scholarly journals Gutta på jakt1

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-203
Author(s):  
Olav Årstad Borgen ◽  
Ketil Skogen

Research among very young hunters (boys aged 15 to 21) in two semi-urban areas outside Oslo demonstrated that for some youngsters with a working-class background and working-class occupational prospects, hunting may be an arena for the reproduction of typical male working-class culture – even in areas that are not typically rural. The hunting culture that these boys are socialized into is typically informal, collective, has a certain element of physical machismo and – not least – it represents a “productivist” perspective on humanity’s relationship to nature and entails a mastery of “tools” like guns, GPS-units and even dogs. These cultural traits correspond to core elements in a typical working-class culture, such as it has been described in numerous studies. However, economic and social change has eroded the material basis for this culture, and its reproduction is now partly relegated to the sphere of leisure. Importantly, the young informants expressed a deep admiration for their fathers and other male relatives (who were hunters) and their lifestyle, and exposed a strong sense of continuity across generations, unlike the popular notions of classless, reflexive identity projects in the so-called post-industrial era.

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Deborah M. Warnock

Through an analysis of eight collections of autoethnographic essays written by working-class academics and published over the span of thirty-two years, I identify stable themes and emergent patterns in lived experiences. Some broad and stable themes include a sense of alienation, lack of cultural capital, encountering stereotypes and microaggressions, experiencing survivor guilt and the impostor syndrome, and struggling to pass in a middle-class culture that values ego and networking. Two new and troubling patterns are crippling amounts of student debt and the increased exploitation of adjunct labor. I emphasize the importance of considering social class background as a form of diversity in academia and urge continued research on the experiences of working-class academics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda van de Kamp

Abstract The histories of former industrial urban areas offer a contested and ambiguous framework for urban redevelopment. Whilst the newly emerged creative industries are framed in continuity with an industrial past, cultural heritage is being mobilized by different actors to authenticate or to contest the redevelopment of working-class neighbourhoods. This article explores the ongoing transformation of post-industrial Amsterdam North, an area that has become subject to active urban redevelopment since the 2000s. Based on ethnographic material, this study examines how 'heritage as development' ‐ based on cosmopolitan ideals of social inclusion ‐ reinforces a process of heritagization grounded on cultural rights that involves working-class memories of solidarity and dissent. I argue that the Amsterdam case complicates dualist interpretations of gentrification and heritagization as processes of categorizing individuals as 'winners' and 'losers'. Heritage practices tend to reinforce cultural differences that produce feelings of exclusion rather than inclusion, but also offer pathways for emancipation and a re-appropriation of local heritage for long-term working-class residents.


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 827-843 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Preece

This article draws on repeated, biographical interviews with 18 households to explore how people construct a sense of belonging in two post-industrial neighbourhoods in the ‘ordinary’ urban areas of Grimsby and Sheffield, UK. It argues that experiences of low-paid, precarious work undermine the historic role that employment has played in identity construction for many individuals, and that places perform a crucial function in anchoring people’s lives and identities. Three active processes in the generation of belonging are elaborated. Through identification, dis-identification and the micro-differentiation of space, people constructed places in order to belong with others ‘like them’. Residents also internalised the symbolic logics of places through their daily movement, territorialising space as they learned how to be in particular environments. Finally, places were temporally situated within relational biographies and experienced in relation to past and imagined futures. Places fulfilled an important psycho-social function, anchoring people’s identities and generating a sense that they belonged.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujata Patel

AbstractThis paper analyzes the work of two Indian sociologists who defined the contours of sociology in India in the immediate post-independence decades, M. N. Srinivas and A. R. Desai. It argues that their scholarship can be linked to sociology’s legacy as anthropology in India and its embeddedness in the episteme of colonial modernity. It contends that Srinivas’s methodology, the field view, attempted to make a break with earlier methods, such as book view. However, his three concepts, that of dominant caste, Sanskritization and Westernization were perceived as civilizational attributes and which had organized social change in India. A. R. Desai, a Marxist historical sociologist, made an incisive critique of capitalist exploitation and elaborated the material conditions that led to peasant and working-class revolts. However, his sociology could not unravel the caste-class linkages that organized the Indian ‘social’ which was embedded in Indian nationalism. This paper suggests that a definitive understanding of modernity emerges in Indian sociology in the late 70s when the feminist, dalit and tribal movements interrogated the material basis of contemporary India’s developmentalism and its capitalist and exploitative character.


Author(s):  
Stefan Collini

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592098729
Author(s):  
Amalia Z. Dache ◽  
Keon M. McGuire

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.


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