Exploring the issues of class through in-depth studies of housing, sport, art, music and politics in Britain, Class and Everyday Life persuasively demonstrates the pervasive influence of class on everyday life and the need to centre a radical understanding of class within emancipatory political movements. The need for a more expansive understanding of class is politically urgent. There is a disconnect between descriptive and analytical approaches to class and the politics of class and realities around how class is lived. Discourse has been shaped by top-down frameworks of analysis and measurements which have stripped the study of class of its political radicalism. This book makes the case for a sociology of class which is informed by a politics of class, based upon using the everyday as the point of enquiry. It presents a sociology of class from the bottom-up which focuses on everyday life and the point at which class is made and remade. In doing so, it advocates for an attentiveness to class and everyday life through a conjunctural analysis. Using an everyday lens, this book examines how the shifting conjunctures manifest in everyday spaces in classed ways and how such changes are negotiated, resisted and shape the working-class subject and communities. This is based upon an understanding of everyday classed experiences which identifies and challenges inequalities while also recognising value and hope. This perspective aims to offer a recognition of both the opportunities and challenges of class as a way of developing a stronger, more politicised understanding of class which takes solidarity and class community power seriously to resist inequality and develop emancipatory politics. This urgent and impassioned book will be essential reading for students, academics and activists with an interest in the lived experience of class in Britain today.

Innovative readings and blog posts show how sociology can help us understand everyday life.

The concept of everyday struggles can enliven our understanding of the lives of young people and how social class is made and remade. This book invokes a Bourdieusian spirit to think about the ways young people are pushed and pulled by the normative demands directed at them from an early age, whilst they reflexively understand that allegedly available incentives for making the ‘right’ choices and working hard – financial and familial security, social status and job satisfaction – are a declining prospect. In Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles, the figures of those classed as 'hipsters' and 'bogans' are used to analyse how representation works to form a symbolic and moral economy that produces and polices fuzzy class boundaries. Further to this, the practices of young people around DIY cultures are analysed to illustrate struggles to create a satisfying and meaningful existence while negotiating between study, work and creative passions. By thinking through different modalities of struggles, which revolve around meaning making and identity, creativity and authenticity, Threadgold brings Bourdieu’s sociological practice together with theories of affect, emotion, morals and values to broaden our understanding of how young people make choices, adapt, strategise, succeed, fail and make do. Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, of fields including: Youth Studies, Class and Inequality, Work and Careers, Subcultures, Media and Creative Industries, Social Theory and Bourdieusian Theory.

'Community' continues to be a persistent theme in political, philosophical and policy debates. The idea of community poses fundamental questions about social inclusion and exclusion, particular versus general interests, identity and belonging. As well as extensive theoretical literature in the social sciences, there is a rich body of social research aimed at exploring the nature of community, and evaluating its contribution to people's lives and well-being. Drawing on a wealth of international empirical examples and illustrations, this book reviews debates surrounding the idea of community. It examines changing patterns of community life and evaluates their importance for society and for individuals. As well as urban, rural and class-based communities, it explores other contemporary forms of community, such as social movements, communes and 'virtual' gatherings in cyberspace. Truly multidisciplinary, this book will be of interest to students of sociology, geography, political science and social policy and welfare. Grounded in a wide-ranging review of empirical research, it provides an overview of sociological debates surrounding the idea of community and relating them to the part community plays in people's everyday conceptions of identity.

This revealing book explores the processes of racialization, class and gender, and examines how these processes play out in the everyday lives of white women living in London with young children. Bridget Byrne analyzes the flexibility of racialized discourse in everyday life, whilst simultaneously arguing for a radical deconstruction of the notions of race these discourses create. Byrne focuses on the experience of white mothers and their children, as a key site in the reproduction of class, race and gender subjectivities, offering a compelling account of both the experience of motherhood and ideas of white identity. Byrne's research is unique in its approach of exploring whiteness in the context of practices of mothering. She adopts a broad perspective, and her approach provides a suggestive framework for analyzing the racialization of everyday life. The book’s multi-layered analysis shifts expertly from intimate acts to those which engage with local and national discourses in more public spaces. Reconsidering white identities through white experiences of race, White Lives encompasses many disciplines, making valuable reading for those studying sociology, anthropology, race and ethnicity, and cultural studies. Winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2007

The challenges of teaching a successful introductory sociology course today demand materials from a publisher very different from the norm. Texts that are organized the way the discipline structures itself intellectually no longer connect with the majority of student learners. This is not an issue of pandering to students or otherwise seeking the lowest common denominator. On the contrary, it is a question of again making the practice of sociological thinking meaningful, rigorous, and relevant to today’s world of undergraduates. This comparatively concise, highly visual, and affordable book offers a refreshingly new way forward to reach students, using one of the most powerful tools in a sociologist’s teaching arsenal—the familiar stuff in students’ everyday lives throughout the world: the jeans they wear to class, the coffee they drink each morning, or the phones their professors tell them to put away during lectures. A focus on consumer culture, seeing the strange in the familiar, is not only interesting for students; it is also (the authors suggest) pedagogically superior to more traditional approaches. By engaging students through their stuff, this book moves beyond teaching about sociology to helping instructors teach the practice of sociological thinking. It moves beyond describing what sociology is, so that students can practice what sociological thinking can do. This pedagogy also posits a relationship between teacher and learner that is bi-directional. Many students feel a sense of authority in various areas of consumer culture, and they often enjoy sharing their knowledge with fellow students and with their instructor. Opening up the sociology classroom to discussion of these topics validates students’ expertise on their own life-worlds. Teachers, in turn, gain insight from the goods, services, and cultural expectations that shape students’ lives. While innovative, the book has been carefully crafted to make it as useful and flexible as possible for instructors aiming to build core sociological foundations in a single semester. A map on pages ii–iii identifies core sociological concepts covered so that a traditional syllabus as well as individual lectures can easily be maintained. Theory, method, and active learning exercises in every chapter constantly encourage the sociological imagination as well as the "doing" of sociology.

This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a small English village at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing and writing the world around him, and on the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering justice from his country house Clifton Hall. Using Woolley's voluminous diaries and Clifton's magistrate records, Carolyn Steedman gives us a unique and fascinating account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending. Through Woolley and his thoughts on reading and drinking, sex, the law and social relations, she challenges traditional accounts which she argues have overstated the importance of work to the working man's understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place and society. She shows instead that, for men like Woolley, law and fiction were just as critical as work in framing everyday life.