Class Divisions and Health Chances in Brazil

Author(s):  
José Alcides Figueiredo Santos
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Christo Sims

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. This book documents the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. It is the account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. The book shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes. It traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. It offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. The book offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.


Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

This chapter examines working-class autobiographies and oral history testimonies created in the 1970s by the ‘history from below’, oral history, and community publishing movements. It finds that most working-class autobiographers felt that class divisions had weakened and changed radically in the post-war years: they identified improvements in housing, the NHS, education, and the power of workers as key alterations. The disappearance of live-in domestic service was a particularly powerful symbol of the changes that had taken place. Though none thought class had disappeared, many thought class divides were less powerful. While some working-class autobiographers wrote that their experiences made them instinctive socialists, in fact political activism did not flow straightforwardly from experience, but was the result of political education and context. Working-class experience was highly diverse, and as this became clear to many in the community publishing movement, it led to changes in their activist practice in the 1980s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-375
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.


Social Forces ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Otero ◽  
Beate Volker ◽  
Jesper Rozer

Abstract This paper studies how social capital is divided across classes in Chile, one of the most unequal countries in the world. We analyse the extent to which upper-, middle-, and lower class individuals congregate in social networks with similar others, while following Bourdieu and expecting that in particular the networks of the higher social strata are segregated in terms of social capital. We test our argument with large-scale, representative survey data for the Chilean urban population aged 18–75 years (n = 2,517) and build an integrated indicator of people’s social class that combines measures of education, occupational class, and household income. Our regression analyses show that upper-class individuals have larger networks and access to more varied and prestigious social resources than their middle- and lower class counterparts. Interestingly, however, we found a U-shaped relationship between social class and class homogeneity, indicating that network segregation is high at the top as well as at the bottom of the class-based social strata. In contrast, the classes in the middle have more heterogeneous class networks, possibly forming an important bridge between the “edges” of the class structure. These findings demonstrate that whereas social and economic capital cumulates in higher classes, the lower classes are socially deprived next to their economic disadvantage.


1983 ◽  
pp. 62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floya Anthias ◽  
Nira Yuval-Davis
Keyword(s):  

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shalev
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magne Flemmen ◽  
Vegard Jarness ◽  
Lennart Rosenlund
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Kienscherf

This article argues that US policing ends up maintaining and reinforcing substantive intersecting racial and class divisions, precisely because of its avowed formal neutrality. The article is divided into two main sections. The first section sets up a theoretical apparatus for conceptualising the seeming contradiction between general and specific social control. This section argues that US policing has a colonial genealogy but now serves to reproduce a neo-colonial order characterised by both formal legal equality and substantive racial and class inequalities. Moreover, this section shows that the transition from a colonial to a neo-colonial order has been effected by a change in policing’s strategic focus from classical colonial pacification to liberal pacification, which combines coercion with developmentalism. Through a genealogy of US policing, the second section will demonstrate empirically how US policing’s shift towards a strategy of liberal pacification has enabled and continues to facilitate the (re)production of a neo-colonial social order. Since this genealogical section covers quite a long historical period, it will primarily draw on secondary sources. By developing a more nuanced and finely grained policing-as-pacification model that highlights both the colonial genealogy and the contemporary neo-colonial ontology of US policing, this article helps us better understand how and why formally neutral law enforcement ends up producing and reproducing racial and class divisions.


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