In the 21st century hardly any aspects of human existence are left unexplored by postmodern theories and discourses of subjectivity and individuality, of hybridity and identity, of race, gender and ethnicity. Conspicuous, however, among these critical inquiries is the relatively little attention devoted to the category of class. This absence is particularly alarming at a time when neo-liberalism and post- capitalism feed on cultural fragmentation and ideological relativism. The contributions in Considering Class: Essays on the Discourse of the American Dream address the (dys)functional position of class in American socio-political and cultural reality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. While it is open to debate whether class is more resistant to being relativized than other categories, there is increasing recognition that class remains a critical category with the potential to transcend the rifts and divisions that run along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, and with the potential to reconfigure the current American political landscape.

Considering Class: Theory, Culture and Media in the 21st Century offers the reader international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the importance of class analysis in the 21st century. Political economists, sociologists, educationalists, ethnographers, cultural and media analysts combine to provide a multi-dimensional account of current class dynamics. The crisis consists precisely in the gap between the objective reality and efficacy of class forces shaping international politics and the relative paucity of class-consciousness at a popular level and appreciation of class as an explanatory optic at a theoretical level. This important book shows why the process of reconstructing class consciousness must also take place on the ground of cultural and subjective formation where everyday values, habits and media practices are in play. Contributors are: Anita Biressi, Joseph Choonara, Maurizio Donato, Danny Dorling, Mark Gibson, Craig Haslop, Dave Hill, Peter Jakobsson, Marina Kabat, Holly Lewis, Catherine Lumby, Lisa Mckenzie, Tony Moore, Adrian Murray, Deirdre O’Neill, Jonathan Pratschke, Michael Seltzer, Eduardo Sartelli, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Roberto Taddeo, Mike Wayne, Milly Williamson, Ferruh Yılmaz.

Race/Gender/Class/Media considers diversity in the mass media in three main settings: Audiences, Content, and Production. It brings together 53 readings—most are newly commissioned for this edition—by scholars representing a variety of social science and humanities disciplines. Together, these readings provide a multifaceted and often intersectional look at how race, gender, and class relate to the creation and use of media texts as well as the media texts themselves. Designed to be flexible in the classroom, the book begins with a detailed introduction to key concepts and presents a contextualizing introduction to each of the three main sections. Each reading contains multiple It’s Your Turn activities to foster student engagement and which can serve as the basis for assignments. The book offers a list of resources—books, articles, films, and websites—that are of value to students and instructors. Several alternate Tables of Contents are provided as options for reorganizing the material and maximizing the flexibility of the readings: by site of struggle (gender, race, class), by medium (television, print, digital, etc.), and by arena (journalism, entertainment). This volume is an essential introduction to interdisciplinary studies of gender, race, and class across mass media.

This book presents the proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Research in Computing, Information, Communication and Applications, ERCICA 2022. The conference provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, professional engineers and scientists, educators, and technologists to discuss, debate, and promote research and technology in the upcoming areas of computing, information, communication, and their applications. The book discusses these emerging research areas, providing a valuable resource for researchers and practicing engineers alike.

In an era in which class divisions are becoming starker than ever, some individuals are choosing to marry across class. The Power of the Past traces the lives of a subset of these individuals - highly-educated adults who married a partner raised in a class different from their own, primarily between those from blue- and white-color backgrounds. Drawing upon detailed interviews with spouses who revealed the inner workings of their marriages, Jessi Streib shows that crossing class lines is not easy, and that even though these couples shared bank accounts, mortgages, children, and friends, each spouse was still shaped by the class of their past, and consequently, so was their marriage. Streib reveals what was rarely apparent to the husbands and wives she interviewed. The class of their past did not only matter in determining the amount of money they had as children or what job their parents went off to each morning; It also mattered in more subtle ways, by systematically shaping their ideas of how to go about their daily lives. Upwardly mobile spouses who grew up in blue-collar families learned to take a laissez-faire approach to the world around them: they preferred to go with the flow, make the most of the moment, and avoid self-imposed constraints. Their spouses, who grew up in professional white-collar families, however, wanted to manage the world around them: they organized, planned, monitored, and oversaw. Living with a spouse who was born into a different class means navigating these differences - differences that appeared across nearly every aspect of their lives, from how they manage their finances, to how they manage their time - both at home and on vacation - to ideas about how their children should be raised. The Power of the Past illustrates that when individuals are raised in different classes, merged lives do not lead to merged ideas about how to lead those lives. Individuals can come together across class lines, but their enduring class characteristics cannot be left behind.