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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]

This paper argues that processes of marginalisation experienced by white working-class students provide insight into systemic problems with the English education system. White British students eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) are a low attaining group. This research investigates factors affecting their engagement and achievement. Fieldwork in three comprehensive secondary schools in a London borough used qualitative methods to gather data on the perspectives of staff, students and parents. Using Bourdieu's conceptual tools to guide the analysis, the study found that performance pressure and funding cuts can result in an institutional habitus which privileges academic attainment, side-lines the social and emotional aspects of learning and misrecognises working-class capitals. Such habitus fosters pedagogic practices which reduce levels of felt safety and limit opportunities to actively engage and exercise agency in the classroom. These conditions often make fragile the learner identity of white working-class students (and others) and prompt disengagement from school. [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]

Copyright of European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is concerned with people's attachments to historic urban places they experience in their daily lives. The topic has received growing emphasis in the realm of heritage studies, given its importance to the conservation and management of historic urban environments. Drawing on qualitative data collected from thirty in-depth interviews carried out in Edinburgh, Scotland, I explore the multiple ways in which (known as dimensions in place attachment literature) people develop attachments to historic urban places: from a kind of autobiographic attachments which were grounded in their everyday living and memories, and those of their families to intellectual attachments wherein they showcased their deep appreciation for the attributes that define a historic place. I also seek to demonstrate a class-specific nature of attachments at the intellectual level, adding a politicised view to the complexity of the phenomenon. In so doing, I demonstrate the many ways in which historic places are important to people's enjoyment of lives in the city, and the various roles the history of places and/or their historic attributes played in forging such attachments. I conclude the paper with discussions on findings related to the current state of knowledge in place attachment research and implications for heritage practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper studies the Fascist Colonial Institute (ICF) of Bologna as a local space in which fascist ideals of empire, gender and class collided and were reproduced. Founded shortly before Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the ICF served to transmit colonial consciousness to the Italian people, and, most especially, to young middle-class women. Analysis of the local Bolognese ICF, however, reveals a more complex reality. Courses designed to create fascist imperialists out of middle-class women and forge a ruling settler class for the colonies evidence that the institute used the empire as a tool to shore up gender norms in fascist Italy. The author argues that an unintended outcome of these courses was that the ICF became a space of limited freedom and of social and professional mobility for its young women participants. In addition to learning transgressive skills, these women took advantage of their affiliation with the institute, using it as a springboard for further employment opportunities. The paper is based on a rich collection of sources from the Bolognese branch of the ICF, held in the Museo Civico del Risorgimento di Bologna in the Archivio dell'Istituto Fascista dell'Africa Italiana – Sezione di Bologna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the International Journal of Lifelong Education archives in the period 1982–2020. We analyse how the Journal engages with the issue of inequality. This is accomplished by systematically identifying relevant articles within the archives, and reviewing these whilst taking account of the societal, cultural and political or economic contexts in which they were written. Most articles identified for review focused on specific disadvantaged groups, discussing ways in which adult education might help, support and strengthen them. A minority took a more critical approach, assessing the drivers for inequality, or problematising the role of lifelong education as a catalyst for addressing inequality or social injustice. In our analysis, we distinguish between inequalities related to class, gender and migration/ethnicity as themes emerging from our initial sweep of the archives, however these themes are represented unequally both in terms of number and attention given across the decades. Perhaps surprisingly, given the different forms of inequality addressed in the Journal, it seems that only very few of these papers can be directly associated with historical events and contexts relevant to the times in which they were written. Theoretically driven conceptualisations of inequality are rarities within the archives, with some notable exceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions why, despite capitalism's intimate connections with sport, it is rarely named, let alone explicitly discussed in sport management. It questions whether capitalism should remain as the invisible, ghostly backdrop wherein sport management is located and conceptualized. This paper is primarily a position and conceptual paper, though it is foregrounded with a search of the term 'capitalism' within leading sport management academic journals, conference abstracts, and textbooks. It also provides a synopsis of capitalism (as a global system of power) and suggests that capitalism has a ghostly presence in contemporary sport management scholarship. This paper advocates for an expansive understanding of 'sport management' as the organizing processes of sport activities, as opposed to the 'managing' modalities with capitalist values. Naming capitalism is a necessary first step for sport management research to become more accountable to social justice and emancipation. Naming capitalism makes it analyzable. It opens up intellectual space to support multi-racial, multi-gender working-class and anti-colonial struggles within and beyond the sport industry, furthering existing analyses on racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc. with a renewed focus on contradictions under capitalism. Moreover, it opens up possibilities to theorize non-capitalist forms of organizing sport that challenge the default logics of the sport 'industry'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists and writers on injustice have highlighted as a structural problem that injustice is experienced differentially. What injustices of privilege lie hidden in my daily academic life? Three deeply discomforting moments relating to Class, climate, and Whiteness privilege, form the core of an account of gradually admitting to my passive acceptance of injustice in the form of privileges from which I benefit. My ignorance has perpetuated privilege despite this not being my conscious will. From this crisis, the paper explores the inner work for healing injustice individually, and the outer work of changing collective habits of dominance within the Academy. A starting point is befriending my will to injustice and facing up to my privileges. Effort needed from White, Middle Class academics 'like me' includes uncovering ways in which we benefit from privilege whether or not we want to. Proposals are made for inner growth through building community among academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxists often link the emergence of finance capital to developments in the categories of capital, such as flight to money capital, sometimes associated with changes in the organic composition of capital. While not disputing the importance of transformations in capitalist categories, this paper examines the causal role of working-class agency in the emergence of finance capital. The paper addresses finance capital in Britain, giving due consideration to a variety of causal factors cementing its dominance. It then considers the role of labour unrest in developing a working class in itself, gravitating towards and away from political expressions (syndicalism, social democracy) in pursuance of its immediate economic struggles. The overall argument is that the emergence of finance capital in the parasitic form it took in Britain was fundamentally a response to the power of a working class in itself. Parasitism became the default trend to control the working class and prevent any potential movement towards a working class for itself from gaining hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper offers a framing ofelite discourseas the way elites and/or eliteness are depicted in language and communication, and the way language and communication are deployed for two elitist ends: the production of status and the maintenance of privilege/power. We sketch three orienting principles which have structured our special issue – targeting elitism, centring discourse and critical reflexivity – before presenting an overview of the individual papers. We end by listing some of the prominent motifs and questions to have emerged through this interdisciplinary collaboration, concluding with the synergetic politics of representational acts and redistributive actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on 'diaspora at home', a concept that encapsulates the unique dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China, as an analytical tool to explore the cross-border experiences of 23 Hong Kong students at 11 universities in mainland China. It empirically ascertains how the made and imposed claims and identifications of these Hong Kong students resulted in inclusion and exclusion as their interactions with their mainland peers and institutions deepened. Specifically, it highlights how their 'diaspora at home' status offered exclusive access to privileged higher education opportunities, preferential treatments and opportunities for upward social mobility. Meanwhile, such a status also resulted in an overwhelming sense of political liability as they unwittingly became 'political tokens' and suspected political subjects amid the increasingly tense political atmosphere between mainland China and Hong Kong. This paper pinpoints the relevance of class and politics in understanding how diasporic groups engage with higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon contemporary analyses of the interconnections between stigmatized places and identity formation, this paper explores processes of place-based identity formation on a British council estate. Connecting post-structural theorisations of identity and space, the paper explores the tensions between structure and agency implicit within theorisations of place-based identity as a community. Conceptualising the entanglement of structure and agency in place making as "being placed", this paper offers an analysis of contradictions inherent in a structurally located agency. Founded upon ethnographic research of the material and cultural conditions of "being placed" on The Estate, the paper explores everyday resistances to place-based identity and the stigmatization of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though extensive literature exists on Moroccan women in the public sphere, simultaneously less research explores the ways in which men ‘do domesticity’. This paper will examine the ways urban Moroccan middle-class men interact within the private spheres of life, why they do so and what this means for gendered subjectivities in Morocco. For some urban middle-class Moroccan men, being a good father means taking an active role in his children’s lives and taking care of them with the help of his wife. This is not true for all urban middle-class men, but most said that they were more willing to help with cooking, cleaning and childcare than their father had been: showing a generational shift. Additionally, most participants said that doing housework does not lower the level of a man’s masculinity. Despite this, every Moroccan woman that I talked to does most reproductive labour around the house. This paper explores the dynamic nature of Moroccan masculinity across the life cycle: from early marriage, to being a father and being retired. This generational shift is happening due to the confluence of structural changes in education, socioeconomic class and occupation in addition to individuals’ desire to be active fathers and husbands. I place urban Moroccan middle-class masculinities in context with Moroccan femininities and highlight both male and female voices. These findings are based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rabat, Morocco including 53 semi-structured interviews and extensive participant observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the state apparatus classifies who are the citizens to be symbolically included in the collective, and who are to be excluded by analysing interfaith marriages in the Israeli context, where ethno-national identity is society's main category organizer. I argue that the women's social-economic standing (working-class versus middle-class) and ethnic origin (Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry versus Ashkenazi Jews of European ancestry) play an important role not only in their strategies but in the nationalist rhetoric against them. The paper also shows how interfaith marriages, although rather rare in Israel, determine that ethno-national boundaries are more permeable than they are first appear, although crossing and shifting them is never simple. Yet the importance of this phenomenon is not in its prevalence, but in its social and political impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Writings on epistemic injustice have assessed how people can be harmed in their capacity as knowers when they are a racial minority, a woman, disabled and so on. But what about when they belong to the working class? This paper is an initial attempt to understand why class has so far received limited attention within writings on epistemic injustice and to respond to these reasons. It focuses on how testimonial and hermeneutic injustices specifically harm workers in ways distinctive from the harm one might suffer due to other social identities. It does this by drawing attention to the special case of industrial strike action and the play of conceptual resources and credibility assessments that influence the action's success. Additionally, it provides a first-time exposition for social epistemologists on what I term the 'class compositional approach', derived from 1960-70s Italian labour struggles. This approach, I argue, succeeds in evading the criticism of class reductionism while developing recent philosophical work on class-based injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between middle-class German Jewish women and food in the context of prewar emigration. Often these women were leaving culturally, economically, and materially rich lives, yet arrived in Britain, America, and other shorelines with very little. Rationing and cultural differences added complex layers to their experience of hosts’ foodscapes. The paper argues that food and its material culture were key parts of German Jewish women’s toolkits for negotiating emigration. Additionally, the article argues that the loss of middle-classness was a defining and enduring feature of their emigratory experience, which is revealed in their relationship to food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the stories of women migrants from Latin America who found themselves living precarious lives and struggling to sustain former idealised notions of their racial and class identities in London. Dispossessed of previous class membership due to an onward feminised precarity, a diminished social capital, undocumented legal statuses, and menial stigmatised jobs, women clung to an idealised perception of social status (shaped by white Eurocentric aspirations) to negotiate and reconfigure class and racial anxieties in London. They engage in various strategies that include processes of whitening through marriage and children, performances of taste and beauty, and negotiating their racialisation at work. These cases reflect the relevance of the coloniality of power, its influence in the subsistence of racial and class ideologies in Latin America, and in a global economy of care that produces and reproduces postcolonial forms of intersectional racialised and gendered exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates attitudes towards death and the social factors that influence them among a sample of residents in Tehran, Iran. Using grounded theory and anchoring our analysis in the meaning of death (what people think happens after death), we were able to conceptualise three broad worldviews on death, which were then further refined into nine attitudes. Our research highlights socio-economic status as a factor potentially shaping people's attitudes towards death. A large group of our respondents, mainly among less affluent groups, think about death daily, while many among the more affluent and the educated middle class prefer to avoid thoughts of death. Our study in a Muslim majority setting in the Middle East contributes to the existing literature on attitudes towards death by going beyond simple typologies, such as western versus eastern, traditional versus modern, religious versus secular, denial versus acceptance, to show that the diversity of attitudes towards death can both incorporate and transcend all of these dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data privacy debate in India has evolved with respect to the government's biometric identity programme, Aadhaar that enrols welfare-dependent, poor populations to grant them access to government benefits. While legal challenges to Aadhaar by civil society groups argued that the biometric identity infrastructure creates conditions of mass surveillance and violation of individual privacy, the Indian Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that the government was justified in restricting individual privacy for the collective good of providing welfare in a transparent and corruption-free manner. Given the disproportionate burden on these populations to prove their identities to the state, this paper draws on a close reading of legal and policy texts, and activist documentation to argue that there is a need to move beyond the narrative of mass surveillance as privacy violation. Data privacy interests of the welfare-dependent emerge in the moment of biometric authentication, which creates anxieties of recognition when their authentication attempts fail or are deliberately falsified. Often, to have better social mobility, they are compelled to be physically mobile in order to enrol or update their records under conditions of physical disability and meagre socioeconomic means. These anxieties illuminate their privacy interests through a compromise of dignity or dignified living, a formulation articulated in the 2018 Aadhaar verdict. The paper makes a critical contribution to the global conversation on data privacy through a discussion of the Indian case that demonstrates the privacy-recognition nexus in local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cohousing is widely celebrated as a socially and environmentally sustainable housing model, but remains a small sector with a distinct social profile: White, highly educated and with middle-high income. Drawing on mixed-methods research and using a Bourdieusian analysis, this paper argues that culture, and not affordability, is the main barrier to inclusion. Contrary to previous claims, the study found that awareness of cohousing is born within like-minded circles and not locally. The quantitative aspect provides up-to-date data on the social profile of cohousing communities in England, and the qualitative data show how cohousing is reproduced as a White and middle-class space due to cultural capital and habitus – an invisible social system that maintains privilege. At the same time, the data also show that cohousing is in fact more diverse than is perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Community, Work & Family is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2006–2007, the romantic affair between Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and white-collar worker Susan Kuronen received unprecedented attention in the national media. Analyzing the coverage of the affair and its aftermath in Finnish evening papers through Sara Ahmed's notion of affective circulation, the present article investigates the drawing of public and private boundaries through the public reviling of Kuronen for revealing intimate details concerning Vanhanen's private life. As the couple's relationship unraveled, the evening papers began fashioning class differences between the parties both previously characterized as "ordinary" and middle-class, labeling Kuronen as common and trashy. Addressing the dynamics of class and gender at play, the article shows that although Kuronen was accused of continuously revealing her private life, she actually gave few interviews herself. Rather, the popular press reused the same comments and quotes extensively in an intertextual process of circulation through which Kuronen was crafted into a highly affective media figure and an object of considerable public dismay. In addition to exploring the intertextual working practices of the popular media, the article investigates the effects of the circulation of affect from evening papers to online discussion forums as underpinned by social hierarchies, the uses of privacy as a politician's media strategy as well as the risks that this involves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class Matters, by Mahony and Zmroczek (1997), was an important collection marking working-class women's contribution to the academy and society. In taking up the question of class, this paper considers the ways in which a partial and particular discourse reflected its author's material circumstances, including her preferred conceptual interests as well as her un(self)conscious knowledge. In revisiting the way class 'mattered', and continues to matter – we devised and enacted an exploratory dialogical methodology to open up the original text to new meanings and interpretations influenced by generationally and geographically specific intellectual/theoretical vocabularies. The paper enacts this multivocality with reflections from each author, connected by a co-authored exploration of affect and the power and problematic of the 'autobiography of the question'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the social constitution of senior BBC journalists and British politicians and considers the extent to which they reflect the general public. By examining ten variables – including gender, age, ethnicity, parental occupation and education – this paper shows the majority of the BBC and Conservative cohorts spent their formative years in the more prosperous regions of the UK and have family backgrounds that suggest relative wealth. Many also attended private secondary schools, and just under half studied at the elite British universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The senior Labour politicians, however, are a closer match to the national population in gender and regional influences. They also have relatively modest backgrounds, and few attended elite universities. This paper raises the question of whether middle class, metropolitan journalists, who have spent most of their lives in southern England, can identify with – and report on – issues that affect the greater British population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialty coffee is increasingly produced and consumed as part of routine life in many cities in modern China, but the social and cultural shifts it has engendered yet to be systematically examined. By examining the intersections between social media and the operations of independent Chinese coffeehouses in the field of taste, this paper puts forward the idea of new taste among Chinese millennials, which comprises individual subjectivity, heterogeneous social relationships, and forms of class distinction. Using taste-oriented keyword searches on WeChat official accounts, 20 articles were returned and analyzed in terms of their textural and visual orientations to examine the processes underlying how taste is influenced in the consumption of specialty coffee in China. Findings suggest the importance of taste makers in this process, from routine creation of aesthetic ambience in the coffeehouses to the construction of affective taste spaces online, and the establishment of taste cycles from online to offline, which all underpin class privilege. Moreover, the emergence of an 'urban café community' appears to be characterized by specific forms of belonging resulting from a productive effect of the interplay between independent coffeehouses and consumers in everyday urban life in which a set of aesthetic boundaries reside. Second, these digital consumers distinguish themselves socially by positioning themselves as having a cosmopolitan taste grounded in coffee appreciation instead of merely consuming coffee for physiological benefits. These findings extend taste propositions through engagement of Chinese digital millennial consumers to uncover the underlying cultural classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the analysis of Israeli society and the experience of immigration and integration into it in the first decades after its establishment in 1948, an Ashkenazi-Mizrahi dichotomy became prevalent, and the explanatory efficacy of other contributing factors went mostly unnoticed. The academic, institutional and public discourses that focused on those among the Mizrahi Jews, who struggled to fit-in, perpetuated the early Ashkenazi establishment's biases against all that was Arab and by extension Mizrahi. Exploring socio-cultural practices - such as dress codes and choice of language, of Jews arriving in Israel from Egypt during this period, this paper will examine the role of class identity and performativity (rather than ethnicity) in shaping the immigrant experience of newcomers. Relying on multiple sources including interviews, life stories and oral testimonials, it will argue that the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria shared an urban middle-class habitus with the Israeli Ashkenazi elites; and that the performative expression of this shared identity enabled them to open doors closed to many other Middle Eastern and North African groups and paved their way into the Israeli mainstream despite their Mizrahi decent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls' unequal access to mobile phones within the family in Mumbai, India? What are the everyday practices and cultural logics upon which these inequalities are built? This paper addresses these questions by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 268 surveys with adolescents aged 13–15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together create varying standards of 'respectable femininity' and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of low-income/high-income or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of 'respectable femininity' create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocational education and training (VET) is linked to many social and economic goals. Yet despite the high policy ambitions, it often remains a sector with a low(er) social standing. This paper is based on empirical data collected through interviews and focus groups with over 250 young women and men aged 16–18 in 34 VET schools in Romania. It aims to gain a better understanding of their perceived reasons for being in VET and seeks to find out the extent to which VET involved an element of choice. The paper explores a large array of circumstances that bring young people into VET, which are not limited to the need to acquire skills. These issues include localism, family obligations and the priorities of powerful 'others': schools, employers, etc. It argues that, despite young people actively searching for elements of choice, VET in Romania is more a story of capability deprivation. This paper questions a policy discourse that prioritises the need for skills at the expense of engaging meaningfully with young people's social worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Indian and Pakistani Punjab, this paper focuses on how, despite membership in or conversion to majority religious communities, former untouchables in both countries continue to experience caste-based discrimination. In India, a rights-based idiom for caste politics is limited by fragmentation within the Dalit community and the compromises required by electoral politics, while the imposition of a totalising Islamic identity by the state has resulted in the erasure of caste from the political discourse in Pakistan. This paper suggests that class-based mobilisation may be a better route to Dalit empowerment on both sides of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how two facets of identity—religion and class—are performed, (re)produced and negotiated within the spaces of the Christian school, home and church in Singapore. We show how the social structuring of one space can inform and influence the structuring of another. Spaces of Christianity in Singapore tend to be mutually reinforcing, strengthening the linkages between religion and class, and in particular reifying the position of Christianity as a religion of the privileged classes. However, the ways in which Christian spaces are reified can become problematic when space is in fact shared with less privileged groups, such as Christians from lower socio-economic classes, and foreign domestic workers. In such instances, the interlinked spaces of Christian privilege and position can cause differences within the community to become points of negotiation and compromise. As a result, they can lead to the social (re)positioning of individuals, and the reproduction of both inclusionary and exclusionary forms of religious citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue offers important insights into race in Asia, insights first shared in a workshop "New Racism and Migration: Beyond Colour and the 'West'". My concluding commentary begins by positioning debates on race within the literature on "new racism". The workshop enhanced existing thinking on race pointing to the legacies of racial thought and of migration in Asia, the nature of comparison in racial thinking, and the ways in which race is entangled with class. It then outlines what is distinctive about Asia – the different histories of settler colonialism by European migrants and the indigeneity of racial thought but not of indigenous people. The paper ends by suggesting three ways forward in conceptualizing racism in Asia: engaging the materialities of race in Asia, recognizing how Asian race debates are influenced by global discourses and the need to draw on anti-racist politics to theorize race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare state transformation has resulted in the expansion of private associations and the increased role of religious charities. In the context of the austerity crisis, the paper addresses how Caritas volunteers in an impoverished urban area in southern Italy deal with the bureaucratisation of resource distribution in face of increasing demands of 'aid'. The categorisation of poverty by welfare agents and the moral evaluations that underlie volunteers' approach to 'the new poor' provide insights to the explanatory frameworks they articulate in order to make sense of their compensatory role in the face of scarcer welfare state provisions. The paper highlights the linkages of formal and informal circuits in charity initiatives in order to analyse the interplay between procedural and moral definitions of poverty. It shows how volunteers adjust to the transfer of the responsibility to care from welfare state to charity and finally how they make sense of social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of migrant minorities in Europe has long been characterized by a turn to identity politics. This turn has had two shortcomings: First, it often conflates religion, ethnicity, and nationality, resulting in what I call "categorical astigmatism". Consequently, migrants find themselves lumped into categories they would not primarily identify with. Second, despite its importance in the lived experiences of migrants, class is treated as a "non-identity" and intra-migrant class differences do not get the attention they deserve. Building on these two criticisms, in this article, I first employ Bourdieu's theory of "classification struggles" to conceptualize "categorical astigmatism" and make a plea for categorical clarification. I then suggest the theory of intersectionality as a way out, highlighting the importance of class and its intersection with other markers of difference. Empirically, the paper builds on interviews with migrants from Turkey and Syria in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to the opinions of high-income citizens than to those of middle and working-class citizens in the United States. This is often explained by the fact that economic elites make campaign contributions to political elites, leading to decision-making that aligns with the preferences of the affluent. This paper examines the opinion-policy link in Swedish politics, where campaign contributions are relatively low. Despite this, the study finds that high-income citizens still receive the most policy responsiveness. Three alternative possible explanations are discussed. Do high-income citizens receive more responsiveness because (a) they are better able to put issues on the political agenda, (b) because they are easier to satisfy and prefer 'cheaper' symbolic policy reforms, while low-income citizens prefer more costly policies or (c) because the status quo bias works to the advantage of high-income citizens? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are histories describing in detail the development of early childhood education (ECE) around the world, yet not enough is known about this in the Middle East and the information on the origins of ECE in Iran is scarce and fragmentary. This article is the first of its kind to present an overview of the main developments rendering possible the establishment of the first kindergartens in Iran. In our account, we connect this genealogy of early childhood education in Iran to various trajectories: 1) the work of intellectual reformers; 2) the Iranian feminist movement; 3) the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1906–1911); 4) religious reformist beliefs in Shia; 5) the missionaries' schools; 6) the Armenians' schools and 7) the age of girls' marriage. As we demonstrate, early childhood education in Iran emerged before the industrial revolution. It was mainly provided for intellectual and influential families, focused on physical education accompanied by music, while religious education was marginal. Our genealogical explorations indicate that compared to kindergartens in Britain and Europe, Iranian early childhood education has been an instrument for intellectual societal reform. It was the fruits of a transplanted tree nourished by various local cultural-socio-political trends and religious beliefs. The paper concludes with an assessment of the importance of local and international influences on the emergence of early childhood education and the need to explore this history with an intersectional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we employ "everyday techno-nationalism" as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government's ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a "Chinese" platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of "Indian-ness." We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok's "Chineseness" is a populist affective outcome of the discursive articulation of Indian "nationhood," achieved by the effective use of an us-versus-them rhetoric, which signifies a process of digital territorialization amid globalized media flows. Second, we observe that the classist-casteist narrative underscoring TikTok's association with "cringeworthiness" marginalizes the working-class content creators – so prominently visibilized by TikTok – both from the media landscape and the nationalist imagination. Fundamentally, India's TikTok ban raises questions about statist interventions into people's media practices; and as importantly, their own understanding and use of digital technology, which, ironically, within a globalized era, seems to be only notionally more connected, but practically more partisan than ever. [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]

Against the "intellectual monoculture" that organizes American IPE, this paper draws on Inayatullah and Blaney's conception of ethnological IPE and Escobar's analysis of the production and management of poverty in the Third World in order to study Appalachia. The paper focuses on Christian missionaries and educators and their work among populations of poor whites at the Konnarock Training School for girls. It shows how diverse actors transformed a stable set of social differences into stark interpretations of neediness, institutionalized those interpretations, and enacted them onto the bodies of locals in specific ways that reflected global, colonial patterns of stark inequality (1830–1930). The paper is organized into an historical narrative with four main points of examination: the contact zone where class and religious differences emerge as politically significant interpretations of neediness; the institutionalization of those differences as neediness through the construction of a church, mission, and school; the educator's discursive production of class and religious differences in a global context through their writings in a missionary magazine; and the educator's discursive production of scientifically measured differences of race, particularly a degraded whiteness. Through a cultural political economy of colonialism, Appalachia was produced as a peripheral zone populated by a marginal people within the world's economic core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on participant observation and interviews in two yoga studios in the highly socially stratified city of Marseille, France, this paper explores the understandings of yoga as a health practice that emerge at the intersections between yoga styles and their social contexts of consumption. Its insights emerge from the comparison of three modern yoga styles that were developed for Western English-speaking cultural contexts – Iyengar, Bikram and Forrest – and which differ in form but also in the chronology of their emergence on the global yoga market and that of their reception in France. These three yoga styles are also branded through contrasting mythologies of transformational healing, and the aim of this paper is to explore how a brand conceptualization of yoga as a health practice relates to or resonates with the embodied experiences of practitioners, and to the socio-cultural contexts in which practitioners and their practices are embedded. The paper contributes a new case study to the global yoga scholarship and to a poorly studied French yoga scene, but more importantly, it cross-examines the discourses through which a yoga style is branded, the way it is transmitted, and the social context and social positioning of the individuals who practice it. Combining perspectives on the body, narrative and rituals, it identifies how yoga healing is construed in relation to gender, ethnicity and class and the points of consensus and dissent that emerge from the encounters between French social bodies and exogenous yoga styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punjab, when viewed through the lens of culture, presents a multifaceted and multi-dimensional cohesion. Within the frame of a cultural phenomenon, Punjab appears to be many Punjabs at once, a geographical, a political, an online, a feudal, and a diasporic Punjab. All of these many phizogs appear to be in continuous dialogue, negotiating for the supremacy of one structure. The paper aims to examine these kaleidoscopic patterns of a changing Punjab through the negotiations occurring within the cultural phenomenon of Sidhu Moose Wala as a singer, painting a picture of an evolving Punjab that persists along spatial, temporal, and cultural axes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the influential Austrian sports publicist, official and athlete Otto Herschmann (1877–1942). He created a unique contemporary document with his book Viennese Sport in 1904. This book is a key text for understanding the political and social condition of sport in Vienna in its constituent phase. Despite this, the book has been virtually unrecognized even in the relevant literature. The study examines the social and political situation of sport in the central European metropolis of Vienna around 1900, focusing primarily on the class relations of sporting practices. The overall question is how British sport diffused into the stratified society of the Habsburg Monarchy. The main sources are Herschmann's book and contemporary newspaper reports which are contextualized with the relevant secondary literature. The theoretical framework of the study is provided by Bourdieu's reflections on the differentiation of the 'semi-autonomous field of forces' of sport, as he set them out in the two texts Historical and Social Preconditions of Modern Sport and Program for a Sociology of Sport. Overall, it becomes apparent that there was no uniform, linear establishment practice of sport in Vienna around 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a growth in outdoor learning opportunities for children of primary school age in part due to concerns that children spend less time outdoors and have become disconnected from nature. This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the school year 2014–2015 in a school garden and two forest schools with children aged 3–11 years old. This paper explores how mud is used to form gendered and class-based identities through its management and social construction as dirt. The empirical research finds that the mud kitchen and wearing of waterproofs worked in part as assemblages to govern individuals and their experiences through the creation of cuts between bodies and mud. Yet, there were times when children's encounters with materials exceeded their intended pedagogical function and resistances emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides one of the most accurate estimates of the size of the Indian middle class, using an eclectic set of variables rooted in three major theories of class; Marxist, Weberian, and Bourdieuian. Using this original and theoretically inclusive method offers a solution to the problem of capturing the conceptual complexities of the middle class and provides a holistic examination of its composition. Through statistical analysis of the India Human Development Survey II (2011–12), the paper reveals three significant findings: firstly, it calculates the size of the middle class to be 28.05% of the urban and rural population in India. Secondly, it demonstrates that despite the occupational diversity that exists among middle classes, a large proportion of the middle class are salaried employees. Thirdly, and most importantly, it demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions in the growing literature on the middle class, a considerable segment of the Indian middle class resides in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractPrevious research on alcohol consumption and leisure illuminates the ways in which drinking practices—including a preference for “craft” products—are entangled with notions of taste and distinction and linked to classed drinking identities and modes of “serious leisure”. However, little is known about how this plays out for light drinkers or short or long-term abstainers from alcohol. These supposed non-consumers have traditionally been located on the periphery of dominant drinking cultures. However, an expanding market of craft and speciality No and Low alcohol (NoLo) drinks in Western contexts presents new opportunities for light/nondrinkers to “do” leisure, (re)engage with the market and construct discerning (non)drinking identities. Drawing on findings from in-depth interviews with UK-based NoLo drinkers, this paper highlights how craft NoLo consumers draw on themes of skill, taste and expertise to align themselves with the discerning (middle-class) drinker and perform or embody modes of serious leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through her films, the Galician filmmaker Margarita Ledo Andión builds a singular benchmark on the margins of a peripheral cinema per se: the Novo Cinema Galego. Her performative and experimental narratives, in line with avant-garde films of other small European cinemas, her nationalist and feminist (political) discourse, and her condition as a woman filmmaker situate her filmography on the intersection of multiple peripheries. This paper analyzes her most recent film, Nación (2020), from the perspective of cinema made by women as minor cinema and an example of "fourth cinema" as an instrument to make visible the role of women in the class struggle and the construction of Galician national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]