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This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in politics, state policies, the economy and labour markets. It is argued that the main weaknesses in current transitions research arise from our lack of an up-to-date class scheme within which to locate subjects' childhood origins and adult destinations. However, the paper illustrates how young researchers occupy a privileged position from which to identify emerging, consolidating and declining social classes. The conclusion is that youth studies must necessarily foreground young people, that it must engage with the outcomes of political and economic processes but has no need to 'dig deeper' into political economy for alleged underlying root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1926 the weekly journal of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the New Leader, welcomed a new editor. Fenner Brockway was an experienced journalist, a committed socialist, and devoted to the ILP. His appointment was a consequence of a more militant left-wing outlook gaining prevalence in the party, careful political manoeuvring, and a desire to communicate the necessity for socialism to the ordinary working class. Until 1946 Brockway worked tirelessly on the New Leader, combining this with several other party roles and external commitments. This article scrutinizes the nature of the paper under Brockway's editorship, which has previously been cursorily dismissed as a failure and disappointment. It examines the format and content of the paper, its function within the party, staffing, circulation, and distribution. Despite the decline of the ILP, it is argued that Brockway delivered a newspaper which met the requirements of the party at the time. Further, it demonstrates that, despite the drastically decreasing party membership in these years, the New Leader consistently broadcast the ILP's message to a wider audience than previously thought. Finally, this article contributes the first account of Brockway's New Leader and a detailed provenance for a journal which has regularly been utilized as a source by historians of the ILP and of the wider labour movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of 'class strategies' in policy formation is sometimes unseen as plans are unrealised in practice over long periods of historical time. 'Subterranean class strategies' are an extension of existing work on class to consider 'class work' on policy in the 'long unenacted'. Using the example of emergency feeding in a national crisis, the stark difference in school meal planning for post-World War 2 emergencies when compared to the COVID-19 crisis is discussed. Through an analysis of archival records, it is shown that 'subterranean class strategies' - the devaluation of school catering expertise by the army and the private sector, the lack of co-operation of independent schools, and localisation and privatisation - diminished the role of schools in emergency feeding. The paper concludes by considering how the concept of 'subterranean class strategies' could inform work on educational think tanks, privatisation and subsumption, and intersectional areas such as race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is bodily-material dynamics of urban trauma in ruins of Miners' Welfare institutions in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK. Emergent geographical work on urban trauma has explored how attritional 'slow' violence enacts in space and time, emphasising the complexities of spatiotemporal processes of collective trauma. Processual theorisations in urban trauma literature are prefigured by those in recent ruins research where there is a retheorisation from ruin as object to ruins contingent of spatiotemporal processes of ruination. Bringing recent literatures on urban trauma into closer dialogue with ruins research, this paper makes a methodological contribution to bodily-material dynamics of urban trauma in spaces of ruination. Contributing to theoretical and empirical debates on industrial ruins and ruination, I advance two interrelated methodological positions: archival research and critically reflexive embodied ethnographies. Following a tracing of their development, I situate Miners' Welfares within theorisations of urban trauma and ruin(ation) before proposing a pluralistic and processual methodological framework. The utility of this framework is then enhanced by an empirical section arguing that bodily-material dynamics suggest moments of 'fast violence' imbricate the slow violence of ruination to constitute how urban trauma is textured into, and evoked by, the decline of Miners' Welfares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth century, highlighting aspects of the gendered and cultural ethos of teacher training. Local efforts to establish teacher training, and the wartime presence in the town of an evacuated women's teacher training college, provide a prism for the examination of transitions in social attitudes towards teaching as a profession, as do the educational aspirations of local working-class grammar school girls and boys during the 1940s/1950s. The paper then focuses on the establishment in 1963 of a 'new kind' of non-residential teacher training college and, in particular, on its introduction in the late 1960s of part-time provision designed specifically for 'married women'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homelessness remains a prevalent issue, and estimates of the number of people without adequate shelter in the UK suggest that the issue is growing. This research draws on literature on the cognitive impact of poverty, stigma, and self-esteem to show how confidence is improved by coaching programmes with those at risk of homelessness. The paper is based on empirical research into one such programme which offers one-to-one guidance on the interlinked issues of financial management, digital skills, and employability. The research shows that coaching helps to provide relief for participants, which in turn frees up "mental bandwidth", allowing them to focus on issues such as managing debt and rent arrears. Confidence and self-esteem, which are often lowered by class-related stigma, are also shown to improve, and it is concluded here that this is largely due to participants becoming more closely aligned with normative neoliberal assignments of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularization of wine drinking was one of the most significant changes in British drinking culture in the twentieth century, in terms of the increase in both the availability and acceptability of wine for the general population. Based on a discourse analysis of 35 years of Jane MacQuitty's Saturday Times Wine Column (1982–2017), this paper argues that while wine has been discursively constructed as a drink of the many, the distinction traditionally associated with wine drinking in Britain remains. The data demonstrate how MacQuitty constructs wine through the media stylistically as everybody's drink, while also constructing and maintaining a distinction between "us" as an in-group whose wine knowledge and taste are distinct from "them." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described 'local' people opposed private housing developments and the migration of 'southerners', 'townies' and 'commuters' into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, 'post-industrial' workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain's transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to 'local' identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on the Wolf (2015) report(Heading for the Precipice: Can Further and Higher Education Funding Policies Be Sustained?)and other quantitative data, specifically that derived from HEFCE’s Participation of Local Area (POLAR) classifications. In addition it explores key literature and debates that associate higher education in further education (HE in FE) with the pursuit of social justice. This enables an interrogation of conceptualisations of vocationalism as well as a consideration of its articulation with class and gender. Whilst the paper is set within a particular and English socio-economic context, it addresses issues that have a much broader global significance. The paper argues that whilst HE in FE has limited traction in facilitating social mobility it does serve as a resource in the struggle for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper asserts that academics, unless they work for or in malign regimes, do not make ‘mistakes’, but work within their own historical period using their knowledge of past thinking. Thus, debates on race, ethnicity, race relations and so on, and the plethora of competing definitions and approaches, take place within specific historical times. The paper notes that for John Rex, racism was always the problem, to be defined and explained. It reviews the research carried out in Handsworth, Birmingham 1974–78, Rex's use of classical social theorists, and it refutes Banton's assertion that Rex did not engage with his critics. It concludes that Rex may well have been prophet in foreseeing the permanence of issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, migration, integration, citizenship and a ‘war on terror’ in a global era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity for autonomous black resistance. At the same time, significant lacunae in his account are identified, including the neglect of the episodic emergence of working-class anti-racism and the part played by socialists, particularly those of racialized minority descent in fashioning a major anti-racist social movement. The paper concludes with a lament for the disappearance of such work informed by a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ in the contemporary field of racism studies, and asks readers to consider the gains to be derived from such a re-engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses analysis of interview transcripts and notes from participant observation to explore white reactions to the introduction of diversity management in a large public sector workplace in Glasgow. The paper analyses white talk about racial equality in a social context where the shaming, exclusion and demonization of disadvantaged groups including migrants, asylum seekers and the poor have ensured that issues of entitlement and race are highly charged. It is suggested that in such contexts diversity management is being wielded as a new kind of civility by middle-class people invested in the objectification of poor whites. This represents a form of class conflict over belonging within the body of whiteness that risks reinforcing rather than redressing racial resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines processes of cultural production and reproduction among members of the elite and upper-middle classes. Drawing on findings from a study of private education in England, it explores the utility of a conceptual framework to examine how practices in and across different sites may be reproductive of various forms of ‘privilege’. Three domains in particular – family, the school and individual young women’s projects of the self – together shape key meanings and orientations informing young women’s lives. These meanings and orientations in turn connect to ‘privileging practices’, both within each domain and beyond. The paper analyses data from three young women in one of the schools studied to illustrate how the framework may be used to examine privately educated young women’s different orientations to the present and the future. Findings point to some of the processes through which class and gender privilege may be variably reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Young people's aspirations remain an enduring focus of education policy interest and concern. Drawing on data from an ongoing five-year study of young people's science and career aspirations (age 10-14), this paper asks what do young people aspire to at age 12/13, and what influences these aspirations? It outlines the main aspirations and sources of these aspirations as expressed by young people in England in the last year of primary school (survey of 9000+ Y6 pupils, aged 10/11, interviews with 92 children and 76 parents) and the second year of secondary school (survey of 5600+ Y8 pupils, aged 12/13, interviews with 85 pupils). We demonstrate how aspirations are shaped by structural forces (e.g. social class, gender and ethnicity) and how different spheres of influence (home/family, school, hobbies/leisure activities and TV) appear to shape different types of aspirations. The paper concludes by considering the implications for educational policy and careers education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the century following their conquest of the province, the British in Punjab erected an administrative apparatus that, like those of precolonial regimes, relied heavily upon the support of the province's landed class. The relationship between the landed class and the colonial state was one of mutual benefit, with the latter using the former to ensure the maintenance of order and collection of revenue in exchange for state patronage. In this paper, it is argued that this administrative framework gave rise to a path-dependent process of institutional development in Punjab, allowing for the different fractions of the province's landowning class to increasingly entrench themselves within the political order in the postcolonial epoch. This paper outlines the mechanisms underlying this process of institutional development, focusing, in particular, on the strategies adopted by the landowning class to reproduce its power. This paper also considers the potentialities for institutional change in Punjab, allowing for the creation of a more democratic and participatory politics in the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the reasons behind the absence of central Government funding for enterprise and innovation at Further Education Colleges (FECs). Enterprise and innovation are, according to conventional wisdom, crucial in rebuilding the UK's economy and providing jobs. In pursuit of this, the Government has provided central funding for enterprise promotion and education for both Universities and Secondary Schools, but not for FECs. The review starts by looking at recent Government policy papers on enterprise and innovation, then briefly considers the current economic characteristics that lay behind the need for enterprise education and innovation. The efficacy of the current proposals is questioned, looking at the concepts concerning the type and level of intelligence entrepreneurs need, also touching on what types of innovations can be expected to increase employment. The paper concludes by asking if elitist or class bias plays a part in the exclusion of Vocational Education & Training students at FECs from central funding for innovation and enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores strategies Polish migrant mothers undertake in order to achieve a state of 'normalcy' as they perceive it themselves, in particular with reference to their children's education and to their future prospects in the UK. 'Normalcy' in this paper denotes a state which is desired, projected and placed in the future rather than seen as everyday reality which surrounds the mothers. This article focuses on various ways the mothers negotiate in order to achieve the desired status and state of well-being and discusses these in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus and capital and with reference to Erving Goffman's notions of normality, stigma and rules of conduct. I look at three aspects through which mothers strive to reach their imagined 'normalcy': (1) a belief in meritocratic values; (2) the feeling of 'classlessness' and (3) management of the 'migrant stigma'. The study is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 36 Polish migrant mothers mainly from London with children in primary or secondary state schools. Even though it could be said that mothers as a social group represent social heterogeneity, the majority of the mothers in the study are educated to a post-compulsory level, having some sort of post A-level qualifications. Half of the 36 mothers arrived in the UK after Poland's EU accession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores forms and functions of the rhetoric of national character in 18th-century British literature. British writers mobilised the rhetoric of national character not only to define themselves collectively against others, but also to influence political controversies at home; in particular the class- and gender-based struggle for political rights in the emerging British nation. To analyse the forms and functions of images of national character, this paper develops a framework for a cultural and historical imagology. This framework integrates a social constructivist view of national character and national identity with discursive, rhetorical, and cultural approaches to literature. Emphasis is placed on the role that narrative devices and intermedial strategies play for constructions of national character. It is concluded that 'national character' not only consists of the attributes typically predicated to a specific nation; rather it is also a formal and even aesthetic construct, which relies on processes of intermedial translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon an earlier analysis presented in this journal. Using official figures for school compositions and for outcomes at KS4 from 1997 to 2007, this paper considers each of the annual cohorts of new Academies in England, from 2002 to 2006. It shows that their level of success in comparison to their predecessors, national averages, their changing compositions and their changing exam entry practices are insubstantial. Of course some schools are gaining higher scores since Academisation, but others are gaining lower scores. Using the most recent results available there is no clear evidence that Academies produce better results than local authority schools with equivalent intakes. The Academies programme therefore presents an opportunity cost for no apparent gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the conceptual limitations of the bully discourses that ground UK anti-bullying policy frameworks and psychological research literatures on school bullying, suggesting they largely ignore gender, (hetero)sexuality and the social, cultural and subjective dynamics of conflict and aggression among teen-aged girls. To explore the limitations of bully discourses in practice, the paper draws on a pilot, interview-based study of girls' experiences of aggression and bullying, illustrating how friendships and conflicts among the girls are thoroughly heterosexualized, en-cultured and classed. Drawing on girls and parent interview narratives, I also trace some of the effects of bully discourses set in motion in schools to intervene into conflicts among girls. I suggest these practices miss the complexity of the dynamics at play among girls and also neglect the power relations of parenting, ethnicity, class and school choice, which can inform how, why and when bullying discourses are mobilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the twentieth century, the UK ‘art school’ was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. InArt into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolments have expanded, art schools have become absorbed into conventional universities and the class profile, at least at the more prestigious colleges, has changed significantly. Simultaneously, art schools, together with other forms of higher education (HE) have been yoked to a broader public policy agenda of the ‘creative economy’ – one that often marginalises working-class people. This paper takes the changing nature of the art school as its starting point for discussion of class, HE and the creative economy workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It explores both their experiences of formal schooling and of the educational provision they chose to seek and found among other groups and institutional frameworks in their society. The range and extended chronology of their educational experiences highlight the need to reconceptualise education as extended processes of physical, intellectual and moral socialisation not necessarily limited to the years of childhood and/or adolescence or time-stopped in any way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea of a “broken society” is advanced by Conservative politicians in the UK as emblematic of social and moral decay. With many echoes of long-standing claims of societal and moral breakdown, the narrative centres on “irresponsibility” and “disorderly” behaviours in disadvantaged working-class communities and asserts that welfare dependency is the underlying condition which produces “social breakdown”. Social housing estates and the populations therein, in particular, are represented as problematic and vulnerable on a number of different levels, especially in the frequently interlinked notion of “welfare ghetto”. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing Loïc Wacquant’s recent work on “territorial stigmatisation” and his thesis on the “ghetto”, to critique these narratives; and we explore the work these notions perform to legitimize increasingly pervasive state interventions to regulate and control working-class lives and communities. The classed assumptions underpinning these discourses are revealed in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper expands the existing literature on ethnicity and economic activity in Britain by studying the impact of religion and class. It argues that while the class location of the different South-Asian groups is important in determining their labour market outcomes, it does not operate independently from ethnicity; rather it is highly influenced by ethnicity in the process of determining the labour market participation of these groups. We use data obtained from the 2001 UK Census on Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi men and women aged between twenty and twenty nine. Our findings confirm that class structure of the South-Asian groups is highly ethnicized, in that the ethno-religious background and class are interwoven to the extent that the separation between them is not easy, if not impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing body of research which explores the dramatic changes of higher education, following recent policies of widening participation and 'internationalisation', to date much of the research has focused on discrete 'non-traditional' groups. Based on qualitative data gathered from international and widening participation students, we explore the crossovers and parallels of their experiences, which is not to say that both groups are the very same. Indeed, it is the resistance to a 'fixing' positioning that this paper charts, negotiating points of sameness and difference. We suggest that there is failure to consider widening participation and internationalisation as two, intersecting, agendas, (re)producing class and race. Theoretically, such an approach offers an insight into contemporary class analysis in the context of mobility and racism, to comprehend how social divisions are complexly lived, where middle-class 'international' students may risk losing (and gaining) privilege, in (dis)similar ways to their working-class 'home' counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The understanding of feminist pasts has been largely ignored in the history of education. This paper suggests that the historical sociology of Olive Banks provides fresh starting points for future research exploring the relationship between the history of social and political movements and a reassessment of contemporary and historical forms of 'radical education.' The article proceeds to use group biography to explore a municipal socialism that has been over-ridden in historical memory by the classic political histories that take the view from Westminster and Whitehall. In so doing it seeks to show the contribution of six educator activists who were participants in the making of a metropolitan political elite emerging from the association between feminism, socialism and the labour and trade union movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the collaboration between the society portraitist E. O. Hoppé and the novelist J. D. Beresford that resulted in the publication of Taken from Life (1922), a book combining both photographic and literary typologies of the metropolitan lower classes. Here, Taken from Life is situated within its authors' respective careers and considered within the broader discourses of class differentiation and Social Darwinism active in Britain in the 1920s. The author argues that Taken from Life is permeated by a superficially benign, but ultimately paternalistic ‘class tourism’, a form of voyeurism that derives from its uneasy combination of sociological speculation with both anecdote and fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, public notions of community, work and family are enmeshing with concepts of citizenship to reconstruct various contexts and foundations for welfare reform in the UK. More specifically, paid work has become central to notions of ‘good’ citizenship, ‘good’ parenting and ‘strong’ communities within debates about welfare reform. This has the effect of re-defining parenting as a non-working activity. Consequently, single mothers who claim welfare benefits are in danger of being positioned as ‘partial’ citizens and their daily practices of citizenship which lie outside of those recognised by the state, rendered invisible. Conversely, in this paper, I will exemplify the ways in which the members of a national single parent organisation are constructing their own relationships between community, work and family and through this process are engaging in building citizenship practices (in local, national and international arenas). Conceptos de comunidad, trabajo y familia enlazan con conceptos de ciudadania para (re)construir varios contextos y fundamentos de reformas de asistencia social en el Reino Unido. Específicaments, en los debates de reformas de asistencia social, el trabajo pagado se ha puesto al centro de nociones de ‘buena’ ciudadanía, ‘buena’ crianza de los hijos y comunidades ‘fuertes’. Ha ofrecido como resultado la redefinición de la crianza de los hijos como actividad no laboral. Por consiguiente, las madres solteras que reclaman prestaciones sociales corren el peligro de verse posicionadas como ciudadanas ‘parciales’, y de hacerse invisible sus prácticas diarias de ciudadanía, que quedan fuera de las reconocidas por el estado. A la inversa, en este artículo, enfocado en los socios de una organización nacional de padres solteros, ejemplificaré como recontruyen sus propias relaciones entre comunidad, trabajo y familia, y como, por medio de este proceso, se ocupan de contruir prácticas de ciudadanía (a nivel local, nacional e internacional). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]