This book is a dialectic and multi-perspective examination of classed traumas in late modernity. The primary anchoring question is whether and how class becomes a condition of possibility for coping with traumas. What does it mean to experience deindustrialization, crises, or domestic violence from a specific class position? Do the coping mechanisms differ along the lines of class, gender, race, age, or ethnicity? The text negotiates such questions, travelling back and forth from psychoanalysis to sociology and from the global to the local, while critically engaging with memories, narratives, and myths engraved into social and personal histories. Through a dialogic quest for what is silenced, and what is salient within oral, written, and visual testimonies, it foregrounds what the upper classes prefer to neglect: the traumatizing core of the new class divide. Rather than idealizing or vilifying the dominated, this study calls for an exploration of practices, narrations, and spaces whereby alienation and integration co-exist antagonistically, producing hybrid and fragmented, but also potentially transformative, subjectivities. This book will be of interest to scholars of humanities and social sciences, primarily for those studying social stratification and inequalities, sociology of emotions, identity theory, trauma and memory, political psychoanalysis, labour history, and ethnography.

This volume explores institutional and policy developments in the EU and its member states in a parallel examination of citizens' views of the effectiveness of crisis response reflected in public trust, output legitimacy, and satisfaction with democracy. Our approach to understanding the crisis posits EU-level governance and institutional change, national-level policymaking, and domestic politics as interrelated, interdependent domains of political action and public spheres that collectively shape the political landscape of post-crisis Europe. The volume sheds new light on the relationship among the institutional, policy, and polity consequences of the crisis. The book has two fundamental aims. The first is to demonstrate the interconnected nature of European governance, domestic reform, and democratic politics. The unprecedented complexity of the financial, sovereign debt, economic, and social crises in Europe has led to a political crisis that reflects the struggle to effectively address its various causes and effects. The second objective is to present a theoretically informed assessment of the consequences of the European crises for state-society relations and democratic legitimacy. Our analysis of the crisis in a variety of national contexts and European governance highlights the difficulties faced by political decision-makers. We find that the domestic policy process is selectively affected or disconnected from the process of rule-making at the EU level, that public opinion still matters in the process of policy formation and EU crisis response, and that the salience of the EU agenda in the domestic public sphere increasingly depends on the preferences of political actors. Public response to the crisis has become increasingly complex as well, ranging from declining trust in the political institutions, emerging national stereotypes, changing expectations of the EU level of crisis response, growing disconnect between political parties and voters, and evolving intra-regional distinctions across the EU's east-west divide.