About the Book
The Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies is a timely volume that provides an overview of this interdisciplinary field that emerged in the 1990s in the context of deindustrialization, the rise of the service economy, and economic and cultural globalization. The Handbook brings together scholars, teachers, activists, and organizers from across three continents to focus on the study of working-class peoples, cultures, and politics in all their complexity and diversity.
The Handbook maps the current state of the field and presents a visionary agenda for future research by mingling the voices and perspectives of founding and emerging scholars. In addition to a framing Introduction and Conclusion written by the co-editors, the volume is divided into six sections: Methods and principles of research in working-class studies; Class and education; Work and community; Working-class cultures; Representations; and Activism and collective action. Each of the six sections opens with an overview that synthesizes research in the area and briefly summarizes each of the chapters in the section. Throughout the volume, contributors from various disciplines explore the ways in which experiences and understandings of class have shifted rapidly as a result of economic and cultural globalization, social and political changes, and global financial crises of the past two decades.
Written in a clear and accessible style, the Handbook is a comprehensive interdisciplinary anthology for this young but maturing field, foregrounding transnational and intersectional perspectives on working-class people and issues and focusing on teaching and activism in addition to scholarly research. It is a valuable resource for activists, as well as working-class studies researchers and teachers across the social sciences, arts, and humanities, and it can also be used as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses.
Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: Methods and Principles of Research in Working-Class Studies Section Introduction: Methods and Principles of Research in Working-Class Studies 1. Class Analysis from the Inside: Scholarly Personal Narrative as a Signature Genre of Working-Class Studies 2. Reconceiving Class in Contemporary Working-Class Studies 3. Mediating Stories of Class Borders: First Generation College Students, Digital Storytelling, and Social Class 4. The ‘How to’ of Working-Class Studies: Selves, Stories, and Working Across Media Part II: Class and Education Section Introduction: Class and Education 5. Class Beyond the Classroom: Supporting Working-Class and First-Generation Students, Faculty, and Staff 6. Working Class Student Experiences: Towards a Social Class-Sensitive Pedagogy for K-12 Schools, Teachers, and Teacher Educators 7. The Pedagogy of Class: Teaching Working-Class Life and Culture in the Academy 8. Being Working Class in the English Classroom 9. Getting Schooled: Working-Class Students in Higher Education 10. Learning Our Place: Social Reproduction in K-12 Schooling Part III: Work and Community Section Introduction: Work and Community 11. Deindustrialization and Its Consequences 12. Economic Dislocation and Trauma 13. Working-Class Studies, Oral History and Industrial Illness 14. Precarity’s Affects: The Trauma of Deindustrialization 15. Feeling, Re-imagined in Common: Working with Social Haunting in the English Coalfields Part IV: Working-Class Cultures Section Introduction: Working-Class Cultures 16. There Is a Genuine Working-Class Culture 17. Class, Culture, and Inequality 18. Post-Traumatic Living: Precarious Employment and Learned Helplessness in the Working Class 19. Activist Class Cultures 20. The Australian Working Class in Popular Culture Part V: Representations Section Introduction: Representations 21. Writing Dubai: Indian Labour Migrants and Taxi Topographies 22. The Cinema of the Precariat 23. The ‘Body of Labor’ in U.S. Postwar Documentary Photography: A Working-Class Studies Perspective 24. Mapping Working-Class Art 25. 'Things that are left out': Working-Class Writing and the Idea of Literature 26. Lit-Grit: The Gritty and the Grim in Working-Class Cultural Production 27. Mass Incarceration, Prison Labor, Prison Writing 28. Marketing Millennial Women: Embodied Class Performativity on American Television Part VI: Activism and Collective Action Section Introduction: Activism and Collective Action 29. From Stigma to Solution: Centering the Community College through Activism in the Classroom and the Community 30. Border Crossing with Day Laborers and Affordable Housing Activists 31. Finding Class in Food Justice Efforts 32. The Mutual Determination of Class and Race in the United States: History and Current Implications 33. Documenting Lumbee Working-Class History: A Service-Learning Approach 34. Precarious Workers and Social Mobilization in Portuguese Call Centre Assembly Lines 35. Post-Fordist Affect: Unions, the Labor Movement, and the Weight of History Conclusion
About the Author :
Michele Fazio is Professor of English and Coordinator of Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, US.
Christie Launius is Associate Professor and Head of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department at Kansas State University, US.
Tim Strangleman is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, SSPSSR, at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
Review :
"This book is far-reaching in its purview. Ranging from a welcome account of working-class studies over the past 25 years to in-depth treatments of working people’s lives, communities, cultures, struggles, oppressions and activism in different places and at different times, it highlights the inherently multi-disciplinary nature of this field of research. Collectively and individually, the contributions focus attention on continuities and changes, intersections and conflicts at work and at play, through words, deeds and representations. At this time of global crisis, the book provides a firm foundation for reflection and for intellectual and political engagement with the lives of those on the labour front lines in the past, present and future."
- Lucy Taksa, Professor and Director, Centre for Workforce Futures, Macquarie Business School
"The relatively young field of Working-Class Studies announces its growing maturity and importance in this wide-ranging collection. Offering contributions from leaders in the field and from fresh new voices, this handbook crosses borders of race, gender, and nation in showing how class and work matter in popular culture, workplaces, schools, prisons, literature, and beyond. Attentive to methodologies and lived experiences it will ground a new generation of scholarship."
- David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas
