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In any highly contested political domain, language can be a potent force for change or an obstacle to understanding and coalition building across difference. This is surely the case in the global debates over sexuality and gender, where even those terms themselves have aroused heated conflicts. In this spirit, we want to challenge the uncritical use of the term "sexual minorities", based on a number of historical and conceptual problems with which that term – like the larger thicket of identities and identity politics it signifies – is encumbered. These include: ignoring history, legitimating dubious normativity, fixing biological categories, and recreating exclusions. With this struggle, we seem caught in a modernist dilemma between two desires: to name and honour difference by signifying identities and to avoid exclusivity and hierarchy by reclaiming universals. The insistence of diverse groups on naming themselves and achieving recognition of their distinctness and variety will go on as long as aspirations for democracy exist, because that is the nature and necessity of emancipatory politics. At the same time, our language needs to reflect the fluidity and complexity of sexuality and gender expressions in everyday life and their intricate interweaving with other conditions such as class, race, ethnicity, time and place. Dans tout domaine politique très contesté, le langage peut être une force puissante de changement ou un obstacle à la compréhension et à la création de coalitions dépassant les différences. C'est sûrement le cas dans les débats mondiaux sur la sexualité et le genre, où même ces termes ont suscité des conflits houleux. Dans cet esprit, nous souhaitons remettre en question l'utilisation non critique de l'expression « minorités sexuelles », en nous basant sur les problèmes historiques et conceptuels avec lesquels ce terme, comme l'enchevêtrement d'identités et de politiques identitaires qu'il signifie, est associé. Ignorer l'histoire, légitimer une normativité douteuse, fixer des catégories biologiques et recréer des exclusions figurent au nombre de ces problèmes. Avec cette lutte, nous semblons nous trouver dans un dilemme moderniste pris entre deux désirs : désigner et honorer la différence en signifiant des identités, et éviter l'exclusivité et la hiérarchie en récupérant des normes universelles. L'insistance de divers groupes pour se nommer eux-mêmes et faire reconnaître leur différence se poursuivra aussi longtemps que les aspirations à la démocratie existeront, car telle est la nature et la nécessité des politiques émancipatoires. En même temps, notre langage doit refléter la fluidité et la complexité des expressions de la sexualité et du genre dans la vie quotidienne et leurs liens complexes avec d'autres conditions comme la classe, la race, l'origine ethnique, le temps et le lieu. En toda esfera política muy refutada, el idioma puede ser una fuerza potente para lograr cambios o un obstáculo a la comprensión y al desarrollo de coalición para saldar diferencias. Indudablemente, ese es el caso en los debates mundiales sobre la sexualidad y el género, donde incluso esos mismos términos han suscitado conflictos acalorados. En ese espíritu, queremos cuestionar el uso ciego del término "minorías sexuales", basándonos en varios problemas históricos y conceptuales de los cuales está cargado ese término, como el matorral más amplio de identidades y política de identidades que significa. Algunos ejemplos son: hacer caso omiso de la historia, legitimar normatividad dudosa, arreglar categorías biológicas y recrear exclusiones. Con esta lucha, parecemos estar atrapados en un dilema modernista entre dos deseos: nombrar y honrar diferencias expresando identidades y evitar la exclusividad y jerarquía reclamando universales. La insistencia de diversos grupos en autonombrarse y lograr el reconocimiento de su particularidad y variedad perdurará siempre que existan aspiraciones de democracia, porque esa es la naturaleza y necesidad de la política emancipadora. A la vez, nuestro idioma debe reflejar la fluidez y complejidad de las expresiones de sexualidad y género en la vida cotidiana, así como su intrincado entrelazado con otras condiciones como clase, raza, etnia, tiempo y lugar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the understanding of the dynamic and the relational nature of identity-formation among skilled middle-class migrants. Following the idea that identities are never singular nor static, but multifaceted, active and have a processual character, the authors specifically analyse two dimensions to the identity of qualified Mexican migrants in the US and the interplay between them. Drawing on findings from a mixed-methods research project (an online survey and semi-structured interviews) with skilled Mexican middle-class migrants in the US, the paper explores how skilled Mexican migrants preserve their ethno-national identity (their 'Mexicanness') in reaction to a hostile socio-political reception context in the US. This study further shows how these migrants recreate their class identity and show tendencies to distance themselves from what they perceive as lower-class Mexican migrants and the dominant popular Mexican and Latin-American cultural expressions. Throughout the paper the lived experience of migration is examined while highlighting the ways in which it impacts the migrants' identities, their concept of self and feelings of being and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how classed identities are constituted through the socio-sartorial inscriptions of a working-class school and community in an Irish city in the twenty-first century. The data of the paper were generated through a wider three-year critical ethnography of a school community. The focus here is upon the identity work of the participants as it is connected to the school and the wider community. The article makes a particular contribution to the conversation of cultural constructions of class; in this instance through socio-sartorialism and how cultural capital is embodied and performed through people. The paper offers illustrative cases formed from participant interviews and an analysis of how socio-sartorial inscription contributes to the making of class in educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government redistributed houses, land and wealth across families and assigned an inheritable class identity ( chengfen) to each family in early 1950s. The government then implemented class-based discriminatory policies against the rich and middle class until 1978. This paper shows that individuals born after 1951 with rich class origins have significantly higher income and family assets per capita than those from the poor class in 2002. Moreover, those who were born after 1960 from rich class gained more years of education than others except for the descendants of the revolutionary class, after the abolition of the discrimination policy. Overall, the study provides evidence that intergenerational transmission of wealth status and education are not necessary flowing through the inheritance of physical capital. The paper further demonstrates that individuals with revolutionary background do not have lower economic outcome or educational attainment than those from the rich, suggesting that a new elite group emerges in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 20th century, objective class position was a strong predictor of both class identity, political preferences and party choice, but since the 1980s, the relationship between objective and subjective dimensions of class has supposedly vanished–according to some as the result of a fundamental blurring of class relations. However, others suggest that this result may be partly due to the use of outdated class schemes. Although still basically focused on inequality of life chances, class relations today are complex and include more than labor market position, such as different forms of cultural resources (e.g., education). As a result, class identity may also have become more complex, and possibly dependent upon the salience of different resources and types of group relations—both in itself and in its relationship with political preferences. Very few contributions, though, test such claims. Using two independent Danish surveys, this paper investigates to what extent class identification is multidimensional and how any such dimensionality is related to, on the one hand, different dimensions of objective class relations and, on the other hand, different dimensions of political conflict. The analyses show that despite changes at the overall, societal level, class identity remains a primarily unidimensional concept both in its structural origins and its relationship with politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A seminal body of work emerged in the 1980s recognising reading as a site for gender and class identity work. However, understandings around working-class girls' reading identities are invisible in the current Australian education policy space where gender equalities with respect to curriculum subjects have disappeared. This paper draws on a broader study of the reading experiences of 615 boys and girls attending elementary schools in Australia to focuses on interviews with eight girls (9–11 years old) attending schools in lower socioeconomic communities. The paper explores the girls' perspectives on reading, being popular at school, and academic success from an understanding of literacy as social practice. Highlighted are discourses of femininity associated with reading where popularity is associated with anti-reading identities; being pretty and hanging out with the boys is associated with higher social status; and doing well academically can lead to social marginalisation. Highlighted are tensions between the lived lives of the girls and the idealised feminine reader depicted in the educational policy context in Australia and broader performativity agendas where girls are illustrated as successful and motivated readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of much island research is to advocate for island communities, to encourage island scholarship by islanders themselves, and where that is not possible, to promote the voices of islanders 'on their own terms'. However, the very nature of small islands as socially and physically bounded communities, means that, whilst one voice cannot speak for the entire community, often the voice speaking is easily recognisable. This can result in the risk of local retribution, or more commonly truths going unspoken and power imbalances remaining unaddressed. To undertake island scholarship, it may be necessary in some cases, to anonymise the island, or at least aspects of it, in order to anonymise the speaker. In this paper, by drawing on examples from our own research on islands around the UK and other research in very small island communities, we consider the difficulty participants may face in speaking openly, and address the conflicts that confront researchers between supporting island stories whilst also offering a balanced reflection of island life. We suggest that while it is clearly important that island voices are heard, and that islanders speak on their own terms, there are instances where the off-island voice may be better placed to address island issues. The best route to do this may be via some form of anonymisation of subject and/or place of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic mobility is increasingly perceived worldwide as a key to academic excellence, career advancement and upward social mobility. Drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork data, this paper interrogates the impact of academic mobility in reconfiguring class and gender identities among students, early professionals and their families from Hong Kong and Indonesia who have studied or received further training in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. This analysis problematises the crude ‘academic mobility → upward social mobility’ formula and considers international academic mobility as a contextual, dynamic and multi-directional process. Through this process social positions and identities of the moving individuals and families are negotiated in an on-going manner as migrants insert into, depart from and re-insert into the various social milieus where their mobility trajectories touch ground. Narratives of interviewees illustrate the complexity and contradictions in class and gender configurations as students move across borders. They show how these individuals are inserted in contrasting social positionings, and experience how a particular social class or gender position carries different connotations. The paper concludes with a few conceptual and methodological reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two Chinese working-class writers: Wanchun Hu (1929-98) and Lijia Zhang (1964-). With a focus on their working-class identity and its relation to their literary works, I discuss their struggles with what Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio refer to as different "identity technologies" and related internal and external conflicts. The specific identity technologies in question are those defined by Moeller and D'Ambrosio as rolerelated "sincerity" and individuality-oriented "authenticity." First, I offer a brief history of Chinese working-class literature to illustrate how "literature for the proletariat" was transformed into literature "by the real working class." I then discuss Hu's literary works and unpack his class identity formation under the regime of sincerity. I finish by looking at Zhang's undoing of her working-class background and experience to develop a different selfhood in authenticity. I argue that these two authors are shaped by different identity technologies in contrasting ways, resulting in different Chinese working-class writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing - both in relation to rental and ownership - disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures. In this paper, we consider two key questions: (1) What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change? (2) How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this? Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction. We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the highlights of the Society for Cinema Studies Conference held in Washington, D.C. in May 1990. Conference sessions were devoted to issues of identity and subjectivity. Issues of class identity, race and gender were the dominant focuses. A number of papers on post-colonial cinema explored the limitations of gender theorization and its tendency towards ahistoricity and ethnocentricism.

Crystal-facet dependent CeO 2 results different charge transferring pathways and activities. [Display omitted] • With richer social capital, peasants are more willing to recycle garbage. • Social engagement becomes an important factor influencing garbage recycling. • Class identity had a significantly positive effect on the garbage recycling. • Class identity moderates the relationship between social capital and HGSR. Based on the literature review, this paper analyzes how social capital and class identity influence peasants' behavior in household garbage sorting and recycling. We carried out field study in Shaanxi Province, China and collected 686 valid questionnaires as basic data for this study. The empirical results of Logit regression model indicate that social network, social prestige and social engagement are all positively correlated with household garbage sorting and recycling behavior of peasants, and class identity is also positively correlated with household garbage sorting and recycling behavior of peasants. The results also show that smaller families are more likely to carry out garbage sorting and recycling. In addition, we also found that class identity moderates the relationship between social trust and household garbage sorting and recycling behavior of peasants. Finally, the theoretical and practical significance, limitations of the study, and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Are You a Girl or Are You a Boy? Or..." by Hallie Lovett. He notes that the said paper declares that gender identities are always under construction and that he finds the topics creative, experiential and scholarly. Reflecting on the paper, the author thinks about his professional identity, then his theoretical orientation and then his particular style of clinical expression.

Many scholars have cited socioeconomic status, cultural tastes, and group reference as the major determinants of class identification. Few have conceptualized minority ethnicity as a vital source of class subjectivities, however. I address this knowledge gap in this paper by examining Uyghur subjective class status in Ürümchi, China. I show that income and occupational attainment are not correlated with Uyghur choices of class labels. I also show that Uyghur ethnic identity affects their choices of class labels. I argue that Uyghurs think that they are a dominated group and compare themselves with Han Chinese unfavourably when defining their subjective class positions in Ürümchi. As a result, intergroup competition overshadows the variability in socioeconomic attainments among different Uyghur groups. The implications of these findings for research on class identification in multi-ethnic societies are discussed. Data are drawn from a survey (N = 900) conducted in Ürümchi in 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks: do most Uyghurs perceive themselves to be middle class or lower class? What are the major determinants of their perceptions? Data are drawn from a 2007 survey (N = 900) conducted in Ürümchi in China. This paper focuses on individualized and subjective hierarchical differentiation and reports three main findings about class identity among Uyghurs. Firstly, class identity is not closely linked to occupational attainment and income among Uyghurs. However, education is a key determinant of Uyghur class identification. Secondly, psychological well-being measures are not predictors of the choice of class label by Uyghurs. Thirdly, ethnic consciousness is closely related to class identification among Uyghurs, holding main background characteristics constant. Uyghurs give more attention to their group concerns (discrimination, prejudices, intergroup inequality, etc.) than to their individual worries (such as unemployment or stress) when choosing a class label. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Group-based privileges are supported and reproduced in part by control of discourse about identity and structural inequality. In the case of social class, this discourse is largely absent. This article explores the ways in which the lack of explicit and sanctioned discourse on social class affirms and reproduces class privileges. Qualitative thematic content analysis was used to analyze the final papers of students (N= 82) who participated in a semester long class-focused intergroup dialogue course. Content analysis found that students came into the dialogues with low levels of class salience. The dialogue course was an informative and fulfilling experience for most students, but the majority of students still had difficulty discussing class based privileges. This difficulty in engaging in an open and disruptive form of class discourse was in part due to the tendency to conflate discussions of class with race, taboos against discussing social class, and the presence of negative stereotypes about class groupings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines developments in Irish urban governance through an ethnographic account of one community's historical memory and contemporary structure. During an era of rapid economic growth, the Irish state has courted previously excluded communities, offering them greater 'inclusion' as 'partners' in responding to urban decay and crime. The micro-governance structures this creates, however, become sites of contest between competing community factions and class-cultural imperatives. Tensions emerge between aspirational community leaders championing the aesthetics (if not the values) of 'respectability' and residual residents who are presented as ' rough'. The paper demonstrates that nuances of class-cultural identity dictate the character of partnership governance at the community level with particular implications for local regeneration and crime control agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, drawing upon a recent study of youth post-compulsory educational and occupational decision-making, argues for a culturalist perspective to understand the persistence of class-based inequalities within VET. The paper begins by outlining two broadly distinct perspectives within current research into youth: an 'individualist' approach influenced by the work of Ulrich Beck and a 'culturalist' approach influenced by Pierre Bourdieu. Findings from the author's own study of a sample of AVCE students are then employed to interrogate the explanatory utility of these two perspectives. The students, working-class high achievers, exhibited a strong subjective sense of choice and individual responsibility combined with a tacit sense of class voiced in discourses that constructed a 'practical' rather than 'academic' self and which actively resisted the value of higher education. It is concluded from this that a Bourdieu-influenced culturalist methodology offers the greatest potential to understand how class-based educational identities may interrelate with apparently individualised identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs critical discourse analysis to examine discourses of council (public) housing tenants. It focuses upon one example of housing activism, a local campaign that mobilized in opposition to a proposed stock transfer of council housing in South East England. The hegemonic societal-wide discourse regarding council tenants is that they constitute a socially excluded 'underclass', as in New Labour urban policy and the mass media. In contrast, the paper demonstrates how the housing campaign presented a counter-hegemonic discourse of tenants as 'ordinary people'. Drawing upon a textual analysis of campaign literature and letters to local newspapers, the paper illustrates how this populist discourse abjured an explicit reference to class identity, but at the same time managed to effectively signify class inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent revival in interest in class subjectivity has been largely premised on class belonging as a form of identity, eschewing talk of class-consciousness. Evidence in this debate has been mostly qualitative and focused on specific social groups. This paper uses data from the 2003 British Social Attitudes Survey to map the sense of class belonging in England and to assess the strength of class belonging when placed alongside other social identities, such as gender and nationality. The paper also explores the extent to which class identity could be conceived of as class-consciousness through its links with attitudes to redistribution and workplace relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades postdevelopment critics, who often draw on the analysis of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, have challenged developmentalism by making visible mechanisms of power within the apparatus of development. While these analyses have opened certain fields of the possible, the continued strength of developmentalism suggests that we must extend the postdevelopment project. This essay draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism to illuminate one set of possibilities not visible within the existing postdevelopment analytic. Working with Development as a social fantasy, this paper examines the formation of the subject and the role of enjoyment in stabilizing modern and postmodern society. The last section of this paper tentatively maps a few directions in which this approach may extend the postdevelopment project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's account of the connections and circulations which they argue constituted a multi-ethnic Atlantic working class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Linebaugh and Rediker 1991, 2000). Their stories of the mobile, networked insurgencies that traversed the early modern Atlantic challenge accounts of the geographies of resistance and labour which treat ethnicities as given and sealed, view subaltern movements as trapped in place and privilege the boundaries between spatial scales. This paper sketches some preliminary aspects of an agenda for thinking spatially the political identities constituted through Atlantic resistances. The paper foregrounds the multiple antagonisms constituted through Atlantic subaltern resistances to explore three aspects of the formation of subaltern political identities in the early-modern Atlantic. Firstly, how the spatial relations of Atlantic networks were brought into contestation through subaltern struggles. Secondly, the plural and mobile character of antagonisms between and within subaltern groups. Finally, the paper explores how subaltern agency and identities were formed in relation to the materialities of Atlantic networks. These arguments are developed through discussion of subaltern resistances in and between Ireland, Newfoundland, the West Coast of Africa, the Virgin Isles and London in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lot of the fun in contemporary sports talk relies on shared understandings about the culture of competitive sporting teams. The purpose of this paper is to explore how often humorous discourses are negotiated by sport fans as they narrate a sense of their own history and identity as followers of professional sports teams. This analysis draws on research conducted with followers of the Australian Football League (AFL), which included 21 life story interviews. As an oral historian, I was interested in how individuals negotiated popular ideas about Australian football in the ‘composition’ of their memories. This attention to the dynamic between the public and personal is described as a ‘popular memory approach’ to oral history. In this paper I explore the place of class in popular understandings about AFL club cultures. I argue that the role class plays in popular discourse around sporting club cultures is revealed more fully when we examine the ways in which individuals – in this case followers of AFL teams – make sense of it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lay perceptions and experiences of social location have been commonly framed with reference to social class. However, complex responses to, and ambivalence over, class categories have raised interesting analytic questions relating to how sociological concepts are operationalized in empirical research. For example, prior researchers have argued that processes of class dis-identification signify moral unease with the nature of classed inequalities, yet dis-identification may also in part reflect a poor fit between 'social class' as a category and the ways in which people accord meaning to, and evaluate, their related experiences of socio-economic inequality. Differently framed questions about social comparison, aligned more closely with people's own terms of reference, offer an interesting alternative avenue for exploring subjective experiences of inequality. This paper explores some of these questions through an analysis of new empirical data, generated in the context of recession. In the analysis reported here, class identification was common. Nevertheless, whether or not people self identified in class terms, class relevant issues were perceived and described in highly diverse ways, and lay views on class revealed it to be a very aggregated as well as multifaceted construct. It is argued that it enables a particular, not general, perspective on social comparison. The paper therefore goes on to examine how study participants compared themselves with familiar others, identified by themselves. The evidence illuminates social positioning in terms of constraint, agency and (for some) movement, and offers insight into very diverse experiences of inequality, through the comparisons that people made. Their comparisons are situated, and pragmatic, accounts of the material contexts in which people live their lives. Linked evaluations are circumscribed and strongly tied to these proximate material contexts.The paper draws out implications for theorizing lay perspectives on class, and subjective experiences of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide an analytical account of the diversity within middle-class identities in Turkey by drawing on an inductive and interview-based investigation of boundary-making processes. Inspired by Lamont's framework, it explores the nature and content of drawn symbolic boundaries and relates the causes of the observed variations to the rapid changes in Turkey's socio-economic structure. The research challenges the homogeneous and strictly hierarchical reading of class/cultural distinctions as it demonstrates the existence of horizontal tensions and culturally inclusive middle-class repertoires. The analysis unpacks the material basis of differentiation and highlights the most significant factors in strengthening or weakening cultural boundaries in the Turkish case: mobility profiles into middle-class positions, composition of overall capital and the sector of employment. The paper contributes both to the growing interest in divergent manifestations of class distinction in non-Euro-American national contexts and to our understanding of middle-class cultures in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How significant are class identities to lesbians and gay men? In the 1990s some theorists implied that lesbian and gay identities were classless or post-class ones. This paper challenges this idea by considering personal narratives of class (dis-)identification that were generated via interviews with lesbians and gay men in the 1990s. The salience of class was explicitly and implicitly articulated in narratives of ‘accepting’, ‘rejecting’, ‘ambiguous’ and ‘disrupting’ class identities. Interviewees’ narratives suggested the relative strength of sexual identities over class ones and their accounts of class had much in common with apparently ‘weak’ mainstream class identities. However, viewed relationally and historically, their narratives troubled the idea that lesbian and gay identities override or transcend class ones. They undermine arguments about the insignificance of class to identities more generally, and complicate arguments about the individualization of class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions whether personal income comparison explains the distributive gap between income and class identification by exploring the following two issues: empirical validity of income comparison as the determinant of class identification, and theoretical validity of income comparison for the distributive gap. For the first issue, we conduct a statistical analysis using data from the Social Stratification and Social Mobility surveys (1975-2005), and the Stratification and Social Psychology- I survey (2010). We find that the criteria for choosing reference groups changed historically from residential proximity to occupational equality. In addition, income comparison with sensitive to lower-income possessors and a distorted perception of income difference significantly affected class identification, except for the year of 1985. The simulation analysis employed to examine the second issue clarified that income comparison with the above-mentioned features yields a less skewed distribution compared to that of class identification. The data also indicates that the empirical conditions of income are satisfied for realization of this result. Thus, we could ascertain empirical and theoretical validity of income comparison as explanation for the distributive gap between income and class identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about the struggle for value by those who live intensified devaluation in the new conditions of legitimation and self-formation, by which the self is required to repeatedly reveal its value through its accrual and investment in economic, symbolic, social and cultural capitals. It explores how this value struggle is experienced: felt affectively, known and spoken through discourses of injustice. Drawing on a small research project, which uses the British New Labour government's Respect Agenda as an evocative device to provoke discussion, the paper details how those positioned as already marginal to the dominant symbolic, presented as 'useless' subjects rather than 'subjects of value' of the nation, generate alternative ways for making value. It examines how the experience of injustice generates affective responses expressed as 'ugly-feelings'. The conversion of these 'ugly feelings' into articulations of 'just-talk' reveals how different understandings of value, of what matters and what counts, come into effect and circulate alongside the dominant symbolic. The issue that most angered working-class respondents is how they are positioned, judged, blamed and held responsible for an inheritance over which they have no control, 'an accident of birth'. They were acutely aware of how they were constantly judged and de-legitimated and how practices such as selfishness and greed were legitimate for others. Showing how they refuse to authorize those they consider lacking in value but with authority and in a position to judge, the paper demonstrates how class relations are lived through a struggle, not only against economic limitation but a struggle against unjustifiable judgment and authority and for dignified relationality. The paper reveals a struggle at the very core of ontology, demonstrating how the denigrated defend and make their lives liveable; an issue at the heart of current austerity politics which may have increased significance for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon the St Anns neighbourhood in Nottingham, a community first studied by Ken Coates and Bill Silburn in the 1960s which noted the great upheavals of the physical and social changes generated by the slum clearance programme of 10,000 back-to-back terraced houses, and the consequent building of the concrete council estate that is now St Anns. This paper draws upon both the physical and the social changes within the neighbourhood, and highlights what has remained constant despite the massive upheavals to working-class life over the last 40 years. This paper looks at the concept of belonging to a neighbourhood which has been stigmatized, finding value and an identity within the estate, and residents describing themselves as simultaneously and interchangeably as being from and simply being St Anns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent economic changes in India have coincided with a dramatic change in the concept of a ‘middle class’ in the south Indian city of Madurai. Whereas previous sets of class identities were overwhelmingly dichotomous (for example, the rich and the poor, or the ‘big people’ and ‘those who have nothing’), the middle class has now become a highly elaborated component of local class structures and identities. It is also a contested category; moreover, its indigenous boundaries differ from those most often used by scholars, marketers, or policy-makers. Drawing from research over the past decade, this paper examines local definitions of ‘middleness’ and the moralized meanings ascribed to it. Whilst being ‘in the middle’ is a source of pride and pleasure, connoting both achievement and enhanced self-control, it is simultaneously a source of great tension, bringing anxiety over the critical and damaging scrutiny of onlookers. For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life. In exploring each of these aspects, I pay attention to the explicitly performative features of class identities. I conclude by considering the epistemological and experiential insights we gain into the construction of emergent class categories by focusing on self-ascribed identities and their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although identity research in organizations has increased in recent years, none of the current perspectives has examined the role of emotion for understanding how individuals construct and enact professional identity. In this paper we examine how emotions affect the development, conduct and meanings of professional identity among a sample of 20 doctor managers from two Spanish hospitals. While not excluding other approaches, we found that a social identity approach was especially useful. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, our results provide new insights about how, in a work setting, emotions prioritize awareness of identity issues that need attention. Second, we discuss the role of emotions for understanding complex role identities by reference to the enactment of different sides of doctor managers' identities. Third, we show how our analysis of the findings may be used to embellish the social identity approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore an important nexus of formal/informal economic activity in Russia: "normative" workers (in waged formal employment) by virtue of a strongly embedded work-related social identity and characterized by a significant number of weak social ties, move with little "effort" between formal and informal work. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents extensive ethnographic data from the Russian provinces on workers and diverse economic practices. It utilizes participant observation and semi-structured interviews from periods of fieldwork over the course of a year (2009-2010). Findings – This study traces the theoretical debates on the informal economy from 1989 to 2008 and argues for a substantivist position on household reproduction that focuses on the interdependence of social networks, employment, class-identity and (informal) work. The findings demonstrate significant performative and spatial aspects of embedded worker identity, including the workspace itself as a contested domain, that facilitate movement between formal-informal work. Originality/value – The originality of the paper resides in its ethnographic approach to informal economies under post-socialism and the substantivist evaluation of diverse economic practices in Russia as supported by formal work-based shared identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relation between contemporary aesthetic features and the formation of cultural dynamics. We examine the role of the symbolic and ideological universe of the aestheticization of everyday life (AEL) in the formation of specific symbolic variables among younger generations of the working-classes, mostly in the service sectors. The analytic lens focuses on the aestheticization of everyday life as a relevant cultural process of de-classicization of collective representations. According to Leroux, Rouanet, Savage and Warde, 'much of the (mostly qualitative) research on class identity and awareness insists on 'dis-identification' (ie, people do not readily identify as class members or consciously adopt 'class specific' activities' (: 1050).1 In the same article, the authors state that 'people's stated intentions, desires and practices are marked by their hopes and fantasies, but these dissemble, rather than being the reflex of, their class locations' (idem). Consequently, they focus on how lifestyles are, to a large extent, connected with specific class locations, not how social agents conceive subjectively their cultural practices. This social discontinuity between class objective processes of social and cultural causality and the individual/collective perceptions of social life is the main theoretical object of our study. In this sense, processes of aestheticization presented in the paper (performativity, narrativization of self, body as practice, fragmentation, the role of image, and prosthetics) contribute decisively to the production of a general set of dispositions around an absence and invisibility of class languages in everyday life practices. The paper covers three interrelated sections. First, how aesthetics had configured relevant dimensions in the structuration of political life in Fascism as Walter Benjamin had envisaged at the time. Then, we will describe pertinent topics of the AEL and, to finish the article, how it induces a set of processes of de-classicization among new strata of Western working-classes. That is, de-classicization is posited as a cultural dynamic capable of displacing class dimensions from everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of colonial and postcolonial studies have been enriched by nuanced analyses of the ways in which racialised colonial identities (cross-cut by gender, class and sexuality) have been enacted in particular settings. Nevertheless, the quantity and quality of knowledge about the lives of European colonials and settlers can be held in stark contrast with the relative scarcity of studies of those who might be regarded as their modern-day equivalents: contemporary 'expatriates', or citizens of 'Western' nation-states who are involved in temporary migration processes to destinations outside 'the West'. These contemporary expatriates are rarely considered through a postcolonial framework. As a corrective, this special issue of JEMS draws together eight articles, each of which explicitly engages in different ways with this theoretical concern. In this introductory paper we argue for the significance of the past in shaping contemporary expatriate mobilities and note postcolonial continuities in relation to people, practices and imaginations. While discussing the resonances across various geographical sites, we emphasise the need to also consider the particularity of postcolonial contexts. Finally, we suggest that we need to broaden the current, somewhat myopic focus on Western expatriates, to understand them in relation to other groups of migrants, particularly in globalising cities, and to include the perspectives of locals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the complex and contradictory framing of youthful female sexuality, personified in the figure of foster-daughters ( beslemes), in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Beslemes were both sexually exploited and attempted to be disciplined under the critical gaze of the upper classes and the state, since they disturbed the accepted rules and limits of sexual agency as sexually active unwed adolescent girls. They were marginalized as indecent and fallen girls, since sexual agency and chastity were considered to be incompatible. Though acknowledging the subordination of foster-daughters, this paper suggests that these young women were not completely subjected, silenced and helpless and that they were able to find ways of taking the initiative in resistive strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research into the teaching of ‘race’ and ethnicity in higher education, including interviews with lecturers and students of specialist sociology of ‘race’ options. It focuses particularly on interactional issues: the conversations conducted about ‘race’ and ethnicity within seminar rooms were often conflictual and emotional in tone. The topics around which conflicts emerged are discussed: the most common areas of conflict were around Islamophobia, anti‐Jewish racism and gender/sexuality; anti‐black racism, British/English nationalism and anti‐Irish racism were also expressed, but less frequently. Women lecturers were more likely to experience conflicts than were men. The paper analyses some factors underlying these processes: these include the perhaps inherent difficulty of teaching subjects in which discrimination and violence feature large; wider political conflicts and ‘identity politics’ as played out within the micro‐settings of seminars; and the emotions mobilised in the process of teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, members from the London Feminist Salon Collective reflected on the vexed problem of agency in poststructuralist theory and asked, ‘as feminist educational researchers, where do we go from here?’ The issue remains pressing as agency, both individual and collective, is at the heart of the feminist, and indeed, all radical political projects. The attractions of poststructuralist theorizing for many feminists has been its decisive break with logocentrism. However, from the 1980s onwards, feminists were pointing to the problems poststructuralism presented in theorizing the nature of agency. In this paper I will argue that we should adopt a different theoretical starting point. Drawing heavily on the work of Margaret Archer, I will argue that critical realism has much to offer theories of political action. While acknowledging the enormous contribution of feminist scholars working within a poststructuralist paradigm, I will argue that the epistemological and ontological assumptions at the heart of poststructuralist theory render it incapable of providing a framework for what Archer calls the enchantment of being human. This enchantment, and the rich resources of a conceptualization of agency based on the primacy of practice, provides a stronger basis for theorizing feminist research, practice and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]