Why is social class still important in the twenty-first century, and in what ways? This text challenges claims that class is 'dead' by exploring how it comes to manifest itself in our everyday lives, whether in the bedroom or the gym, on social media sites or in the music charts. Taking a distinctive new approach that combines theory with application, it moves class debates beyond traditional measurements of stratification and mobility to consider how seemingly disconnected processes that have a material and cultural impact on our everyday lives are woven through with class inequality and identity.

Exploring issues of class in through in-depth studies of housing, sport, art, music, and politics in Britain, Class and Everyday Life persuasively demonstrates the pervasive influence of class on everyday life and the need to centre a radical understanding of class within emancipatory political movements. The need for a more expansive understanding of class is politically urgent. There is a disconnect between descriptive and analytical approaches to class and the politics of class and realities around how class is lived. Discourse has been shaped by top-down frameworks of analysis and measurements which have stripped the study of class of its political radicalism. This book makes the case for a sociology of class which is informed by a politics of class, based upon using the everyday as the point of enquiry. It presents a sociology of class from the bottom-up which focuses on everyday life and the point at which class is made and remade. In doing so, it advocates for an attentiveness to class and everyday life through a conjunctural analysis. Using an everyday lens, this book examines the how shifting conjunctures manifest in everyday spaces in classed ways, and how such changes are negotiated, resisted, and shape the working-class subject and communities. This is based upon an understanding of everyday classed experiences which identifies and challenges inequalities whilst also recognising value and hope. This perspective aims to offer a recognition of both the opportunities and challenges of class as a way of developing a stronger, more politicised understanding of class which takes solidarity and class community power seriously to resist inequality and develop emancipatory politics. This urgent and impassioned book will be essential reading for students, academics and activists with an interest in the lived experience of class in Britain today.

Focusing on the working-class experience of gentrification, this book re-examines the enduring relationship between class and the urban. Class is so clearly articulated in the urban, from the housing crisis to the London Riots to the evocation of housing estates as the emblem of 'Broken Britain'. Gentrification is often presented to a moral and market antidote to such urban ills: deeply institutionalised as regeneration and targeted at areas which have suffered from disinvestment or are defined by 'lack'. Gentrification is no longer a peripheral neighbourhood process: it is policy; it is widespread; it is everyday. Yet comparative to this depth and breadth, we know little about what it is like to live with gentrification at the everyday level. Sociological studies have focused on lifestyles of the middle classes and the working-class experience is either omitted or they are assumed to be victims. Hitherto, this is all that has been offered. This book engages with these issues and reconnects class and the urban through an ethnographically detailed analysis of a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification which historicises class formation, critiques policy processes and offers a new sociological insight into gentrification from the perspective of working-class residents. This ethnography of everyday working-class neighbourhood life in the UK serves to challenge denigrated depictions which are used to justify the use of gentrification-based restructuring. By exploring the relationship between urban processes and working-class communities via gentrification, it reveals the 'hidden rewards' as well as the 'hidden injuries' of class in post-industrial neighbourhoods. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive 'sociology of gentrification', revealing not only how gentrification leads to the displacement of the working class in physical terms but how it is actively used within urban policy to culturally displace the working-class subject and traditional