifacts, speech, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from the top to the bottom and everybody -- you'll surely recognize yourself -- in between. Class is guaranteed to amuse and infuriate, whether your class is so high it's out of sight (literally) or you are, alas, a sinking victim of prole drift.

Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan. This book presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people's family, education, employment and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities. Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policymakers.

Form vs. content, aesthetics vs. politics, modernism vs. realism: these entrenched binaries tend to structure work in early 20th century literary studies even among scholars who seek to undo them. The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how realism's defining concerns - sympathy, class, social determination - animate the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Ralph Ellison. In contrast to the oft-told tale of an aesthetically rich modernism overthrowing realism's social commitments along with its formal structures, Stasi shows how these writers engaged with realism in concrete ways. The domestic novel, naturalist fiction, novels of sentiment, and industrial tales are realist structures that modernist fiction simultaneously preserves and subverts. Putting modernist writers in conversation with the realism that preceded them, The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how modernism's social concerns are inseparable from its formal ones.

In a blend of economic, social, and political history, Paul Le Blanc shows how important labour issues have been, and continue to be, in the forging of America's history. Within a broad analytical framework, he highlights issues of class, gender, race and ethnicity, and includes the views of key figures of United States labour.

This new study looks at the ways in which the years surrounding the First World War shaped the lives of the rural workforce in Britain and how the patriotism unleashed by the war was used by those in power to blur class divisions and build conservative attitudes in rural communities. Using the area of Shropshire and the Marches as a focus, the book looks at farmworkers and their trade unions, the structures of agrarian economy, class divisions, local loyalties, cultural institutions and political organisations. From 1917 the growing power of the farmworkers' unions and the rural labour movement mounted a challenge to the landed elites and sought a radical change from rural poverty. The author shows how the elites met this threat dynamically by creating a range of new village institutions, such as ploughing matches, Women's Institutes, village halls, war memorials and the British Legion. The extraordinary growth of rural radicalism at the end of the war was diffused by popular conservatism and local patriotism. Influenced by wartime experiences, the period 1900-1930 saw a change in rural society from parochial concerns to a new sense of loyalty to county and to the English nation.

What are the challenges for the current generation of graduate millennials? The role of universities and the changing nature of the graduate labour market are constantly in the news, but less is known about the experiences of those going through it. This new book traces the transition to the graduate labour market of a cohort of middle-class and working-class young people who were tracked through seven years of their undergraduate and post-graduation lives. Using personal stories and voices, the book provides fascinating insights into the group's experience of graduate employment and how their life-course transitions are shaped by their social backgrounds and education. Critically evaluating current government and university policies, it shows the attitudes and values of this generation towards their hopes and aspirations on employment, political attitudes and cultural practices.

While many scholars have argued that confrontation and protest were the most effective ways for the poor to empower themselves during the social change of the 1960s, Karen Hawkins demonstrates that moderate, local leadership and biracial cooperation were sometimes just as forceful. Everybody's Problem shows these values at play in the nation's first rural Community Action Agency to receive federal funding as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Karen Hawkins describes the founding of Craven Operation Progress in North Carolina, discusses the philosophies and tactics of its directors, and outlines the tensions that arose between local leadership and federal control. Using previously untapped primary sources including oral interviews with antipoverty workers and local citizens, records from the U.S. Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, and documents from the North Carolina Fund, Hawkins adds to the story of the factors that helped lower poverty rates and advance economic development during the 1960s and beyond.

For anyone studying childhood or families a consideration of the state may not always seem obvious, yet a good critical knowledge of politics, social policy and social theory is vital to understanding their impacts upon families' everyday lives. Accessibly written and assuming no prior understanding, it shows how key concepts, including vulnerability, risk, resilience, safeguarding and wellbeing are socially constructed. Carefully designed to support learning, it provides students with clear guidance on how to use what they have read when writing academic assignments alongside questions designed to support the develop of critical thinking skills. Covering issues from what the family is within a multicultural society, through issues around poverty, social mobility and life-chances, this book gives students an excellent grounding in matters relating to work with children and families. It features: * 'using this chapter' sections showing how the content can be used in assignments; * tips on applying critical thinking to books and articles - and how to make use of such thinking in essays; * further reading.

A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

This is a powerful new book by one of America's most admired critics and writers. In Where We Stand, bell hooks talks about class - the 'elephant in the room' - the subject we all know is central to our culture and its problems but that hasn't been given the attention it so desperately needs.
Why is it that the face of poverty in America is a black face, even though most of the 36 million poor in America are white? How do fantasies of wealth's power help keep the poor poor? Are wealthy black Americans any more aware of class issues than wealthy whites? Why do we need so much money, after all?
Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection - personal, straightforward, and rigorously honest - on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class is the first extensive analysis of the most important themes and concepts in this field. Encompassing contemporary research in ethnomusicology, sociology, cultural studies, history, and race studies, the volume explores the intersections between music and class, and how the meanings of class are asserted and denied, confused and clarified, through music. With chapters on key genres, traditions, and subcultures, as well as fresh and engaging directions for future scholarship, the volume considers how music has thought about and articulated social class. It consists entirely of original contributions written by internationally renowned scholars, and provides an essential reference point for scholars interested in the relationship between popular music and social class.

In a time of great gloom and doom internationally and of major global problems, this book offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of alternative societies that could be better for humans and the environment. Bringing together a wide range of approaches and new strands of economic and social thinking from across the US, Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Luke Martell critically assesses contemporary alternatives and shows the ways forward with a convincing argument of pluralist socialism. Presenting a much-needed introduction to the debate on alternatives to capitalism, this ambitious book is not about how things are, but how they can be!

Based on comparative surveys, the author presents a study of social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Focusing on Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Slovakia, the author provides information relating to social structure, mobility, inequality, lifestyle and economic stratification. Applying the Erikson-Goldthorpe classification of class positions, Domanski effectively presents fully comparable data to enable political comparisons to be made with other countries, especially those with firmly established free market economies. As such, "On the Verge of Convergence" seeks to provide a clearer understanding of the on-going process of social transformation within developing capitalist societies.