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In this paper, I examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: GBCS respondents who are college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000 a year. I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still substantial differences by social position. Specifically, postgraduate degrees and higher incomes still differentiate political engagement, and cultural and social capital (as indicated by cultural activities practised, and the occupations people report knowing) differentiate elite political engagement even more strongly. This indicates that social position qua social position - that is, connection to dominant and legitimated ways of being - contributes to a sense of the 'right to speak' that matters as much as or more than costs and resources for facilitating political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second, we find that even when the upwardly mobile are successful in entering elite occupations they invariably fail to accumulate the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. While many such differences may be explained by inheritance, we also find that the mobile tend to have considerably lower incomes. Investigating this further we demonstrate that even when controlling for important variables such as schooling, education, location, age, and cultural and social capital, the upwardly mobile in eight occupations - located largely in the business sector - have considerably lower incomes than their higher-origin colleagues. These findings underline the value of analyses of mobility into specific high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did I come to embody and then ultimately reject the idea that periods, and period stains, are inherently dirty? How did I get from scrubbing period stains off my clothes at age 12 to crowdsurfing with a stain at a period demo in front of Parliament nearly 30 years later? Who influenced me and how have I influenced others to reject the idea that menstrual blood stains make us dirty? This article traces my 30-plus-year history of adventures in menstruating and my trajectory from embodying shame to thinking critically about how periods are presented to people of all genders – whether we menstruate or not – and trying to move the discourse through art and comedy, menstruating with pride and encouraging others to join me. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]