Contributions by Phil Bevin, Blair Davis, Marc DiPaolo, Michele Fazio, James Gifford, Kelly Kanayama, Orion Ussner Kidder, Christina M. Knopf, Kevin Michael Scott, Andrew Alan Smith, and Terrence R. Wandtke In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books. Essayists analyze and deconstruct these figures, viewing their roles as fictional stand-ins for real-world blue-collar characters. Informed by new working-class studies, the book also discusses how often working-class writers and artists created these characters. Notably Jack Kirby, a working-class Jewish artist, created several of the most recognizable working-class superheroes, including Captain America and the Thing. Contributors weigh industry histories and marketing concerns as well as the fan community's changing attitudes towards class signifiers in superhero adventures. The often financially strapped Spider-Man proves to be a touchstone figure in many of these essays. Grant Morrison's Superman, Marvel's Shamrock, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, and The Walking Dead receive thoughtful treatment. While there have been many scholarly works concerned with issues of race and gender in comics, this book stands as the first to deal explicitly with issues of class, cultural capital, and economics as its main themes.

Revealing Britain's Systemic Racism applies an existing scholarly paradigm (systemic racism and the white racial frame) to assess the implications of Markle's entry and place in the British royal family, including an analysis that bears on visual and material culture. The white racial frame, as it manifests in the UK, represents an important lens through which to map and examine contemporary racism and related inequities. By questioning the long-held, but largely anecdotal, beliefs about racial progressiveness in the UK, the authors provide an original counter-narrative about how Markle's experiences as a biracial member of the royal family can help illumine contemporary forms of racism in Britain. Revealing Britain's Systemic Racism identifies and documents the plethora of ways systemic racism continues to shape ecological spaces in the UK. Kimberley Ducey and Joe R. Feagin challenge romanticized notions of racial inclusivity by applying Feagin's long-established work, aiming to make a unique and significant contribution to literature in sociology and in various other disciplines.

During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States--a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle class residents, witnessing up close the seemingly overnight success of a "new entrepreneurial" class, negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security.

"The Burdens of Aspiration" explores the imprint of the region's success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region's working and middle class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students--low-income, "at-risk" Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high tech industry within an "under-performing" public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a "high-performing" public school with informal connections to the tech elite--Elsa Davidson offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, she provides keen insights into the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.

After decades of the American "war on drugs" and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce the prison population: addiction treatment. In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system-two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim's book shows how addiction rehab reflects the race, class, and gender politics of the punitive turn. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that has reorganized the link between punishment and welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help women, McKim argues that the framework of addiction further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gendered subordination. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.

Which were the mechanisms by which certain groups were positioned at the margins of national narratives during the nineteenth century, either via their exclusion from these narratives of through their incorporation into them as 'others'? By engaging with shifting ideas of exclusion and difference, the authors in this book reflect upon the paradoxical centrality of the subaltern at a time when literature was deployed as a tool for nation building. The lasting presence of the Jewish and Moorish legacy, the portrayal of gypsy characters, or the changing notions of femininity in public discourse exemplify the ways in which images of marginal 'types' played a central role in the configuration of the very idea of Spanishness. ?Cuales fueron los mecanismos mediante los que ciertos grupos fueron relegados a los margenes del relato nacional durante el siglo XIX, bien a traves de su exclusion de dichos relatos, bien a traves de su incorporacion a ellos como "otros"? A traves del analisis de las ideas de exclusion y diferencia, los autores de este libro reflexionan sobre la paradojica centralidad de lo marginal en una epoca en la que la literatura fue una herramienta fundamental para la construccion de la nacion. La pervivencia del legado judio y morisco, la representacion de personajes gitanos o las distintas nociones de feminidad presentes en el discurso publico ejemplifican las formas en que las imagenes de "tipos" marginales desempenaron un papel central en la configuracion de la idea de espanolidad.

Economic Cycles and Social Movements: Past, Present and Future offers diverse perspectives on the complex interrelationship between social challenges and economic crises in the Modern World System. Written with a balance of quantitative, qualitative and theoretical contributions and insights, this volume provides a great opportunity to reflect upon the ongoing conceptual and empirical challenges when confronting the complex interrelations of various economic cycles and social movements. By engaging wide-ranging ideas and theoretical points of view from different disciplines, different countries and different perspectives, this study breaks new ground and offers novel insights into the way the capitalist world economy functions as well as the way social and political movements react to these constraints. Different chapters in this volume bring about novel interdisciplinary approaches to study business cycles, economic changes and social as well as political movements, offer new interpretations and, while examining the complexity of socioeconomic cycles in the long run, present epistemological challenges and a wide variety of empirical data that will increase our understanding of these complex interactions.

This book is an essential resource for anyone who wants to understand race in America, drawing on research from a variety of fields to answer frequently asked questions regarding race relations, systemic racism, and racial inequality. This work is part of a series that uses evidence-based documentation to examine the veracity of claims and beliefs about high-profile issues in American culture and politics. This particular volume examines the true state of race relations and racial inequality in the United States, drawing on empirical research in the hard sciences and social sciences to answer frequently asked questions regarding race and inequality. The book refutes falsehoods, misunderstandings, and exaggerations surrounding these topics and confirms the validity of other assertions. Assembling this empirical research into one accessible place allows readers to better understand the scholarly evidence on such high-interest topics as white privilege, racial bias in criminal justice, media bias, housing segregation, educational inequality, disparities in employment, racial stereotypes, and personal attitudes about race and ethnicity in America. The authors draw from scholarly research in biology, genetics, medicine, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics (among many other fields) to answer these questions, and in doing so they provide readers with the information to enter any conversation about American race relations in the 21st century as informed citizens. Addresses beliefs and claims regarding race and ethnicity in America in an easy-to-navigate question-and-answer format Draws from empirical research in a variety of scholarly fields and presents those findings in a single, lay-friendly location to aid understanding of complex issues Provides readers with leads to conduct further research in extensive Further Reading sections for each entry Examines claims made by individuals and groups of all political backgrounds and ideologies

The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the "distributional regime." The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1933 and 1988, come from sociology, politics, philosophy, economics, health and education. They: Explore a particular level at which the concept of equality must be applied if educational equality is to be realised. Present a philosophical analysis of the principle of equality. Provide a detailed examination of the correlation between health and wealth, or ill-health and deprivation in Britain. Include an important contribution to the study of social mobility in Australia. Evaluate the effects of converting rental housing into owner occupancy in the USA, the UK and Germany. Presents a detailed empirical analysis of the key dimensions of inequality and poverty in Wales.

Considering Class: Theory, Culture and Media in the 21st Century offers the reader international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the importance of class analysis in the 21st century. Political economists, sociologists, educationalists, ethnographers, cultural and media analysts combine to provide a multi-dimensional account of current class dynamics. The crisis consists precisely in the gap between the objective reality and efficacy of class forces shaping international politics and the relative paucity of class-consciousness at a popular level and appreciation of class as an explanatory optic at a theoretical level. This important book shows why the process of reconstructing class consciousness must also take place on the ground of cultural and subjective formation where everyday values, habits and media practices are in play. Contributors are: Anita Biressi, Joseph Choonara, Maurizio Donato, Danny Dorling, Mark Gibson, Craig Haslop, Dave Hill, Peter Jakobsson, Marina Kabat, Holly Lewis, Catherine Lumby, Lisa Mckenzie, Tony Moore, Adrian Murray, Deirdre O'Neill, Jonathan Pratschke, Michael Seltzer, Eduardo Sartelli, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Roberto Taddeo, Mike Wayne, Milly Williamson, Ferruh Yilmaz.

Television and film not only entertain and reflect social change, they may also participate and influence these changes -- the recent success of The Full Monty and Billy Elliot show popular British comedy based on such painful social transformations.

Looking at Class brings together film and television practitioners with academic students of cultural and economic change to examine the media representation of the British working class in the twentieth century -- a time of decline for the manual working class when a complex service-based economy emerged. The book covers a large range of genres from documentaries to soaps and shows that complex cultural transitions can be communicated clearly in prose as well as in screen drama.

Although New England boarding schools have been educating America's elite for four generations, they, along with their privileged students, rarely have been the subject of study. Living in a senior boys' dorm at a co-ed school, Sarah Chase was able to witness the inner workings of student culture and the dynamics of their peer groups. In an environment of ivy-covered buildings, institutional goals of excellence and aspirations to Ivy League colleges, the boys and girls acted extremely masculine or feminine. While girls typically worked themselves into a state of sleep deprivation and despair during exam period, the boys remained seemingly unconcerned and relaxed. As much as the girls felt pressure to be "cute" and "perfect," the boys felt pressure to be "bad ass" and the "best at everything." Tellingly, the boys thought that "it would suck" to be a girl, while over one third of the girls wanted to be male if given the chance.
From her vantage point of sitting in the back of the football and field hockey buses, attending prom and senior pranks, and listening to how students described their academic and social pressures, competition, rumors, backstabbing, sex, and partying, Chase discovered that these boys and girls shared similar values, needs and desires despite their highly gendered behavior. The large class, ethnic and individual differences in how the students perform their genders reveal the importance of culture in development and the power of individual agency. This book examines the price of privilege and uncovers how student culture reflects and perpetuates society and institutional power structures and gender ideologies.

This study identifies the mechanisms through which women can reach positions of power in public life. The study highlights the processes which may contribute new impulse to the vitality of the industrialized countries, introducing models characterized by flexibility and creativity both in enterprises and politics.

This set of 23 volumes, originally published between 1934 and 1994 shed much light on the history of industrial relations and working-class organisation in the UK. They analyse trade union structure, organization and government and look at the pattern of union activity in the workplace. Containing fascinating insider accounts of developments in British industrial relations they analyse the impact of the changing economic and political climate on trade unions in Europe and use a series of comparative case studies to examine change in the government, growth, mergers, character and bargaining structures of British unions. They provide an introduction to the characteristics and styles of trade unionism in Europe and offer a comprehensive guide to the complex structure and administration of British Trade Unions as well as analysing the relationship between political parties and trade unions in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Based on extended, intensive fieldwork in an Australian high school, Challenging the System illuminates issues faced on a daily basis by teachers and educational administrators in many parts of the world. Forsey highlights the tensions arising between neo-liberal emphasis on individual school communities as the engine for competitive excellence in education, and the need for those responsible for running public education to maintain some degree of equity across the whole system. He shows that reforms based purely on market forces are not only undesirable, they are imposible to achieve. Governments do not want to lose control of highly significant cultural and political

""Class Issues" reminds us that university intellectuals work in knowledge factories; that the factories produce engines of dominance; and that, therfore, sabotage has to be the order of the day. The essays state their cases with elegance, with thoroughness, and with economical precision. No one interested in addressing his or her mite of effort to transforming the world can afford to ingore this book."
--Wahneema Lubiano
Duke University

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain.

Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, "Class Issues" is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. "Class Issues" offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy.

"Class Issues" is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness.
Contributers:
Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, DonaldK. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland, Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams.

An in-depth examination of the different forms of privilege perpetuating inequality within American society In this era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, inequality is at the forefront of American thought like never before. Yet many of the systems of privilege upholding the status quo remain unchanged. Many Americans who advocate a merit-based, race-free worldview do not acknowledge the systems of privilege which benefit them. Men remain at the top of the gender wage gap and white people are five times less likely to be stopped by police than their Black neighbors. White families can build lives using social and financial inheritances that have been denied to Black Americans and immigrants for centuries. Individual chapters focus on language, the workplace, the implications of comparing racism and sexism, race-based housing privilege, the dream of diversity and the cycle of exclusion, the rule of law and invisible systems of privilege, and the power of law to transform society. Twenty-five years since its first publication, Privilege Revealed is more relevant than ever. With a new preface and substantive foreword, this book offers readers important insight into the inequalities still pervading American society and encourages us all to confront our own relationship to these too often invisible privileges.