tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/social-class-31524/articlesSocial class – The Conversation2024-02-26T13:09:06Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2233992024-02-26T13:09:06Z2024-02-26T13:09:06ZRelationship anarchy is about creating bonds that suit people, not social conventions<p>By its very nature, friendship is <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/anarchy">anarchic</a>: it has few rules and is not regulated by the government. Our friendships are usually egalitarian, flexible and non-exclusive. We treat our friends as individuals and care about their interests. We support them and don’t tell them what to do; our friendships fit around, rather than govern, our lives. </p>
<p>But interestingly, friendship is the exception when it comes to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/people-who-prioritize-friendship-over-romance/616779/">intimacy</a>. Few of us want anarchic love lives, or to treat our children as equals. We gravitate instead towards more rigid, hierarchical, structured forms of intimacy in these relationships. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/i-have-4-partners-and-several-comet-romances-this-is-what-its-like-to-be-a-relationship-anarchist_uk_64ba8dcfe4b093f07cb48251">Relationship anarchists</a> do not hold with these ideas. They argue we must try harder to relate as equals, reject hierarchy between relationships and accept that intimate life can take many forms. </p>
<p>Critics would suggest relationship anarchy is just a lifestyle – an attempt to evade commitment. But the concept is best understood as political, and a development of the core themes of anarchist thinking. This reflects the values and practices involved, and reminds us that the flourishing of intimacy might require radical change. </p>
<p>These core themes include rejecting the idea that there should be one dominant form of authority – like a president, boss or patriarch; wariness of social class or status which arbitrarily privileges some people other others; and a deep respect for the idea that individuals should be able to govern their own lives and support each other. Applied to intimate relationships, these themes define relationship anarchy. </p>
<p>But political anarchism is not above violence and disorder. As someone whose work explores the philosophy of love, sex and relationships – and different approaches to intimacy – I view it as an attitude towards our social predicament where people try to relate as equals and reject unnecessary constraints. </p>
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<h2>Equals without constraints</h2>
<p>Relationship anarchists critique society and imagine alternatives. Their main target is the idea that there are different kinds of relationships and some are more important than others.</p>
<p>They reject how relationships appear in the media; good relationships needn’t last forever, be exclusive, between two people, domestic, involve romantic love or practical entanglement. This critical eye also extends to our attitudes towards children, animals and the environment. </p>
<p>Relationship anarchy’s aversion to hierarchy separates it from <a href="https://www.womenshealthmag.com/relationships/a46109633/what-is-a-swinger/">swinging</a> or forms of <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/japp.12240">polyamory</a> which distinguish between sex and romance, <a href="https://www.morethantwo.com/polyconfigurations.html">“primary” and “secondary” partners</a>, or which think the government should privilege some relationships through marriage law. </p>
<p>The practical heart of relationship anarchy is the idea that we design relationships to suit us, not mirror social expectations. Do we want to share a home? Is sexual intimacy important? If so, what kind exactly? This process also involves creating a framework to guide our broader intimate life. How will we choose together? How and when can we revise our framework? What about disagreements?</p>
<p>Relationship anarchists will disagree about the content of these frameworks. Can two relationship anarchists agree to be romantically exclusive, for example, set rules for each other, or decide to never revise their framework? Should they retain, repurpose or reject common labels such as “partner”?</p>
<p>My own view is that agreements are acceptable if they support our <a href="https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=romantic-agency-loving-well-in-modern-life--9781509551521">ability to be intimate</a>, but we should embrace “minimal non-monogamy” and remain open to the possibility our desires will change. </p>
<h2>Community and self-development</h2>
<p>Community is central to relationship anarchy. From queer feminist Andie Nordgren’s “<a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andie-nordgren-the-short-instructional-manifesto-for-relationship-anarchy">short instructional manifesto</a>” – which jumpstarted relationship anarchy – to <a href="https://ia803109.us.archive.org/14/items/rad2019zine/RAD%202019%20Zine%20for%20online%20reading.pdf">zines</a> like Communities Not Couples, the <a href="https://violetbeau00.medium.com/relationship-anarchy-smorgasbord-practical-applications-78ad8d911b0b">relationship “smorgasbord”</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/decolonizing.love/?hl=en">social media influencers</a>, relationship anarchists educate each other and share resources. </p>
<p>They also embrace <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2722-mutual-aid">supporting each other</a> when social institutions are inadequate. This might involve providing money, establishing accessible community spaces, sourcing contraception and caregiving.</p>
<p>Relationship anarchy requires self-development. Since we are shaped by our social context, we often lack the skills needed to overhaul our relationships, whether that’s communicating effectively or managing emotions such as jealousy and insecurity.</p>
<p>Relationship anarchists embrace the idea that we cannot behave now in ways that would be <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Prefigurative+Politics:+Building+Tomorrow+Today-p-9781509535910">unacceptable in our ideal society</a>. We cannot be callous or dishonest in trying to bring about open and equal relationships. Instead, trying to embody our desired changes in our actions helps us develop the skills needed to ensure these changes are sustainable. </p>
<p>Talk of relationship anarchy often prompts objections. Liberals think government involvement in private life prevents harm, and that common social norms and ideals of relationships prevent anxiety. A relationship anarchist would ask us to consider the real source of these worries. </p>
<p>We are well able to harm each other within existing government frameworks: police, immigration, social and health services often harm people in unconventional relationships through policies that <a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/21/orphaned-by-decree-italy-same-sex-parents-react-losing-rights">do not recognise the family life of non-heterosexual people</a>. Or which make it hard for immigrant families to be together, or deny visitation rights to unmarried people, for example.</p>
<p>Community networks of care are active in resisting and repairing these harms, and their efforts are evidence that we can successfully oversee our own needs when it comes to intimacy. </p>
<p>Similarly, a more active approach to our relationships, where we reflect on our needs and desires, set boundaries and communicate, <a href="https://scribepublications.co.uk/books-authors/books/polysecure-9781914484957">builds confidence and decreases anxiety</a>. A realistic and flexible attitude towards intimacy makes it harder to trip on the <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2019/09/why-love-ends/">gap between ideals and reality</a>.</p>
<p>Realism, not revolution, is at the heart of relationship anarchy. Social criticism can be radical – ranging from love and domesticity to childcare, companionship and co-operation – but efforts to remould our relationships should be done with care. We can both expose social contradictions and oppressive laws and accept common ground with other views and initiatives.</p>
<p>Most of all, we should be wary of attempts to cast relationship anarchy as a fad or lifestyle. It is political – a commitment to nurture agency when it comes to intimacy. Like conversation, relationship anarchy is a process; it can be messy, loud, and unpredictable, but it can change us entirely.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223399/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luke Brunning does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Relationship anarchists argue that we should relate to one another as equals and accept that intimacy can take many forms.Luke Brunning, Lecturer in Applied Ethics, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2134902023-10-11T15:15:40Z2023-10-11T15:15:40ZWhy ‘toxic masculinity’ isn’t a useful term for understanding all of the ways to be a man<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551355/original/file-20231002-17-jilxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C8%2C5812%2C3874&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Masculinity is complex, diverse and can be expressed in multiple ways.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/view-back-lonely-standing-man-high-1469768498">yanik88/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There seem to be as many interpretations of what “<a href="https://theconversation.com/toxic-masculinity-what-does-it-mean-where-did-it-come-from-and-is-the-term-useful-or-harmful-189298#:%7E:text=The%20phrase%20emphasises%20the%20worst,%22toxic%22%20for%20two%20reasons.">toxic masculinity</a>” means as there are uses of the term.</p>
<p>Some believe it’s a way to criticise what they see as specific negative behaviour and attitudes often associated with men. Others, such as broadcaster Piers Morgan, claim that media interest in toxic masculinity is part of a “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wake-up-why-the-world-has-gone-nuts-piers-morgan?variant=33046214377506">woke culture</a>” that aims to emasculate men. Others believe toxic masculinity is a fundamental part of <a href="https://oneworld-publications.com/work/boys-will-be-boys/">manhood</a>. </p>
<p>My <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385231172121#bibr26-00380385231172121">research</a> into working-class young men in south Wales shows how masculinity is changing. Some men remain hostile to the notion of toxic masculinity and see the term as a vehicle for shaming men. And some are caught in a conflict between changing ideas of masculinity and traditional, unhealthy expressions of manhood. This is further complicated by the term itself.</p>
<p>In its simplest sense, toxic masculinity refers to an overemphasis or exaggerated expression of characteristics <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Toxic_Masculinity.html?id=9FzBDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">commonly associated</a> with masculinity. These include traits such as competition, self-reliance and being stoic, which produce behaviours such as risk-taking, fear of showing weakness, and an inability to discuss emotions. These have negative implications for both men and women. </p>
<p>For example, a rejection of weakness and vulnerability may prevent some men from <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Dying-to-be-Men-Psychosocial-Environmental-and-Biobehavioral-Directions/Courtenay/p/book/9780415878760#:%7E:text=Description,In%20this%20book%2C%20Dr.">discussing issues</a> such as mental health. Similarly, an inability to express emotion may expose itself through frustration, anger and acts of physical violence. </p>
<p>But masculine traits such as being stoic can equally be valuable in some circumstances, such as emergencies and making lifesaving decisions. In essence, masculinity is complex, diverse and can be expressed in multiple ways.</p>
<h2>More than one type of masculinity</h2>
<p>However, masculinity that involves courage, toughness and physical strength has <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3149/jms.0703.295">historically</a> been held in high regard by society. </p>
<p>Masculinity is socially, historically, culturally and individually determined, and subject to change. It can be influenced by a person’s status, power, place, social class and ethnicity. So, a person’s differing circumstances establish or enable different expressions of masculinity. </p>
<p>For example, traditionally high rates of manual employment in heavy industries and family relationships helped establish the gender roles of the male breadwinner and female homemaker. This reinforced masculine traits such as toughness and stoicism in men.</p>
<p>In recent decades though, the way people in western countries work has changed a lot. Manual jobs have <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-10792-4_6">decreased</a> while service sector work has increased. These alterations have contributed to the increase in <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/introducing-gender-and-womens-studies-9781352009903/#:%7E:text=With%20fully%20revised%20chapters%20written,examples%20and%20questions%20to%20consider.">the number of women</a> working, and their wages have became an <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Redundant+Masculinities%3F%3A+Employment+Change+and+White+Working+Class+Youth-p-9781405105866">important part</a> of household incomes.</p>
<p>Movements like <a href="https://metoomvmt.org">#MeToo</a> and brands like Gillette and its We Believe: The Best Men Can Be advert have led to further <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/15/gillette-metoo-ad-on-toxic-masculinity-cuts-deep-with-mens-rights-activists">examination</a> of masculinity. They have challenged negative expressions of masculinity, encouraging men to change their behaviour and instead adopt a <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442232921/Masculinities-in-the-Making-From-the-Local-to-the-Global">more positive</a> version of masculinity. </p>
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<p>Against this backdrop, we urgently need to reassess what the current research tells us about men and masculinity.</p>
<h2>Men are changing</h2>
<p>Some <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Inclusive-Masculinity-The-Changing-Nature-of-Masculinities/Anderson/p/book/9780415893909">studies</a> suggest that men are changing their behaviour as society and the economy change. For example, studies of white, middle-class men who attend university have found that they are more likely to express their emotions verbally and physically.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-78819-7">critics</a> of that idea say that such young men can transgress typical notions of masculinity because of their higher social status.</p>
<p>A new wave of qualitative research has shown that some <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Young-Working-Class-Men-in-Transition/Roberts/p/book/9780367473723">working-class</a> young men are changing their behaviour. They are more open about their emotions, admit to feeling vulnerable and have more egalitarian views on housework. However, they still sometimes use sexist and homophobic language. </p>
<p>My recent <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385231172121#bibr26-00380385231172121">study</a> is part of a growing criticism of how masculinity is defined and talked about. I carried out my research at a youth centre and focused on a group of working-class young men aged between 12 and 21. I talked to the young men about their school experiences, work ambitions and looked at their behaviour. </p>
<p>The study was based in the Gwent valleys, a former coal mining community. It is a place known for its traditional ideas of masculinity, such as being strong and tough. But also I found that these young men showed softer sides of masculinity, such as empathy, compassion and sensitivity.</p>
<p>These changes and softer sides of masculinity coexisted with behaviours often linked with negative expressions of masculinity, such as violence and crime. I describe this as “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385231172121#bibr26-00380385231172121">amalgamated masculinities</a>”.</p>
<p>My findings strengthen the idea that positive changes in masculinity are happening socially. </p>
<h2>Changing the narrative</h2>
<p>We must be aware of the harm caused by exaggerated masculine traits but language like “toxic masculinity” can be unhelpful. We should focus on promoting the benefits of positive expressions of manhood, such as emotional openness and empathy. </p>
<p>We should also do more work to try to understand why positive changes in masculinity are happening. Once we understand this, we can think about how to encourage these positive changes to make them more common in society. This could help to make masculinity better for everyone.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213490/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Gater works for Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data. He receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. </span></em></p>A new wave of research shows how working-class young men are changing their behaviour. But some remain hostile to the term “toxic masculinity” and see it as a vehicle for shaming men.Richard Gater, Postdoctoral research fellow at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2144502023-10-09T12:22:45Z2023-10-09T12:22:45ZToday’s white working-class young men who turn to racist violence are part of a long, sad American history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552186/original/file-20231004-19-gkf42y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=844%2C152%2C5146%2C3835&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dressed in orange prison garb, Payton Gendron is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 10 Black people in Buffalo, N.Y. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/payton-gendron-is-escorted-back-into-the-courtroom-by-news-photo/1247183130?adppopup=true">Derek Gee/Buffalo News/Pool via Xinhua</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent years, the United States has seen <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-mass-shootings-motivated-by-hate-2023-08-28/">a surge of white supremacist mass shootings against racial minorities</a>. While not always the case, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/03/why-so-many-mass-shooters-young-angry-men/">mass shooters tend to be young white men</a>. </p>
<p>Some <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/masculinity-overdue-reckoning-mass-shootings-child-advocates-say-rcna33597">journalists</a> and <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/567070c969a91a786be045cb/t/5773edb415d5dbbfbeb44621/1467215284777/Suicide+by+Mass+Murders.pdf">researchers</a> have argued that class and ideals of white masculinity are partly to blame. </p>
<p>This argument is not surprising. Throughout U.S. history, white men’s anxieties over their manhood and social class help explain many <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-24/black-americans-more-likely-to-be-mass-shooting-victims">violent attacks on Black people</a>, whom the perpetrators blame for denying them their rightful privileges. </p>
<p>Such was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/878828088/5-years-after-charleston-church-massacre-what-have-we-learned">the case with Dylann Roof</a>, a then 22-year-old white supremacist who was convicted and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/10/11/1128137852/dylann-roof-supreme-court-death-sentence-appeal">sentenced to death</a> in the 2015 deaths of nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.</p>
<p>In another case involving <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/buffalo-supermarket-gunman-to-be-sentenced-to-life-for-racist-attack-killing-10">a racist mass shooting</a>, Payton Gendron, a white supremacist who believed a slew of racist conspiracy theories he discovered online, was sentenced to life in prison after his convictions on the 2022 murders of 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.</p>
<p>One such unfounded conspiracy that then 18-year-old Gendron frequently cited was the “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1099034094/what-is-the-great-replacement-theory">great replacement theory</a>,” the false idea that a group is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence. Such ideas reflect white supremacist beliefs, but they also reveal deep insecurities about white men’s social status in America.</p>
<p>It’s my belief as <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/history/faculty/profile.html?id=ckohlha1">a scholar</a> of U.S. history, labor, ethnicity and masculinity that Roof, Gendron and other recent mass shooters in racist attacks share similar insecurities with their historical predecessors. </p>
<p>Though finding solutions is not an easy task, recognizing the link between white anxiety and racial violence is a first step in addressing the problem. </p>
<h2>Class, masculinity and violence</h2>
<p>In modern-day society, young men face many hurdles to traditional avenues of masculine success. It’s more difficult than ever for young people to <a href="https://archive.curbed.com/2018/4/10/17219786/buying-a-house-mortgage-government-gi-bill">purchase a home</a>, <a href="https://money.com/harder-for-millennials-get-good-job/">secure a high-paying job</a> or <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/marriage-divorce-rates.html#:%7E:text=Both%20the%20marriage%20and%20divorce,per%201%2C000%20women%20in%202011.">find a marriage partner</a>. These difficulties result in <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/09/29/gen-z-faces-financial-challenges-stress-anxiety-and-an-uncertain-future/?sh=1e7af33e4f14">a great degree of anxiety among young people</a> who struggle to achieve the security of their parents’ generation. </p>
<p>Many young men become <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/lost-boys-violent-narcissism-angry-young-men/672886/">particularly resentful</a> of these conditions. Male socioeconomic power is traditionally linked with <a href="https://fee.org/articles/why-patriarchy-once-made-economic-sense/">patriarchal authority</a>, a position to which many white men may feel they are entitled. </p>
<p>Throughout American history, white manhood was often defined “through the subjugation of racialized and gendered others,” according to historian <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854945/murder-at-the-sleepy-lagoon/">Eduardo Obregón Pagán</a>. But when they felt their superiority was threatened, white men acted against the supposed enemies whom they felt blocked them from enjoying these benefits of their white male privilege. </p>
<h2>The 1863 New York City draft riots</h2>
<p>During the Civil War, northern states like New York <a href="https://www.historynet.com/draft-riots-civil-war/">instituted a lottery draft</a> of fighting-age white men. At the time, Black men were exempted from the draft because <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford">they were not considered U.S. citizens</a>. </p>
<p>The draft infuriated the white working-class population of New York in part because rich white men could hire a substitute or pay $300 to secure an exemption to the draft. This sum was roughly the average yearly salary of an American worker.</p>
<p>In response, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/draft-riots">thousands of white workers rioted</a> between July 13 and July 16, killing over 100 people. They concentrated their attacks on African Americans, whom they beat, tortured and killed. Most egregiously, rioters burned down the <a href="https://maap.columbia.edu/place/35.html#:%7E:text=The%20orphanage%20is%20remembered%20best,City%20draft%20riots%20of%201863.">Colored Orphanage Asylum</a>, which sheltered over 200 Black children.</p>
<p>In one particular display of gendered symbolism, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc=#:%7E:text=After%20the%20mob%20pulled%20Franklin%27s%20body%20from%20the%20lamppost%2C%20a%20sixteen%2Dyear%2Dold%20Irish%20man%2C%20Patrick%20Butler%2C%20dragged%20the%20body%20through%20the%20streets%20by%20its%20genitals">a 16-year-old white youth</a> dragged a Black corpse through the street by his genitals.</p>
<p>The rioters’ anger over their subordinate social class largely drove their attacks against Black men who were an easier target than the real cause of the draft inequalities – elite white men and government agents.</p>
<h2>The 1919 Chicago race riot</h2>
<p>During the turn of the 20th century, the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration">Great Migration</a> saw many southern Black people move from the rural South to northern cities like Chicago. As waves of Black people moved into the city, white Chicagoans on the city’s South Side began <a href="https://interactive.wttw.com/playlist/2019/07/26/chicago-1919-race-riot">bombing campaigns</a> against Black-owned homes to keep them out of white neighborhoods. </p>
<p>In July 1919, <a href="https://time.com/5636039/chicago-race-riots-art-project/">a Black teenager</a> inadvertently drifted into what was considered the white section of Lake Michigan. Angry white people threw rocks at him and he eventually drowned.
The incident sparked the infamous <a href="https://chicagoraceriot.org/">Chicago race riot</a>, which left 38 people dead, most of whom were Black. </p>
<p>The main perpetrators of riot violence were organized white youth gangs operating under the moniker of “<a href="https://www.americanhistoryusa.com/prelude-to-riot-irish-athletic-clubs-and-black-belt-1919/">athletic clubs</a>,” a phenomenon that is the primary focus of <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/colin-kohlhaas-1002757">my own research</a>. While these clubs participated in athletic competitions, they were, in effect, violent gangs who targeted Black men. </p>
<p>These gangs prowled the streets in automobiles and attacked African Americans, burned black homes and businesses, and kept the fires of racial violence inflamed for days. They blamed Black men <a href="https://chicagoraceriot.org/history/great-migration/">for invading their communities</a>.</p>
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<img alt="A Black man who is bleeding and laying on a sidewalk is pelted with rocks by two white men." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552176/original/file-20231004-19-57nbim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">White attackers throw rocks at a Black man during the Chicago race riots in 1919.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/whites-stone-an-african-american-man-who-later-died-of-his-news-photo/86288988?adppopup=true">Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many of the youth gang members were the <a href="http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/943.html">sons of Chicago packinghouse workers</a> and did not want to endure the menial wage work of their parents. Unable to secure social and financial success through legitimate means, such youths turned to crime and violence to make money and <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691223308/vampires-dragons-and-egyptian-kings">build a sense of masculine identity</a>. </p>
<p>Instead of traditional notions of manhood centered on the family, they internalized what historians call “<a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p081545">rough masculinity</a>,” which prioritized fighting and physical toughness. </p>
<h2>The 1943 Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots</h2>
<p>During World War II, the U.S government <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/rationing">rationed many foods and materials</a> for the war effort. One such item was fabric, which forced clothing designers to fashion clothes using less material. </p>
<p>Most Americans embraced wartime rations, viewing sacrifice as their patriotic duty. But in communities on the West Coast, young Mexican American men flaunted flamboyant “<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/brief-history-zoot-suit-180958507/">zoot suits</a>.” Zoot suits were brightly colored and distinctly flashy, but more importantly, they required a large amount of fabric. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Two men show where their clothes had been sashed by angry white servicemen." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552178/original/file-20231004-27-z1eyx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two Latino youths had their clothes slashed by angry white servicemen during the Zoot Suit Riots on Jun. 10, 1943, in Los Angeles, Calif.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/noe-vasquez-and-joe-vasquez-latino-youths-who-reported-to-news-photo/85374830?adppopup=true">Anthony Potter Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>White Americans viewed the zoot suits as a mockery of the war effort. On June 3, 1943, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/zoot-suit-riots">a series of riots broke out</a> in Los Angeles as white servicemen attacked young Mexican Americans sporting zoot suits. </p>
<p>Demonstrating their fury over the clothing, servicemen stripped the suits off many victims and burned them. Over the course of three days, over 150 Latino men were injured, but the police did not arrest a single white serviceman. </p>
<p>In many ways, the zoot suiters challenged the masculinity of the servicemen. On one hand, the white men felt affronted by the Mexican Americans’ audacity to scoff at their manly sacrifice to go to war. On the other hand, by attacking the zoot suiters and ripping off their clothes, the servicemen effectively <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/zoot-suit-riots-and-wartime-los-angeles">denied their claims to manhood</a>. </p>
<p>There are many parallels between racial violence of the past and mass shootings of today. Understanding anxieties about class and masculinity can perhaps go a long way to addressing such concerns in a new generation of young white men.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214450/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colin Kohlhaas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Throughout US history, racist attacks against racial minorities were committed by white men grappling with their masculinity and social status.Colin Kohlhaas, Doctoral Candidate, History, Binghamton University, State University of New YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2110162023-09-05T12:29:10Z2023-09-05T12:29:10ZHow video games like ‘Starfield’ are creating a new generation of classical music fans<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546018/original/file-20230901-25-u3v8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C3199%2C2122&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The London Symphony Orchestra has performed music from video games like 'Starfield' and 'The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.' </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/niklas-benjamin-hoffmann-winner-of-the-donatella-flick-lso-news-photo/623978072?adppopup=true">Tristan Fewings/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“<a href="https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield">Starfield</a>” is one of the most anticipated video games in recent history. </p>
<p>The game, which was released on Sept. 6, 2023, allows players to build their own character and spacecraft, travel to any one of a thousand or more planets and follow multiple story arcs.</p>
<p>The soundtrack is equally epic, with audio director Mark Lampert describing the game’s music as a “companion to the player,” with a “sense of scale” that “had to be totally readjusted,” in a <a href="https://youtu.be/fedc6ZzfU8I?si=Ui0UHlf-vnrKhXlX">recent interview</a> about Starfield’s sound design.</p>
<p>Soundtracks for outer space have appeared in many films – “Star Wars,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Interstellar,” to name a few.</p>
<p>But the interactive music of “Starfield” by composer Inon Zur does something different: Utilizing a palette of musical language that cultivates a contemplative soundscape, it launches the listener into the vastness of space while remaining curious, innocent and restrained. If you close your eyes, you can imagine it being performed in the concert hall.</p>
<p>That’s exactly what happened prior to the game’s release, when the London Symphony Orchestra <a href="https://youtu.be/IaskxKfeFno">performed the “Starfield Suite</a>” before a sold-out audience at the Alexandra Palace Theatre, one of the world’s most prestigious concert halls.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jaaronhardwick.com/">As a conductor, musician and educator</a>, I’m excited about games like “Starfield” because they’re drawing people to symphonic music like never before.</p>
<h2>Classical music becomes exclusive</h2>
<p>Before recording technology, the only way to hear music was to experience it live. Throughout early history, music functioned as an integral part of cultural life: It was played at festivals, accompanied religious services and even served as a means of communication.</p>
<p>During the time of the <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/renm/hd_renm.htm">Renaissance</a>, around the middle 15th to 16th centuries, there was a shift from music as function to music as art and entertainment.</p>
<p>Soon, live vocal and instrumental music became a form of popular entertainment, and people clamored for bigger and better sounds. In the 16th century, the marriage of art, drama and music was consummated in <a href="https://www.sfopera.com/learn/about-opera/a-brief-history-of-opera/">opera</a>. During the 17th and 18th centuries, instruments continued to evolve, large concert halls and opera houses were built, and composers explored new ideas that pushed boundaries.</p>
<p>What’s now known as “symphonic music” was born: music that was performed by a symphony orchestra. <a href="https://coloradosymphony.org/symphony-vs-orchestra/">A symphony</a> is not only a large group of musicians, but it is also a piece of music written by a composer containing multiple movements.</p>
<p>To hear a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, you had to witness a symphony orchestra play it, and crowds clamored to gain entry to concert halls hear the newest and most acclaimed composers’ works.</p>
<p>During the 18th and early 19th centuries, however, a set of social rules calcified around this music: how to listen, what to wear, where to sit and when to applaud. As tastes and technologies began to <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/amcm/hd_amcm.htm">change in the late 19th century</a>, the masses were drawn to new forms of music like jazz. Concert halls, meanwhile, became the realm of high culture, high art and high society.</p>
<p>A clear divide between popular music and <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-theory/why-do-we-call-it-classical-music/">what became known as “classical” music</a> emerged. That divide still exists today.</p>
<p>Many argue that the <a href="https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/11/17/the-classical-music-world-is-grappling-with-accessibility">classical music world is no longer accessible</a> to most people – it’s seen as too intimidating and too stuffy, with works that are too long and tickets that are too expensive. Meanwhile, symphony orchestras around the world <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/arts/music/orchestra-diversity.html">are scrambling to diversify their music and ranks</a> within a tradition and culture that was long reserved for the highly educated, wealthy and white.</p>
<p>With symphonies working to be more inclusive in their music education and program offerings, I see video games as a key way to bridge this divide.</p>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/69xgGwecfj6y1Jfz2e73PA?utm_source=generator&theme=0" width="100%" height="352" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe>
<h2>From ‘bleeps and bloops’ to symphonic music</h2>
<p>Due to limitations in hardware, early video games utilized synthesized “bleeps and bloops.” However, these constraints spurred programmers to think about creative ways to make games more immersive through sound. </p>
<p>Today, video games do not have the same limitations. Composers have the agency to create soundscapes that utilize the most advanced hardware and software, and they can employ some of the best musicians in the world <a href="https://www.grammy.com/videos/assassins-creed-wins-best-score-soundtrack-video-games-interactive-media-2023-grammys-premiere-ceremony">to record award-winning soundtracks</a>. </p>
<p>In a 2021 interview, video game composer and conductor <a href="https://youtu.be/wInG9pSpmNQ?t=1505">Eimear Noone said</a>, “More young people listen to orchestral music through their game consoles today than have ever listened to orchestral music in the history of music.” </p>
<p>She’s probably right. <a href="https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/">There are over 3 billion gamers</a> around the world, and people between the ages of 18 and 25 spend the most time playing video games. A <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/video-games-children-classical-music/">2018 poll conducted by the U.K.’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra</a> found that more young people are exposed to classical music through video games than through attending live performances.</p>
<p>The fusion of advanced technology and scholarship has forged worlds like those found in the “Assassin’s Creed” franchise, which can <a href="https://doi-org.wake.idm.oclc.org/10.1086/713365">act as time machines</a> that allow players to explore ancient Greece, with historically informed soundtracks accompanying them on their journeys.</p>
<p>In Activision’s “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,” composer Yuka Kitamura used traditional Japanese instruments to craft a sound informed by Japan’s <a href="https://doyouknowjapan.com/history/sengoku/">Sengoku period</a>; the music of “Civilization IV” contains tracks influenced by composers throughout history; and many of today’s most popular video game titles <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/features/the-best-classical-music-in-videogames/">feature classical music</a>. </p>
<p>“Thanks to video games,” <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/04/28/arts/i-fell-love-with-classical-music-thanks-video-games/">Boston Globe music writer A.Z. Madonna wrote</a>, “I fell in love with classical music.”</p>
<h2>Getting the recognition it deserves</h2>
<p>Today’s video game music is more interactive and nonlinear than traditional concert hall and film music. This means that <a href="https://stringsmagazine.com/top-video-game-composers-talk-craft-and-breaking-into-the-business/">composers think differently when writing for games</a>. Tools, technologies and education for composers and musicians are changing.</p>
<p>The increasing complexity of video games means composers are once again pushing boundaries through expanded sound palettes. Like “Starfield,” many modern game titles incorporate symphonic music needed to provide the emotional and atmospheric underpinning of the game experience.</p>
<p>As the gaming industry continues to expand – it’s projected <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/748044/number-video-gamers-world/">to earn US$533 billion globally by 2027</a> – video game soundtracks have become more and more popular. When a game is released, <a href="https://blog.chartmetric.com/video-game-music-rise-popularity/">music streaming platforms</a> routinely release an accompanying soundtrack. </p>
<p>The classical music world and symphony orchestras may finally be catching on.</p>
<p>In 2022, the BBC Proms, a daily summer concert series that features classical music in London, included video game music <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/erjv9r">performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra</a> for the first time in history. In 2023, the Grammys recognized “<a href="https://www.grammy.com/news/2023-grammys-new-categories-songwriter-year-best-video-game-soundtrack-social-impact-special-merit-award-65th-grammy-awards">Best Video Game Soundtrack</a>” as an official category for the first time. Its inaugural winner was <a href="https://www.grammy.com/news/stephanie-economou-interview-2023-grammys-assassins-creed-valhalla-best-score-soundtrack-video-games-interactive-media">Stephanie Economou</a> for her work on “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök.”</p>
<p>Today, there are a number of symphonic concert series – <a href="http://gameonconcert.com/">GameOn!</a>, <a href="https://www.gameconcerts.com/en/concerts/final-symphony/">Game Concerts</a>, <a href="https://ffdistantworlds.com/">Distant Worlds</a> and <a href="https://www.videogameslive.com/">VGL</a> – that feature live video game music performed by top orchestras.</p>
<p>“Starfield” will be marked by beautiful graphics, interactive game play and a compelling story, but holding it together will be the gravity of its sonic landscape. Video game music has come a long way from its first “bleeps and bloops.” Symphonic music will continue to accompany players’ video game journeys, and like “Starfield,” the sky is no longer the limit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>J. Aaron Hardwick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The genre has long been viewed as too exclusive, too expensive and too stuffy. Thanks to video games, that’s starting to change.J. Aaron Hardwick, Orchestra Director and Assistant Professor of Music, Wake Forest UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1895052022-09-22T17:02:02Z2022-09-22T17:02:02ZIndian Matchmaking: English can be a valuable asset for young women seeking husbands – but it can also backfire<p>After a popular and <a href="https://theconversation.com/netflixs-indian-matchmaking-at-the-emmys-the-problems-with-nominating-this-indian-reality-167011">controversial</a> first season, Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking is back with more Mumbai elites and American <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/brown-desi-south-asian-diaspora-reflects-terms-represent-erase-rcna1886">Desis (diasporic South Asians)</a> looking for love. The show offers a glimpse into matrimonial negotiations and the arranged marriage process, guided by matchmaker Sima Taparia. Contestants and their families outline their preferences – from values to profession, hobbies to looks – and scrutinise potential partners. </p>
<p>While some criteria are more or less explicit (“must like dogs”), others, such as “good education”, work as implicit references to social class. In India – much like <a href="https://theconversation.com/when-english-becomes-the-global-language-of-education-we-risk-losing-other-often-better-ways-of-learning-143744">across the globe</a> – good education is synonymous with an English medium education. </p>
<p>This is where English is the language through which all subjects are taught – <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315107929-8/mind-language-medium-gap-chaise-ladousa">a model favoured by fee-paying institutions</a>. English speakers are widely assumed to be more educated, more affluent, more modern. </p>
<p>August marked 75 years of Indian independence from British colonial rule. But the English language has continued to play a key role in upholding inequality. For years it remained accessible only to the wealthy. </p>
<p>Over the past two decades, as India’s economic policies shifted, English has become more widely accessible and demand continues to increase. Part of this is due to the longstanding <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/abs/below-english-line-an-ethnographic-exploration-of-class-and-the-english-language-in-postliberalization-india/BFC18D5713CFC14EECC62AAE280BBBEB">prestige of speaking English</a>, and the narrative that investing in English can bring opportunity and success. </p>
<p>Young Indians are feeling pressure to speak English, both to boost their chances of securing a professional job and to increase the probability of finding a good match for marriage. Unmarried women aspiring to the middle classes are bearing the brunt of the pressure. </p>
<p>In my <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/josl.12567">ethnographic research</a>, I looked at how English gets linked to social mobility in India. I spent several months working alongside young adults at a free English and employability training organisation on the outskirts of South Delhi. </p>
<p>While most of the students enrolled had hopes of becoming socially mobile, many of the young women were also aware that their newly acquired English skills could benefit them in the search for a husband. But, as my interviews with these young women showed, their association with English sometimes ended up backfiring.</p>
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<p>In matrimonial negotiations, English is often favoured by both sides, but is increasingly becoming a requirement for women. At times this appears more explicitly transactional. Young English-speaking brides are in high demand for their potential to secure a place at an international higher education institution. </p>
<p>Some have termed this phenomenon “<a href="https://www.dw.com/en/ielts-marriages-indias-ideal-bride-is-proficient-in-english/a-53341947">IELTS brides</a>”, indicating young women who have scored highly on the International English Language Testing System. But mostly, the desire for English in a future wife is more about what the language says about her class status and her perceived ability to be a part of modern India.</p>
<p>This was the case for Rupal – one of the teachers from the organisation – who was in the process of meeting potential husbands with her parents when I met her. After attending a school where Hindi was the language of instruction, she joined the organisation as a student to develop her English skills. </p>
<p>She was the first member of her family to speak English, and then trained to become a teacher at the same organisation. Rupal knew that this could be leveraged to find a “better” husband, someone from a more securely middle-class background. Her parents had already rejected a proposal from a young man who had not finished school, arguing that, “My daughter is an English teacher … she is so educated.”</p>
<p>English gave Rupal a form of cultural capital which worked in her favour. This was an advantage that her sister, who had left education early to help financially support the family, was not able to wield.</p>
<h2>When English backfires</h2>
<p>But, as Rupal told me, “converting” her English capital into marriage appeal was not so straightforward. More than once, Rupal was rejected by the families of potential suitors precisely because she spoke English. Because of the widespread associations between English, modernity and progressiveness, Rupal’s language skills raised suspicions about the type of wife she would be. </p>
<p>Parents of potential matches worried, “She will control my son, she will not allow him to do anything else, she will order [him].” Rather than giving her leverage in marriage negotiations, Rupal’s status as an English speaker was taken by some families as an indication that her behaviour may not conform to what they expected from a woman and a wife. </p>
<p>Pursuing social mobility through the promise of English turned out to be a risky investment. Rupal was forced to carefully balance contradictory demands of “tradition” and “modernity” to show she was capable of being a respectable woman and a good wife. While inability to speak English can disadvantage both men and women, the risks of speaking English are specific to expectations of womanhood.</p>
<p>In its first season, Indian Matchmaking <a href="https://theconversation.com/indian-matchmaking-a-show-about-arranged-marriages-cant-ignore-the-political-reality-in-india-144441">came under fire</a> for its silence on the politics of caste, gender, religion and nationalism. It has been equally quiet on the unspoken dimensions of language on the marriage market, and what speaking certain languages represents socially. </p>
<p>The increasing demand placed on young Indians aspiring to the middle classes to speak English is fuelled by an often unquestioned acceptance of the utility of English across the globe. But what this narrative hides is how English is deeply entrenched in unequal social stratification through class, caste and gender. </p>
<p>Stories like Rupal’s reveal how the lists of criteria for potential matches that Indian Matchmaking puts into the spotlight are less about “personal preferences”, and much more about maintaining social order.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189505/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katy Highet received funding from Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship) 2021-2022.</span></em></p>The controversial reality show is only part of the picture when it comes to class and education in Indian marriage negotiations.Katy Highet, Lecturer in English Language & TESOL, University of the West of ScotlandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1807132022-04-26T15:02:47Z2022-04-26T15:02:47Z‘I didn’t feel as if I fitted in at all’: the real life challenges of social mobility<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458195/original/file-20220414-1352-xi2u0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=61%2C114%2C5829%2C4477&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Going up?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/large-diverse-group-people-seen-above-676495477">Shutterstock/Arthimedes</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The benefits of social mobility seem to be widely agreed on. The idea that a person’s opportunities and earnings should not be defined by their background is supported across the political spectrum. </p>
<p>Despite this, attempts to make society more mobile and to equalise opportunities have proved to be <a href="https://theconversation.com/i-resigned-from-the-social-mobility-commission-because-of-the-british-governments-dismal-record-88813">frustrating</a> and complex. And nor is it easy for the people who do achieve this goal. </p>
<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211041304">Our research</a> suggests that people who move away from their roots can find the experience challenging. This is especially true if colleagues and employers are not supportive. </p>
<p>Employees across a range of occupations spoke to us about their experiences of social class during childhood, at work, and at home. Those who had “benefited” from social mobility said they often found it difficult to adjust.</p>
<p>Some felt under pressure to change mannerisms, adjust their accents and conceal behavioural habits to fit into a workplace where class differences were prominent. As one person in our study told us: “The [work] culture is very middle class, where it might be that you can quote Latin, that you drink wine rather than beer, that you socialise in a certain way.” </p>
<p>Others who had been socially mobile described instances at work where they had been ridiculed for background, had their professionalism questioned, and regularly suffered discriminatory microaggressions. One participant recalled: “[A colleague] made a formal complaint about me, saying I was unprofessional, and he actually used the words, ‘How can she meet anyone speaking like that?’”</p>
<p>Another explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I get mocked. it’s not a regular thing, but I don’t hide the fact I’m [working] class. There’s kind of a joke that I have progressed quite a lot from [where] my class suggests I should be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a result, some said they tried to conceal their background by avoiding social situations, staying quiet in meetings, and even leaving their roles. One explained: “I didn’t feel as if I fitted in at all. I felt completely uncomfortable there, as they were a different type of people totally.”</p>
<p>She added: “I felt very lonely and just couldn’t face working there any longer, so I resigned”</p>
<p>We also found that the socially mobile encountered similar problems in their social and personal lives. Some felt the need to hide their social mobility when at home by adjusting their accent and vocabulary or avoiding discussions of work. </p>
<p>One explained: “If I’m home, then I’m speaking differently, and I do it because I’ve got a lot of friends who probably didn’t get the [same opportunities] and I want to melt back in with them.”</p>
<p>One participant told how he had even detached from family relationships because of his social mobility. “I don’t think I fit in with my dad’s family anymore,” he said. </p>
<p>“They just don’t understand my job so I can’t communicate with them because they don’t understand what it feels like […] so I just don’t go and see them that often.” </p>
<p>Many socially mobile employees felt they had to act all the time, constantly shifting their behaviours to fit in at home and work. One admitted: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You feel insecure and a little bit at sea. I just thought, ‘I’m inadequate’. It’s tarring because you’re aware of it and looking out for it and you’re never utterly secure in any situation, including the one you left.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Authenticity</h2>
<p>In comparison, we found that people who had remained within the social class of their childhood found the process of moving between work and home reasonably effortless. They felt more secure and authentic in both environments. One commented: “I don’t conceal my background or social class as I think I can just speak how I am.” Another agreed: “I’ve never felt uncomfortable about my background.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Glass of red wine next to glass of beer." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/459754/original/file-20220426-26-9kam5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Different tastes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/red-wine-glass-light-beer-215871109">Shutterstock/Slawomir Fajer</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While our research suggests numerous difficulties for socially mobile employees, we also found that their range of life experiences provided them with important skills. One participant remarked:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think I’m quite a social chameleon in the fact that I’ve got a very working-class background, but I went to a grammar school and university. I do find that useful, that I’ve had those different bits in my life which means I know how to talk to people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Employers who recognised the interpersonal skills that socially mobile employees bring to the workplace, and encouraged them to be themselves were perceived as more supportive. Some even provided opportunities for staff to build connections with people from similar backgrounds. </p>
<p>So although levelling up can be quite a stressful experience, employers and colleagues who celebrate class differences can go a long way to improving the situation. As one participant, who said their employer valued competence over class told us: “I’m good at the job I do and I don’t need to conceal my class because I have other attributes, rather than being well-spoken, which can get me progression.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180713/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Climbing the ladder is not a simple process.Samantha Evans, Lecturer in Human Resource Management, University of KentMadeleine Wyatt, Reader in Diversity and Inclusion, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1679192021-09-16T15:10:21Z2021-09-16T15:10:21ZWhy it makes good business sense to attract more employees from working-class backgrounds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421366/original/file-20210915-25-1le5jhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C180%2C5655%2C3827&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-sunset-view-on-business-modern-310935740">Shutterstock/dade72</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The business world has made <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/">some progress</a> in tackling entrenched barriers of gender, ethnicity and sexuality in the work place. But inequalities related to income and education continue to attract much less attention. </p>
<p>Yet the social and economic position of a person’s family remains a key factor when it comes to <a href="https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Social-Mobility-in-the-Workplace-An-Employers-Guide-Updated-1.pdf">career opportunities</a>. Fairer employment is about access – and this is where employers can make a difference.</p>
<p>Plans recently announced by accountancy firm KPMG to make sure 29% of its senior staff are <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58485825">from a working class background</a> are therefore welcome. It is a bold move which recognises that social class is a root cause of inequality – and that big companies have an important role to play in addressing social mobility.</p>
<p>That role will involve being aware of the many challenges and entrenched practices which have so far impeded progress.</p>
<p>To begin with, education is the single most important factor that can help people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The home learning environment has an important impact on development, and on readiness for school <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28344/1/CASEreport60.pdf">from an early age</a>. </p>
<p>Access to education depends on the material and social resources of the family, including their ability to develop networks (related to job opportunities, for example, or other forms of influence). Research has shown that social class differences in identity, feelings, and behaviour make it <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5901394/">less likely</a> that working‐class families can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. </p>
<p>Employers can address some of the worst effects of this structural imbalance. They could, for instance, set up mentoring programmes in secondary schools. And they could strive to become more accessible by providing role models within firms or avoiding jargon in communication with young potential employees. </p>
<p>Employers should also explain that numerous career paths are available for people from poorer backgrounds. Offering alternative routes into an organisation for skilled individuals is valuable for all concerned. To make things fairer they could also start by recruiting from a wider pool of universities, rather than primarily targeting <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272164028_What_is_preventing_social_mobility_A_review_of_the_evidence">Russell Group members</a> in the UK. </p>
<p>And they should also be mindful that there are higher levels of debt aversion among poorer families, so students from low-income backgrounds are <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/education-40112033">less likely to go to university</a> in the first place. Employers could step in to sponsor student placements through university and work with job centres, providing internships and routes to part-time degrees. </p>
<h2>Creativity and insight</h2>
<p>Another important issue concerns workplace inequalities that are ignored. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320013984_Paradoxes_of_Diversity">Research shows</a> how conversations around diversity can even neutralise potential gains. For instance, upbeat talk about diversity can actually <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-5236-5_601.pdf">downplay many of the problems</a>, if the focus is on assimilation rather than considering and embracing difference. </p>
<p>In this way, good intentions to address discrimination can end up seeing others as inferior and in need of help, with the expectation that they will eventually adjust to the <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1350508418812585">existing hierarchical order</a>. It is also important to consider the ways unspoken norms and discrimination patterns are <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319989167">deeply rooted in some organisations</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="KPMG offices in London." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421569/original/file-20210916-23-c8ka3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Breaking glass ceilings?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-england-oct-12-kpmg-uk-118068757">Shutterstock/Gordon Bell</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rightly, KPMG says it intends to monitor its workforce data in terms of social mobility, to track the improvement that needs to be addressed. It is to be hoped that other large companies seeking to attract the best talent follow their lead.</p>
<p>Firms which take a long-term strategy on recruitment and staffing will be the ultimate winners if they actively seek to attract people from disadvantaged backgrounds. They will also do well to consider the root causes of socio-economic inequality and what they can do to tackle it.</p>
<p>Put simply, this is because diversity is <a href="https://www.unstereotypealliance.org/en/resources/diversity-and-inclusion/2020/12/diversity-wins-report-by-mckinsey#:%7E:text=Originally%20publishetrying%20to%20increase%20the%20diversity%20of%20their%20staffd%20by%20McKinsey.%20Diversity%20wins%20is%20the,likelihood%20of%20financial%20outperformance%20has%20strengthened%20over%20time">good for business</a>. Diverse groups of people learn from one another, leading to improvements in creativity, knowledge, insight, and <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-business-case-for-equality-and-diversity-a-survey-of-the-academic-literature">ultimately success</a>. But there is also broader moral imperative, which will hopefully see more companies take on this approach – working towards the fair treatment of all members of society is just the right thing to do.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167919/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marianna Fotaki does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Accountancy firm KPMG’s plans for greater social balance should be applauded.Marianna Fotaki, Network Fellow, Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University and Professor of Business Ethics, Warwick Business School, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1560272021-03-11T13:29:43Z2021-03-11T13:29:43ZHow the quest for significance and respect underlies the white supremacist movement, conspiracy theories and a range of other problems<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388886/original/file-20210310-23-1oud1kk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C2941%2C1962&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Unemployed Blackjewel coal miners, their family members and activists man a blockade along railroad tracks leading to their old mine on Aug. 23, 2019, in Cumberland, Kentucky. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/unemployed-blackjewel-coal-miners-their-family-members-and-news-photo/1169799870?adppopup=true">Scott Olson/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>President Joe Biden’s fundamental pitch to America has been about dignity and respect. He never tires of repeating his father’s words that “a job is about more than a paycheck, it is about … dignity … about respect … being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘<a href="https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1202972212384288768?lang=en">Everything is going to be OK</a>.’”</p>
<p>In strikingly similar language, Princeton economists <a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bKON6gYAAAAJ&hl=en">Anne Case</a> and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rvFjcQIAAAAJ&hl=en">Angus Deaton</a> affirm that “jobs are not just the source of money.” When jobs are lost, they wrote in 2020, “it is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of pride, and of self respect … <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism">that brings on despair, not just or even primarily the loss of money</a>.”</p>
<p><a href="https://psyc.umd.edu/facultyprofile/kruglanski/arie">I am a psychologist</a> who studies <a href="https://scholar.google.gr/citations?user=Trd2BdsAAAAJ&hl=en">the human quest for significance and respect</a>. My research reveals that this basic motivation is a major force in human affairs. It shapes the course of world history and determines the destiny of nations. It underlies some of the chief challenges society is facing. Among others, these are: </p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism">The suicides – known as “deaths of despair” – of working-class Americans</a> </li>
<li>White supremacist movements </li>
<li>Systemic racism </li>
<li>Islamist terrorism</li>
<li>The proliferation of conspiracy theories</li>
<li>The growing rift in the Republican Party between moderates and extremists</li>
</ul>
<p>In all these cases, people’s actions, opinions and attitudes aim, often unconsciously, to satisfy their fundamental need to count, to be recognized and respected. </p>
<p>The very term “supremacism” betrays concern for superior standing. So do names like “Proud Boys” or “Oath Keepers.” Systemic racism is rooted in the motivation to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/885878564/what-systemic-racism-means-and-the-way-it-harms-communities">put down one race to elevate another</a>. Islamist terrorism targets the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032615">alleged belittlers of a religion</a>. Conspiracy theories identify alleged culprits <a href="https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781461298021">plotting the subjugation and dishonor of their victims</a>. And the <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90553503/its-time-to-respect-that-republicans-care-about-only-one-thing-winning">extremist faction of the Republican Party cares exclusively about winning, no holds barred</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Torch-bearing white men marching at night, shouting" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388889/original/file-20210310-19-70s8h0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chanting ‘White lives matter! You will not replace us!’ and ‘Jews will not replace us!’ several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists march through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on Aug. 10, 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chanting-white-lives-matter-you-will-not-replace-us-and-news-photo/831221784?adppopup=true">Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Triggering the quest</h2>
<p>This quest for significance and respect must first be awakened before it can drive behavior. We don’t strive for significance 24/7. </p>
<p>The quest can be triggered by the experience of significant loss through humiliation and failure. When we suffer such a loss, we desperately seek to regain significance and respect. We are then keen to embrace any narrative that tells us how, and to follow leaders who show us the way. </p>
<p>The quest for significance can also be triggered by an opportunity for substantial gain – becoming a hero, a martyr, a superstar.</p>
<p>Over the past several decades, many Americans have experienced a stinging loss of significance and respect. Social scientists examined the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217721174">perception of social class in the United States between 1972 and 2010</a>. The results of their research were striking: In the 1970s, most Americans viewed themselves as comfortably middle class, defined at the time by conduct and manners – being a good neighbor and a good member of the community, exhibiting proper behavior.</p>
<p>In contrast, by the 2000s, membership in the middle class was determined primarily by income. And because incomes have stagnated over the past half-century, by 2010 many Americans (particularly the lower-income ones) lost their middle-class identity entirely. </p>
<p>Small wonder, then, that they resonated to the Trump campaign slogan that promised to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12647">make America (or Americans) “great again</a>.” </p>
<h2>Piling on</h2>
<p>The COVID-19 pandemic <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-to-turn-the-coronavirus-anxiety-into-15136037.php">compounds people’s sense of fragility</a> and insignificance. </p>
<p>Isolation from loved ones, the danger to our own health and the dread of an economic disaster are all stressors that make a person feel weak and vulnerable. They increase the attraction to ideas that offer quick fixes for loss of significance and respect. </p>
<p>Though the ideas that promise restoration of significance and dignity range widely, they share an important core: They <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032615">depict the promotion of different social values as paths to significance</a>. Promoting freedom and democracy, defending one’s nation or one’s religion, advancing one’s political party – all aim to earn respect and dignity in communities that cherish those values.</p>
<p>When the quest for significance and respect is intensified, other considerations such as comfort, relationships or compassion are sidelined. Any actions that promote significance are then seen as legitimate. That includes actions that would otherwise seem reprehensible: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000260">violence, aggression, torture or terrorism</a>. </p>
<p>An intense quest for significance does not invite reprehensible actions directly. But it boosts a person’s readiness to tolerate and enact them for the sake of significance and dignity. </p>
<p>The path ultimately taken depends on the narrative that identifies significance-bestowing actions in a given situation. Depending on one’s moral perspective, such actions may be seen as “good,” “bad” or “ugly.” One might have an entirely different moral evaluation of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Proud Boys and yet recognize that, psychologically, both represent routes to significance.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A gallows with a noose hanging on it at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388895/original/file-20210310-17-1hmj7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A noose is seen on makeshift gallows erected on Jan. 6 at the Capitol before Trump supporters violently stormed a session of Congress.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/noose-is-seen-on-makeshift-gallows-as-supporters-of-us-news-photo/1230473117?adppopup=true">Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The allure of violence</h2>
<p>A special danger to societies stems from the primordial, significance-lending appeal of violence. </p>
<p>Among animals, dominance is established through <a href="https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idOVDU2NS9R">“trial by combat,” to use Rudy Giuliani’s</a> recent turn of phrase at the rally before the Capitol insurrection. And as President Theodore Roosevelt famously observed, <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/roosevelt/foreign-affairs">walking with a “big stick”</a> makes other nations pay attention and respect. </p>
<p>Most narratives adopted by violent extremists identify a real or imagined enemy at the gates, and fighting such enemies is depicted as worthy and honorable: For Trump acolytes, the enemy is the “<a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-02/the-deep-state-is-fighting-back">deep state</a>.” For much of the far right, the enemy is, variously, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006">immigrants, refugees</a>, <a href="https://www.voanews.com/usa/race-america/far-right-us-facebook-groups-pivot-attacks-black-lives-matter">people of color</a>, <a href="https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Antisemitism%20as%20an%20Underlying%20Precursor%20to%20Violent%20Extremism%20in%20American%20Far-Right%20and%20Islamist%20Contexts%20Pdf.pdf">Jews</a>, <a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/study-shows-rise-of-hate-crimes-violence-against-asian-americans-in-nyc-during-covid/2883215/">Asians</a>, or even <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1861029,00.html">reptilians who plot to dominate the world</a>. </p>
<p>Evangelicals view Trump’s alleged battle <a href="https://theconversation.com/demons-of-the-deep-state-how-evangelicals-and-conspiracy-theories-combine-in-trumps-america-144898">against the “deep state” as divinely inspired</a>. And a QAnon message from Jan. 13, 2018, stated: “You were chosen for a reason. You are being provided the highest level of intel to ever be dropped publicly in the history of the world. <a href="https://joyinliberty.com/q/category/qanon-quotes/">Use it – protect and comfort those around you</a>.” These views sow division among segments of society, inviting fissures and polarization.</p>
<p>The quest for significance and respect is a universal and immutable aspect of human nature. It has the potential to inspire great works but also tear society asunder. The formidable challenge these days is to harness the energies sparked by this fundamental motive and channel them for the betterment of humanity.</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/156027/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arie Kruglanski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The quest for significance and respect is a universal part of human nature. It has the potential to inspire great works – but lately, it has been much in evidence tearing society apart.Arie Kruglanski, Professor of Psychology, University of MarylandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1464672020-10-01T12:27:27Z2020-10-01T12:27:27ZHow 3 prior pandemics triggered massive societal shifts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360834/original/file-20200930-22-1auioh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=137%2C137%2C2901%2C2122&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 19th-century engraving depicts the Angel of Death descending on Rome during the Antonine plague.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_angel_of_death_striking_a_door_during_the_plague_of_Rome_Wellcome_V0010664.jpg">J.G. Levasseur/Wellcome Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before March of this year, few probably thought disease could be a significant driver of human history. </p>
<p>Not so anymore. People are beginning to understand that <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105960/changes-to-the-general-lifestyle-due-to-covid-19-in-selected-countries/">the little changes</a> COVID-19 has already ushered in or accelerated – telemedicine, remote work, social distancing, the death of the handshake, online shopping, the virtual disappearance of cash and so on – have begun to change their way of life. They may not be sure whether these changes will outlive the pandemic. And they may be uncertain whether these changes are for good or ill.</p>
<p>Three previous plagues could yield some clues about the way COVID-19 might bend the arc of history. As <a href="https://www.macalester.edu/politicalscience/facultystaff/andrewlatham/">I teach</a> in my course “Plagues, Pandemics and Politics,” pandemics tend to shape human affairs in three ways.</p>
<p>First, they can profoundly alter a society’s fundamental worldview. Second, they can upend core economic structures. And, finally, they can sway power struggles among nations. </p>
<h2>Sickness spurs the rise of the Christian West</h2>
<p>The Antonine plague, and its twin, the Cyprian plague – <a href="https://asit-prod-web1.cc.columbia.edu/historydept/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2017/07/Kenneth-Philbrick.pdf">both now widely thought to have been caused by a smallpox strain</a> – ravaged the Roman Empire from A.D. 165 to 262. <a href="https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/the-antonine-plague-and-the-spread-of-christianity/">It’s been estimated</a> that the combined pandemics’ mortality rate was anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the empire’s population. </p>
<p>While staggering, the number of deaths tells only part of the story. This also triggered a profound transformation in the religious culture of the Roman Empire.</p>
<p>On the eve of the Antonine plague, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Rise_of_Christianity.html?id=HcFSaGvgKKkC">the empire was pagan</a>. The vast majority of the population worshipped multiple gods and spirits and believed that rivers, trees, fields and buildings each had their own spirit. </p>
<p>Christianity, a monotheistic religion that had little in common with paganism, <a href="https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/the-antonine-plague-and-the-spread-of-christianity/">had only 40,000 adherents</a>, no more than 0.07% of the empire’s population. </p>
<p>Yet within a generation of the end of the Cyprian plague, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the empire.</p>
<p>How did these twin pandemics effect this profound religious transformation? </p>
<p>Rodney Stark, in his seminal work “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Rise_of_Christianity.html?id=HcFSaGvgKKkC">The Rise of Christianity</a>,” argues that these two pandemics made Christianity a much more attractive belief system.</p>
<p>While the disease was effectively incurable, rudimentary palliative care – the provision of food and water, for example – could spur recovery of those too weak to care for themselves. Motivated by Christian charity and an ethic of care for the sick – and enabled by the thick social and charitable networks around which the early church was organized – the empire’s Christian communities were willing and able to provide this sort of care. </p>
<p>Pagan Romans, on the other hand, opted instead either to flee outbreaks of the plague or to self-isolate in the hope of being spared infection.</p>
<p>This had two effects. </p>
<p>First, Christians survived the ravages of these plagues at higher rates than their pagan neighbors and developed higher levels of immunity more quickly. Seeing that many more of their Christian compatriots were surviving the plague – and attributing this either to divine favor or the benefits of the care being provided by Christians – <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Rise_of_Christianity.html?id=HcFSaGvgKKkC">many pagans were drawn to the Christian community and the belief system that underpinned it</a>. At the same time, tending to sick pagans afforded Christians unprecedented opportunities to evangelize.</p>
<p>Second, Stark argues that, because these two plagues disproportionately affected young and pregnant women, the lower mortality rate among Christians translated into a higher birth rate.</p>
<p>The net effect of all this was that, in roughly the span of a century, an essentially pagan empire found itself well on its way to becoming a majority Christian one.</p>
<h2>The plague of Justinian and the fall of Rome</h2>
<p>The plague of Justinian, named after the Roman emperor who reigned from A.S. 527 to 565, arrived in the Roman Empire in A.D. 542 and didn’t disappear until A.D. 755. During its two centuries of recurrence, it killed <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Justinian_s_Flea.html?id=2oA2Lbiv4xAC">an estimated 25% to 50% of the population</a> – anywhere from 25 million to 100 million people. </p>
<p>This massive loss of lives crippled the economy, triggering a financial crisis that exhausted the state’s coffers and hobbled the empire’s once mighty military. </p>
<p>In the east, Rome’s principal geopolitical rival, Sassanid Persia, was also devastated by the plague and was therefore in no position to exploit the Roman Empire’s weakness. But the forces of the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate in Arabia – which had long been contained by the Romans and Sasanians – were largely unaffected by the plague. The reasons for this are not well understood, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22992565/#:%7E:text=The%20epidemic%20plague%20significantly%20contributed,territories%2C%20succeeded%20in%20escaping%20the">but they probably have to do with the caliphate’s relative isolation from major urban centers</a>.</p>
<p>Caliph Abu Bakr didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. Seizing the moment, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Plague_and_the_End_of_Antiquity/DKhLOd6gGlAC?hl=en&gbpv=0">his forces swiftly conquered the entire Sasanian Empire</a> while stripping the weakened Roman Empire of its territories in the Levant, the Caucasus, Egypt and North Africa.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Troops clash in a 14th-century illustration of the Battle of Yarmouk." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360879/original/file-20200930-14-1ofqkrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Muslim forces of the Rashidun Caliphate captured the Levant – a region of the Middle East – from the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 636.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Hayton_BNF886_9v.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Pre-pandemic, the Mediterranean world had been relatively unified by commerce, politics, religion and culture. What emerged was a fractured trio of civilizations jockeying for power and influence: an Islamic one in the eastern and southern Mediterranean basin; a Greek one in the northeastern Mediterranean; and a European one between the western Mediterranean and the North Sea. </p>
<p>This last civilization – what we now call <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Middle-Ages">medieval Europe</a> – was defined by a new, distinctive economic system. </p>
<p>Before the plague, the European economy <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Plague_and_the_End_of_Antiquity/DKhLOd6gGlAC?hl=en&gbpv=0">had been based on slavery</a>. After the plague, the significantly diminished supply of slaves forced landowners to begin granting plots to nominally “free” laborers – serfs who worked the lord’s fields and, in return, received military protection and certain legal rights from the lord. </p>
<p>The seeds of feudalism were planted.</p>
<h2>The Black Death of the Middle Ages</h2>
<p>The Black Death broke out in Europe in 1347 <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Plague_A_Very_Short_Introduction/KYOz00Jkt9IC?hl=en&gbpv=0">and subsequently killed between one-third and one-half</a> of the total European population of 80 million people. But it killed more than people. By the time the pandemic had burned out by the early 1350s, a distinctly modern world emerged – one defined by free labor, technological innovation and a growing middle class.</p>
<p>Before the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/plague/index.html"><em>Yersinia pestis</em> bacterium</a> arrived in 1347, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Plague_and_the_End_of_Antiquity.html?id=DKhLOd6gGlAC">Western Europe was a feudal society that was overpopulated</a>. Labor was cheap, serfs had little bargaining power, social mobility was stymied and there was little incentive to increase productivity.</p>
<p>But the loss of so much life shook up an ossified society. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/uprisings-after-pandemics-have-happened-before-just-look-at-the-english-peasant-revolt-of-1381-139260">Labor shortages</a> gave peasants more bargaining power. In the agrarian economy, they also encouraged the widespread adoption of new and existing technologies – the iron plow, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-field-system">the three-field crop rotation system</a> and fertilization with manure, all of which significantly increased productivity. Beyond the countryside, it resulted in the invention of time and labor-saving devices such as the printing press, water pumps for draining mines and gunpowder weapons.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Townspeople flee the city for the countryside to escape the bubonic plague." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=240&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=240&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360884/original/file-20200930-18-1aszuon.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=240&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Black Death created massive labor shortages.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/flight-of-the-townspeople-into-the-country-to-escape-from-news-photo/188005823?adppopup=true&uiloc=thumbnail_more_search_results_adp">Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In turn, freedom from feudal obligations and a desire to move up the social ladder <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Plague_and_the_End_of_Antiquity.html?id=DKhLOd6gGlAC">encouraged many peasants</a> to move to towns and engage in crafts and trades. The more successful ones became wealthier and constituted a new middle class. They could now afford more of the luxury goods that could be obtained only from beyond Europe’s frontiers, and this stimulated both long-distance trade and the more efficient three-masted ships needed to engage in that trade. </p>
<p>The new middle class’s increasing wealth also stimulated patronage of the arts, science, literature and philosophy. The result was an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity – what we now call <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Renaissance">the Renaissance</a>.</p>
<h2>Our present future</h2>
<p>None of this is to argue that the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will have similarly earth-shattering outcomes. <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality">The mortality rate</a> of COVID-19 is nothing like that of the plagues discussed above, and therefore the consequences may not be as seismic. </p>
<p>But there are some indications that they could be. </p>
<p>Will the bumbling efforts of the open societies of the West to come to grips with the virus shattering <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/world/asia/coronavirus-china-aid.html">already-wavering faith in liberal democracy</a>, creating a space for other ideologies to evolve and metastasize? </p>
<p>In a similar fashion, COVID-19 may be accelerating an already <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230358973_3">ongoing geopolitical shift</a> in the balance of power between the U.S. and China. During the pandemic, China has taken the global lead in providing medical assistance to other countries as part of its “<a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-chinas-health-silk-road">Health Silk Road</a>” initiative. <a href="https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/chinas-pandemic-power-play-2/">Some argue</a> that the combination of America’s failure to lead and China’s relative success at picking up the slack may well be turbocharging China’s rise to a position of global leadership. </p>
<p>Finally, COVID-19 seems to be accelerating <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2020/09/07/zoom-work-from-home-future-office-after-coronavirus/5680284002/">the unraveling of long-established patterns and practices of work</a>, with repercussions that could affet the future of office towers, big cities and mass transit, to name just a few. The implications of this and related economic developments may prove as profoundly transformative as those triggered by the Black Death in 1347. </p>
<p>Ultimately, the longer-term consequences of this pandemic – like all previous pandemics – are simply unknowable to those who must endure them. But just as past plagues made the world we currently inhabit, so too will this plague likely remake the one populated by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146467/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Latham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Societies and cultures that seem ossified and entrenched can be completely upended by pandemics, which create openings for conquest, innovation and social change.Andrew Latham, Professor of Political Science, Macalester CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1451762020-09-21T04:25:37Z2020-09-21T04:25:37ZJane Austen, Monet and Phantom of the Opera – middlebrow culture today<p>Culture has long been stratified as “high” or “low”, or perhaps “high” and “popular” to soften the blow. But what about the in-between?</p>
<p>The word “middlebrow” emerged into English in the 1920s as an insult. It described works that mistook mere good taste for serious art - and consumers who couldn’t tell the difference. </p>
<p>We asked almost 1500 Australians about their cultural preferences and participation, and mapped their responses on a spectrum. There is a clear divide between those who don’t regularly engage with arts and culture on one side and the dedicated lovers of high or avant-garde art forms on the other. </p>
<p>The most concentrated area of mapped data was in the middle space. This patch – filled with likes for Phantom of the Opera, Rhapsody in Blue, light classical music and jazz, TV documentaries and police shows, Monet and Ken Done, Tim Winton, Jane Austen and more – can tell us what constitutes middlebrow culture today. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australians-favourites-show-aboriginal-art-can-transcend-social-divisions-and-art-boundaries-143827">Australians' favourites show Aboriginal art can transcend social divisions and art boundaries</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Airs and graces</h2>
<p>From the early decades of the 20th century, the new twin forces of modernist high culture and mass commercial culture produced ongoing fights over cultural value and authority among critics and consumers alike in a “<a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230298361">battle of the brows</a>”. </p>
<p>The language of brows suggested not just different but dramatically opposed tastes. Worse, the three brow levels could be taken to represent high, low and middle-class tastes. Any rise from below threatened those above. </p>
<p>Most threatening to cultural elites was not the vulgar but the middlebrow’s pretensions to culture and good taste. As <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/05/virginia-woolf-middlebrow/">Virginia Woolf</a> put it, the middlebrow was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… of middlebred intelligence … in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Middlebrow art imitated serious art, but only offered easy pleasure. Middlebrow consumers aspired to culture, but for its social prestige. Middlebrow institutions like book clubs or radio made high culture accessible to all, supposedly “dumbing it down” in the process. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Impressionist painting of buildings reflected on water." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=660&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=660&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356722/original/file-20200907-16-1h2ep0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=660&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">London, Parliament, Reflections on the Thames by Claude Monet (1905).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Claude_Monet%2C_Londres%2C_Le_Parlement%2C_Reflets_sur_la_Tamise%2C_1905%2C_huile_sur_toile%2C_Mus%C3%A9e_Marmottan_Monet%2C_Paris.jpg/1370px-Claude_Monet%2C_Londres%2C_Le_Parlement%2C_Reflets_sur_la_Tamise%2C_1905%2C_huile_sur_toile%2C_Mus%C3%A9e_Marmottan_Monet%2C_Paris.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-politics-of-dancing-and-thinking-about-cultural-values-beyond-dollars-139839">Friday essay: the politics of dancing and thinking about cultural values beyond dollars</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Major works, minor arts</h2>
<p>For French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “middle culture” comprised the “major works of the minor arts” and the “minor works of the major <a href="https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203740248.ch23">arts</a>”. But almost anything could be deemed middlebrow depending on how it was perceived or packaged. </p>
<p>There’s nothing essentially middlebrow about Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, landscape painting or Jane Austen’s novels, but the term could describe most occasions for their consumption today – Vivaldi over dinner, landscapes in the gallery gift shop, Austen in The Jane Austen Book Club! </p>
<p>The works still carry their prestige as serious art, but packaged for pleasurable or tasteful consumption. </p>
<p>Since the 1990s a new field of middlebrow studies has arisen, relocating the middlebrow in cultural history to understand it in its own right. Scholars have identified recurrent aspects of middlebrow culture: taking culture seriously as “purposeful recreation” or empathetic engagement but also as a source of pleasure; open to both high and popular culture but within clear boundaries, nothing too arty or abstruse, nothing trashy or <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137402912">cheap</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photography book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356726/original/file-20200907-16-1exnbhp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407812761l/264238.jpg">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Australian Cultural Fields project conducted a national survey of Australians’ cultural preferences in 2015, and in the new book, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Fields-Capitals-Habitus-Australian-Culture-Inequalities-and-Social-Divisions/Bennett-Carter-Gayo-Kelly-Noble/p/book/9781138392304">Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Social Divisions and Inequalities</a>, specific attention is given to the “middle space” of Australian cultural tastes and engagement.</p>
<h2>A map of the middle</h2>
<p>Individuals’ likes and dislikes for certain kinds of books, art, music, TV, heritage and sport, and participation in cultural activities, were mapped so that shared preferences would be clustered together. So too attitudes to certain named artists, authors, composers, and TV and sports personalities. These results were mapped against social variables including age, gender, education and occupational class. </p>
<p>This exercise revealed two very different zones of taste and engagement, and a crowded middle space between.</p>
<p>On one side is a zone of low participation (42% of those surveyed) where negative responses are registered for almost all book types, for Impressionism, Renaissance and abstract art, classical and light classical music, TV arts and documentary programs, and more.</p>
<p>Likes and engagement are restricted to commercial TV, reality and sports shows, country music, landscapes and portraits, sports books, author Stephen King, family and homeland heritage, and rugby league.</p>
<p>On the other side (21%), positive tastes are dominant, especially for the traditionally prestigious or “learned” items such as literary classics, modern novels, Impressionism, Indigenous books, Aboriginal and migrant heritage, the ABC and SBS, author David Malouf and artist Margaret Preston. Dislikes register for certain popular or declassé genres including dance music and landscapes. </p>
<p>But the densest concentration of likes and dislikes falls in the cultural middle ground. This helps us visualise the middlebrow. Positive responses congregate around classical music, Aboriginal and Renaissance art, Australian histories and biographies, crime novels, TV news and lifestyle programs. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Young women in period costume." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=258&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=258&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=258&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356725/original/file-20200907-20-c5aszb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Me? Middlebrow? Jane Austen’s works, including Pride & Prejudice, sit proudly at the centre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOWQ1NTFkZmEtMzE1Ni00M2E4LWEzMDgtMjVkZjE5YzYzYjA0XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyOTc5MDI5NjE@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,763_AL_.jpg">IMDB</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In terms of named artists and works, the middle space is even more crowded. In the literary field, Jane Austen sits proudly at the centre, alongside authors such as Bryce Courtenay, Jodi Picoult and Woolf, and painters Rembrandt, Monet and Jackson Pollock. Musically, Nessun Dorma and Phantom of the Opera are playing. </p>
<p>Dislikes also fall within the middle space: for Ben Quilty, Francis Bacon, Kate Grenville, Ian Rankin, Ai Weiwei and Caravaggio (alongside Stephen King, Big Brother and Kylie Minogue!). The very presence of the negative responses, however, suggests cultural capital – that it matters to have a view on such figures, even if negative. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/artists-help-communities-during-a-crisis-not-hinder-why-are-we-still-told-they-dont-matter-129695">Artists help communities during a crisis, not hinder. Why are we still told they don't matter?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Who likes the middle?</h2>
<p>We can map the distribution of tastes against key social variables. The middle space corresponds closely to lower professional-managerial occupations (like teachers, curators, academics); tertiary (but not postgraduate) education; the 45-64 age group; and urban or suburban residents. Women occupy the middle space; men are closer to the less engaged zones. There is no <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2702873">simple alignment with class</a>; middlebrow culture doesn’t align neatly with the “middle class”. </p>
<p>The term “middlebrow” remains difficult because of its still potent, pejorative <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/could-not-put-it-down/">connotations</a>. What it can tell us is that imagining culture divided simply into high and low won’t get us very far. There is plenty to enjoy in the middle space.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145176/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Carter has received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australia-China Council.</span></em></p>We asked almost 1500 Australians about the art they liked and disliked. Then we mapped middlebrow culture. We found plenty to enjoy there.David Carter, Professor emeritus, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1449032020-09-09T12:25:27Z2020-09-09T12:25:27Z‘Quarantine envy’ could finally wake people up to the deep inequalities that pervade American life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355896/original/file-20200901-14-vgdio7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1837%2C1228&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Envy is one of the seven deadly sins – the worst of them all, according to the 'Canterbury Tales.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/thoughtful-young-woman-traveling-seen-though-train-royalty-free-image/730259045">Richard Donaghue/EyeEm via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent months, mental health experts have been drawing attention to what they’ve dubbed “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/smarter-living/quarantine-envy-pandemic.html">quarantine envy</a>.”</p>
<p>Many people, they note, have been sizing up the extent to which they’ve been affected by lockdowns and economic hardship. Who still has a job? Who gets to work from home? Whose home is spacious, light-filled and Instagram-worthy? </p>
<p>The start of the school year adds another layer of comparison. Parents stuck in a small apartment with two kids forced to learn remotely might feel pangs about the fact that their friend’s kids get to attend a private school in person. </p>
<p>What should we do with these unpleasant feelings? Should we repress them or reason them away? Are they too shameful to be shared? </p>
<p>Envy is one of Christianity’s seven deadly sins – the worst of them all, says the <a href="https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/%7Echaucer/teachslf/parst-tran.htm">Parson</a> in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” But my research into the long history of envy shows that the emotion has many sides to it.</p>
<p>Some are certainly destructive. But envy can also be useful. The “sin” can help us better understand ourselves and the world around us – and it can be a key driver of social change.</p>
<h2>Tales of envy</h2>
<p>Envy has a bad reputation. Everyone feels it at one point or another, although we often don’t want to admit to being truly envious of others – harboring the kind of envy that gnaws at us and makes us feel inferior. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="One man – representing envy – stands with his palms out and one eye blinded. The other – greed – has both his eyes blinded." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357005/original/file-20200908-18-194l7w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 15th-century illustration of a classic fable of envy and greed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/12/77039">Morgan Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Portraits of envy can show it as an astonishingly malicious emotion. One version of a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OE5AAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA215#v=onepage&q&f=false">popular fable</a> tells the story of an envious man and a greedy man being given a single wish. The one condition is that the person who does not get to choose the reward will be given double what the other man wishes. The greedy man quickly asks that the envious man be given the choice; the envious man then wishes to be blinded in one eye.</p>
<p>In William Langland’s poem “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Piers_Plowman/uWU4U32pV1AC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=piers+plowman&printsec=frontcover">Piers Plowman</a>,” the personification of Envy confesses that all he wants is for his neighbor, “Gybbe,” to have something bad happen to him; he wants this even more than he wants cheese (which is saying a lot, if you ask me!).</p>
<p>In these stories, envy is typically defined as wanting misfortune for others, longing to feel superior in some way or at least making them just as miserable as you are. </p>
<p>Late medieval literature is also filled with stories that point to envy as a source of violence. </p>
<p>The chronicler <a href="https://www.dhi.ac.uk/onlinefroissart/index.jsp">Jean Froissart</a> describes the social unrest associated with <a href="https://theconversation.com/uprisings-after-pandemics-have-happened-before-just-look-at-the-english-peasant-revolt-of-1381-139260">the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381</a> as a consequence of the envy the commoners had toward the nobles and the rich.</p>
<p>Here – and elsewhere – envy is a label used to diminish the political claims of a particular group of people. In 2012, Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of practicing the “<a href="https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2012-jan-10-la-pn-victorious-romney-warns-against-bitter-politics-of-envy-20120110-story.html">bitter politics of envy</a>.” In this way, criticism of the rich or powerful, or wanting the wealthy to be taxed more to fund public services, brings accusations of petty envy and resentment. </p>
<h2>When envy spurs social change</h2>
<p>Modern understandings of envy are also related to other kinds of negative feelings, like anger that someone has undeserved wealth or frustration that certain groups are hoarding money, power, or privileges. </p>
<p>Here is where envy can take a turn that can lead to better outcomes. Envy can be productive when it is not directed at one person in particular but is instead directed at the way society is structured.</p>
<p>Economists and political scientists increasingly <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sores041214a">recognize</a> that reducing inequality can be an end in itself. Envy – even the kind of nakedly competitive envy that seeks to damage others for no personal gain – can work to regulate inequality that has grown too wide. </p>
<p>Political scientist Jeffrey Green defends policies driven by a “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Shadow_of_Unfairness/xs0dDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">reasonable envy</a>” that targets the well off, even if there is no expectation of gain for everyone else. For example, he says that capping wealth might lower the material welfare for all, but this would be worth the reduction in inequality, since excessive or unjust inequality can lead to instability and feelings of disempowerment among ordinary citizens. </p>
<p>Economist Robert Frank prefers taxing consumption to reduce “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Luxury_Fever/nlmNzL7ZNPkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">luxury fever</a>,” in which competitive spending escalates wildly, especially among the super-rich, leaving less money for individuals and the government to spend on essential services.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Personification of envy, wearing a veil and green dress, sits on a bench with her arms folded." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357001/original/file-20200908-16-nqbfah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An illustration of the personification of envy from a medieval manuscript.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/4/76943:http://ica.themorgan.org/icaimages/3/g32.003ra.jpg">The Morgan Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In their new book, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Economic_Other/u7jtDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">The Economic Other</a>,” political scientists Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky open with the line, “The human imagination is an engine of comparison.” </p>
<p>In their studies, they show that politics is driven by the social imagination – and Americans have fewer opportunities for comparison because of increasing class segregation in our society. Middle-class and poorer Americans see the wealthy online and on TV but not in everyday life. The authors believe policies might become more just if there were more opportunities for “upward comparison” – if everyday Americans could simply see, in their day-to-day lives, the extent to which the wealthy lead extravagant lives. Their research suggests that envious comparison would lead to more support for government spending on welfare, Social Security and education.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<h2>Dwelling with envy</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Aristotle_s_Art_of_Rhetoric/pi2GDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=aristotle+rhetoric&printsec=frontcover">Aristotle</a> has a much more specific – and negative – definition of envy. In his view, the emotion is directed toward our equals. We become envious when our neighbors have something we desire and believe we deserve, and when we feel it is our own fault that we do not have that good thing.</p>
<p>He distinguishes envy from other comparative feelings like emulation, indignation or pity. These kinds of distinctions are helpful, because thinking carefully about emotions can give us information about ourselves and our environment. Some philosophers describe <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rationality_of_Emotion/ohoT1CDor9AC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">emotions as reasoning tools</a>, a shortcut to filter copious amounts of information.</p>
<p>In a time of quarantine – when comparisons often involve who has the best version of being alone – dwelling with envy can open our eyes to ourselves and the world.</p>
<p>Do these negative feelings say something about ourselves? Are they specific to another person? Or do they reflect an unjust system? </p>
<p>Can these disparities change? If so, what could bring that about? </p>
<p>Trying to manage or avoid envious feelings doesn’t allow us to answer – or even ask – those questions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144903/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jessica Rosenfeld does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We’re supposed to suppress feelings of envy. But what if the kind spurred by school shutdowns, frontline work and cramped apartments are worth exploring – and acting upon?Jessica Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of English Literature, Washington University in St. LouisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1294652020-01-09T17:07:58Z2020-01-09T17:07:58ZStudent success is about more than hard work<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309078/original/file-20200108-107243-ncyxf9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Entering university from a middle-class family is easier.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is that time of year again when South Africans celebrate National Senior Certificate results, ushering a generation of youth out of the school system and into the world. Of the <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2020-01-08-matric-class-hits-80-pass-mark-for-the-first-time">788,717</a> who successfully completed these exams, 186,058 achieved passes that potentially open the doors of university study. </p>
<p>As we read about the results, we take delight in the success stories, like the student from a poorer background scoring multiple distinctions despite having no properly qualified maths or science teacher. Or the rural student who earned a university entrance despite walking long distances to school each day. These achievements <a href="https://www.politicsweb.co.za/documents/matric-pass-rate-a-poor-indicator--ee">should be celebrated</a>, as they are truly exceptional. </p>
<p>But the problem with these stories, uplifting as they may be, is that they often carry a subtext. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If he can do it, why can’t <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/363480/4-tables-and-graphs-you-should-see-ahead-of-south-africas-matric-results/">the rest of them</a>?” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The presumption that hard work alone leads to success – and that laziness leads to failure – follows the student into the university. Here, despite a wealth of careful research that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2011.527723">proclaims otherwise</a>, most people believe that success emerges from the intelligence and work ethic of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Theorizing-Social-Class-and-Education-1st-Edition/Reay-Vincent/p/book/9780415842297">the individual</a>.</p>
<p>In a recent journal article, we have <a href="http://cristal.epubs.ac.za/index.php/cristal/article/view/184">argued</a> that academics often ignore the research on student failure that shows it emerges from a number of factors. Many of these factors are beyond the attributes inherent in the student. Instead, most hold on to the simplistic common sense assumption that success comes to those who deserve it. Academics who hold this view are prone to assume that students are successful because of what an individual student does or does not do. </p>
<p>But the reality is a far more complex interplay of individual attributes with social structures which unfairly affect some more than others. </p>
<h2>The lure of meritocratic explanations</h2>
<p>There is a widely held view that education is a <a href="http://cristal.epubs.ac.za/index.php/cristal/article/view/80">meritocracy</a>, where success is determined by the merit of the individual. The term was coined in British sociologist Michael Young’s 1958 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Meritocracy-Classics-Organization-Management/dp/1560007044">The Rise of the Meritocracy</a>. In it, he described a dystopian society stratified by educational level and intelligence. The term has been appropriated to suggest that those who do well at university do so on the basis of personal effort and acumen rather than as a result of their privileged background.</p>
<p>University academics have <a href="https://www.africanminds.co.za/dd-product/going-to-university-the-influence-of-higher-education-on-the-lives-of-young-south-africans/">access to research</a> looking at the complex mechanisms of higher education. Despite this, many are likely to believe that the university <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-class-and-social-capital-affect-university-students-92602">is a meritocracy</a>. Believing that students succeed or fail on their own merits sits more comfortably than scrutinising the role universities play in reinforcing divisions in society.</p>
<p>In every country around the world, higher education success most strongly correlates to <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137534804">social class</a>. Parental education levels, wealth, social influence and status are the strongest indicator of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212017/the-tyranny-of-the-meritocracy-by-lani-guinier/">university success</a>. But class does not work in isolation from other forces. </p>
<p>Social class intersects in varying ways with race, gender, language, and so on. In some countries, for example, race is used as a means of dividing society and assigning social class. In many countries, gender too plays a role in who gets access to the powerful knowledge offered by the academy. All of these factors and more have a role to play. But it is social class that most consistently tracks <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/46608">higher education success</a> across geographical contexts.</p>
<p>If you did well at university, chances are that you worked hard and you’re bright. But those two characteristics probably account for a much smaller part of your success than most of us would care to admit.</p>
<h2>What class privilege looks like</h2>
<p>Entering university from a middle-class family doesn’t only confer financial, health, educational, emotional and nutritional benefits. It also provides less visible privileges. A middle-class student probably had role models like relatives who went to university, possibly even the same university, who could explain the university system. It’s likely that they took part in everyday conversations about professional identities, and they could probably draw on social networks to assist them in adapting to university life and then entering the workplace.</p>
<p>The late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?vid=ISBN0803983204&id=vl0n9_wrrbUC&dq=%22Reproduction+in+Education%22">argued</a> that underprivileged students fail not because they are less intelligent than middle-class students but because the curriculum is biased towards what middle-class students are already accustomed to. It is this that reinforces the relationship between social class and success in higher education around the world.</p>
<p>Many of the privileges that middle-class students enjoy are so arcane as to be invisible, even to themselves. These students often bring with them a sense that their role at university is to engage not just with facts but with the disciplinary rules for how knowledge gets made. Typically they are willing to challenge what is presented to them and to seek flaws in the evidence provided in the texts they encounter. They also have a stronger confidence in their right to be there and to participate fully. These, and many other ways, aid middle-class students to enter the academy primed for success.</p>
<h2>What needs to happen?</h2>
<p>Academics who are committed to social justice often have to grapple with the fact that the university does not reward students on the basis of merit so much as on privilege. This calls for teaching in ways that constantly seek to make the expectations of the classroom transparent and the disciplinary norms and values explicit. </p>
<p>Teachers need to make these practices clear to students and, in the process, harness <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2011.582096">students’ agency</a> to craft their own place in the world and their own contribution to knowledge. Regular feedback on student work, for example, allows students to begin to see what counts as knowledge in the particular discipline.</p>
<p>It is also important to expose academic practices to scrutiny. Increasingly the academy is being challenged to consider forms of knowledge long omitted by the <a href="https://theconversation.com/universities-cant-decolonise-the-curriculum-without-defining-it-first-63948">colonial order</a>. </p>
<p>The university promises society that it will produce both powerful knowledge and competent graduates adept at using such knowledge to tackle societal and environmental problems. But not all university practices are inherently powerful and much powerful knowledge remains outside its walls.</p>
<p>If some students enter the university with easier access to the practices needed for success, nobody can pretend that institutions are a meritocracy rewarding attributes inherent in <a href="https://theconversation.com/universities-cant-just-wash-their-hands-of-student-failure-40664">the individual</a>. Understanding the complex relationship between social class and educational success requires that educators reconsider almost all aspects of their teaching.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129465/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simpiwe Sobuwa is the Vice-Chariperson of the Professional Board for Emergency Care and a Council Member of the Health Professions Council of South Africa. I however write this article in my academic capacity.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sioux McKenna does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many of the privileges that middle-class students enjoy are not obvious, even to themselves.Sioux McKenna, Director of Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes UniversitySimpiwe Sobuwa, Head of Department: Emergency Medical Care & Rescue, Durban University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1271602019-11-26T14:26:33Z2019-11-26T14:26:33ZWhat to do with those Thanksgiving leftovers? Look to the French<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303518/original/file-20191125-74584-1bsviim.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=137%2C129%2C2175%2C1373&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Leftovers, as one French chef put it, 'can be as good as, if not better than, the first time they are served.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/half-eaten-turkey-carcass-on-blue-77204038?src=e3e515e0-b44d-4b0c-92de-10183888f5d9-5-66">Tom Grundy/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s the day after Thanksgiving, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/turning-to-turkeys-tryptophan-to-boost-mood-not-so-fast-125633">tryptophan</a> has worn off, and there are towers of <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-slag-to-swag-the-story-of-earl-tuppers-fantastic-plastics-100564">Tupperware</a> filled with turkey, stuffing and potatoes in your fridge.</p>
<p>If you rely on your microwave, you might simply resign yourself to eating the same meal, over and over again, until the leftovers run out.</p>
<p>But you don’t have to get stuck in a cycle of nuke and repeat. This Thanksgiving, take inspiration from the French, who saw leftovers as an outlet for creativity.</p>
<p>My research on the history of French home cooking reveals how restyling dinner scraps first became fashionable more than a century ago. </p>
<h2>Reheating ‘with art and discernment’</h2>
<p>In 19th-century France, leftovers were a way of life for the <a href="http://www.pur-editions.fr/detail.php?idOuv=3147">lower classes</a>. </p>
<p>In the countryside, the broth from the evening <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/pot-au-feu-convivial-familial-histoires-dun-mythe/oclc/300065944?referer=br&ht=edition">beef stew</a> would become the basis of breakfast the next morning. In cities, street hawkers known as “<a href="https://www.doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2017.22">arlequins</a>” purchased dinner scraps from restaurants and rich households to resell them to the poor. For these Frenchmen and -women, repurposing previous meals wasn’t about style but survival. Because of their association with poverty, leftovers were stigmatized up until the late 19th century. </p>
<p>But by the turn of the 20th century, it had become hip to whip something up with the remains from last night’s meal.</p>
<p>In 1892, French chef Alfred Suzanne wrote that “there are dishes which, when reheated with art and discernment, transformed with taste and presented in an appetizing manner… can be as good as, if not better than, the first time they are served.” In the preface to his encyclopedic cookbook, “<a href="https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb31422725c">150 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers</a>,” the former chef to British royalty declared that the “deep-seated prejudice that many people have” against leftovers was “an error.” </p>
<p>Suzanne’s colleagues and culinary connoisseurs concurred. French food critic <a href="https://data.bnf.fr/fr/12976931/fulbert-dumonteil/">Fulbert-Dumonteil</a> <a href="https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0001775372?highlight=*&posInPage=3&bookmark=f517caa0-7a3a-4697-ab12-6c27958b14e0&queryid=00c849fa-28b9-439e-b3ad-ba0c462471c2&searchType=all">praised</a> the chef for explaining “all the ingenious and charming ways to restore mutilated bits and pieces from epic feasts” and turn “cumbersome remains” into something that delights the palate. </p>
<h2>Marketing to the masses</h2>
<p>Why did “leftovers” make the leap from insipid plates peddled by “arlequins” to inspired dishes perfected by culinary artists? </p>
<p>In 1882, France’s new republican government passed legislation <a href="https://www.gouvernement.fr/partage/8723-la-loi-jules-ferry-rend-l-enseignement-primaire-public-et-gratuit">mandating education</a> for all children ages 6 to 13. Many public schoolchildren came from the lower and lower-middle classes, and educators designed home economics lessons <a href="http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/docview/304347150?accountid=12768.">with this in mind</a>. Girls learned how to preserve and prepare their leftovers safely, nutritiously and economically. They were also taught that their talent for accommodating leftovers was a reflection of their thrift and resourcefulness – <a href="https://www.sunypress.edu/p-757-schooling-the-daughters-of-mari.aspx">the markers of middle-class French femininity</a>. </p>
<p>As the percentage of literate females spiked in France, the publishing industry pounced on this potential market. The late 19th century saw more and more domestic manuals aimed at “ménagères” – wives and mothers from the working and lower-middle classes. Many guides featured a chapter on fixing leftovers, while some, such as “<a href="https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb312451543">100 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers</a>” and “<a href="https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb33247084h">The Art of Accommodating Leftovers, Dedicated to Those of Meager Means</a>,” made revamping remains their central focus.</p>
<h2>France’s top chefs join in</h2>
<p>In the 1890s top chefs also started to contribute recipes to domestic cooking magazines. This genre of culinary literature <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/All_Manners_of_Food.html?id=wdRnNPb8z3sC">proliferated</a> in the late 19th century during a period of rapid growth for the popular press. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303528/original/file-20191125-74557-1ti39yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=935&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Orpen’s ‘Le Chef de l'Hôtel Chatham, Paris’ (1921).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Orpen_Le_Chef_de_l%27H%C3%B4tel_Chatham,_Paris.jpg">Royal Academy of Arts</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Chefs wanted to appeal to a wide audience, and their contributions ranged from columns on economical cooking to instructions for assembling “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi%C3%A8ce_mont%C3%A9e">pièces montées</a>,” which are elaborate edifices made of confections. Many of these journals designated a special section for accommodating leftovers, with titles like “Utilizing Leftovers” and “Delicious Ways to Accommodate the Scraps.”</p>
<p>The repetitive nomenclature belies the range of the recipes printed under these rubrics. Some were simple and modest and reflected the original rationale for leftovers, which was economical. </p>
<p>For example, a July 1907 recipe for “Lisette’s Cake” in the magazine <a href="https://data.bnf.fr/fr/32753419/la_cuisine_des_familles__paris_/">Family Cooking</a> offered a sweet solution for yesterday’s bread. The cook needed only to soak the loaf in sweetened milk, strain the mixture through a fine sieve, add two eggs and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. </p>
<p>But some recipes got complicated and costly. Family Cooking also published a leftovers recipe for “Veal à la Russe,” which required, in addition to veal chops, a quarter pound of butter, anchovies, tomato coulis, jus and truffles for garnish. The <a href="https://www.cordonbleu.edu/news/ouverture-ecole-paris/fr">Cordon Bleu Magazine</a> suggested repurposing leftover pheasant in a way that required an hour of boiling in fine <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demi-glace">demi-glace</a> and two hours of cooling on ice, before being pureed by hand, seasoned, molded and fried. </p>
<p>Such recipes would hardly qualify as time- or cost-saving. But practicality wasn’t the only point anymore. Scholars have shown how women at the turn of the century read popular and prescriptive literature as a “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Bourgeois_Consumption.html?id=unuhYgEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description">form of escapism</a>” that encouraged them to “<a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22400">fantasize</a>” about what modern domestic life could be. </p>
<p>By turning leftovers into an art form, early home cooking magazines inspired a modern generation of home cooks to be creative and think critically about cooking. And they left their legacy to us and our leftovers. </p>
<p>So this year, instead of scraping together another tiresome turkey sandwich, try <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/792/Untitled_2.pdf?1574698612">a turkey recipe</a> adapted from Alfred Suzanne’s “150 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/303512/original/file-20191125-74580-md2vc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A leftover turkey recipe adapted from Alfred Suzanne’s ‘150 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Samantha Presnal</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>[ <em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklysmart">You can get our highlights each weekend</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samantha Presnal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It doesn’t have to be a week of tiresome turkey sandwiches. A food historian explains how the French came to see leftovers as an outlet for creativity and experimentation.Samantha Presnal, Fellow, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1144152019-03-29T10:45:27Z2019-03-29T10:45:27ZWhat happens to rural and small-town Trump voters after Trump is gone?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266430/original/file-20190328-139371-1kgb6d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How will Trump's rural and small-town voters affect American politics after he's gone?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Postcards-From-Trumps-America-Georgia/30103adbed3741f79f204a94981bfe72/19/0">AP/David Goldman</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If one word can capture the sentiment of rural and small-town dwellers in recent years, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/13/how-rural-resentment-helps-explain-the-surprising-victory-of-donald-trump/?utm_term=.7dfd26e6ccc4">it is “resentment</a>.”</p>
<p>I am a scholar who <a href="https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/departments/school-of-interdisciplinary-global-studies/people/edwinbenton.aspx">studies politics at the state and local level</a>. Residents of rural and small-town communities believe they are not getting their fair share of government attention and vital resources compared to urban dwellers. They believe that America is moving away from them.</p>
<p>As the 2020 presidential campaign gears up, these resentful Americans will play a key role. How <a href="https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14/501737150/rural-voters-played-a-big-part-in-helping-trump-defeat-clinton%5D(https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14/501737150/rural-voters-played-a-big-part-in-helping-trump-defeat-clinton">strong supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 election</a> vote in 2020 will depend on whether the president has delivered on the promises he made to help them out.</p>
<p>Will this growing divide affect American politics beyond Trump?</p>
<h2>Left behind</h2>
<p>Political scientist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/13/how-rural-resentment-helps-explain-the-surprising-victory-of-donald-trump/?utm_term=.7dfd26e6ccc4">Katherine Cramer has spent over a decade doing field work</a> in 27 small Wisconsin towns to understand how <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/16/13645116/rural-resentment-elites-trump">people use social class identity to interpret politics</a>. Cramer found that people in these rural areas <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo22879533.html">feel as though they are being ignored</a> by urban elites and urban institutions like government and the media at a time when they are struggling to make ends meet.</p>
<p>They believe their <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/rural-america-economy-revive.html">communities are dying, the economy is leaving them behind, and that young people, money and their livelihoods</a> are going somewhere else.</p>
<p>They think that <a href="https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2393-rural-america-is-losing-young-people-">major decisions affecting their lives are being made far away in big cities</a>. And perhaps most importantly, they feel that no one is listening to them or their ideas about things that are important to them.</p>
<p>Most distressing to those living in this situation is the belief that no one, and especially no one in government, really cares.</p>
<h2>From resentment to division and deadlock</h2>
<p>To date, the phenomenon of “resentment” has been responsible for adding <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/urban-rural-vote-swing/">another layer of heightened division among Americans</a>, including an increase in political polarization.</p>
<p>That makes it much more difficult for federal government officials, as well as those at the state and local level, <a href="http://www.apsanet.org/portals/54/Files/Task%20Force%20Reports/Chapter2Mansbridge.pdf">to reach consensus on important issues of the day</a>.</p>
<p>University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book, “<a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land">Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right</a>” helps in explaining how this frustration and anger of small-town and rural area dwellers has resulted in <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/strangers-in-their-own-land-anger-and-mourning-on-the-american-right/oclc/986603010">increasing political support for Republican</a> candidates, generally, and for Trump, specifically.</p>
<p>Given their intensifying feelings of resentment for being ignored and left behind, rural and small-town dwellers were particularly receptive to the slogan touted by Trump in his campaign – “Make America Great Again!”</p>
<p>Trump won the country’s small town and non-metropolitan areas by 63.2 percent to 31.3 percent, with his largest vote shares <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716217712696?journalCode=anna">coming from the most rural areas</a>.</p>
<p>Like other Republican presidential candidates over the last 10 years, Trump garnered a large majority of the vote in traditional rural areas like Appalachia, the Great Plains and parts of the South.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, however, Trump also won a substantial proportion of the traditionally Democratic small town and rural vote in several key Midwestern industrial areas. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/analysis-rural-america-silent-majority-powered-trump-win-n681221">He won 57 percent of that vote in Michigan, 63 percent in Wisconsin and 71 percent in Pennsylvania</a>.</p>
<h2>Why Trump triumphed</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-obamacare-analysis-idUSKBN135171">Trump implied or clearly promised to repeal Obamacare</a>, <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1397/build-wall-and-make-mexico-pay-it/">build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border</a> and <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/subjects/immigration/">deport around 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.</a></p>
<p>Other appealing policies were <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1424/cut-taxes-everyone/">tax cuts for both businesses and individuals</a>; significant <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2018/10/23/trump-exceeds-one-in-two-out-goals-on-cutting-regulations-but-it-may-be-getting-tougher/">reductions in the regulation of business and industry</a>; and <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1411/raise-tariffs-goods-imported-us/">import tariffs on foreign goods that compete unfairly</a> with American-made products.</p>
<p>Data collected by the <a href="https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/">Cooperative Congressional Election Study</a> (from a national survey of more than 54,000 respondents) clearly show that people living in small towns and rural areas who supported these kinds of policies were <a href="https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/doi/full/10.1177/0002716217712696">decisively more likely to vote for Trump rather than Clinton in 2016</a>.</p>
<p>Above all, Trump promised a shift in the focus of the national government so that much more attention would be directed to <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/1109/Trump-rides-rural-rebellion-to-stunning-victory">rural areas and small towns and the challenges they faced</a>.</p>
<p>This evidently buoyed the hope of Trump supporters in these areas that they would be getting something closer to their fair share of government attention and resources.</p>
<p><iframe id="ovo3W" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ovo3W/6/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>Voting implications</h2>
<p>There is ample evidence of voting patterns in recent years – even before the 2016 election – that suggest that voters in rural areas and small towns were increasingly voting for Republican candidates in national and state elections. This trend was quite visible from Republican and Democratic vote proportions in <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716217712696?journalCode=anna">the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections</a>.</p>
<p>In 2008, 53 percent of rural voters cast ballots for the Republican presidential candidate; 59 percent did in 2012; and 62 percent did in 2016.</p>
<p>This was most clear in the 2016 election in the 2,332 counties that make up small-town and rural America, where Trump swamped Hillary Clinton by winning <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rural-america-lifted-trump-to-the-presidency-support-is-strong-but-not-monolithic/2017/06/16/df4f9156-4ac9-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.e53f08d44b54">60 percent as opposed to 34 percent of the vote</a>.</p>
<p>Trump’s 26-point advantage over Clinton in rural America was much greater than had been the case for Republican presidential nominees in the four previous elections.</p>
<p>The Trump appeal and the growing urban-rural division in the country is also evident from the fact that Trump’s vote percentage in rural America was 29 points higher than he received in the nation’s urban counties and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716217712696?journalCode=anna">far larger than for Republican presidential nominees between 2000 and 2012</a>.</p>
<p>Moreover, responses to a 2017 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey of rural and small-town voters in the 2016 election indicate that <a href="http://files.kff.org/attachment/Topline-The-Health-Care-Views-and-Experiences-of-Rural-Americans">they were more likely to vote for Trump and also agree with him</a> on a variety of issues.</p>
<p>Those included immigration, tax cuts, eliminating regulations on businesses, making better trade deals, targeting more infrastructure projects and federal government services to rural areas and small towns, and appointing more conservative judges to the federal courts.</p>
<p>But, did this trend of strong support from rural voters for Republican candidates, including Trump, continue into the 2018 midterm election?</p>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/686531523/progress-report-president-trumps-campaign-promises-2-years-later">About half of Trump’s ideas and policy proposals</a> have been accomplished, with the others yet to gain traction in Congress, two years after his election. So his record of delivering for these rural voters is mixed.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, they stuck with Trump in the 2018 election.</p>
<p>“<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/415441-americas-urban-rural-divide-deepens">Rural voters stormed to the polls in virtually unprecedented numbers</a> in 2018 and once again delivered for the president they voted for in 2016,” The Hill reported. They delivered Trump “a handful of critical Senate and gubernatorial elections in ruby red states.”</p>
<p>While not totally surprising, the Trump camp did not know what to expect going into the midterm election, given the numerous investigations of the president and his low public approval rating.</p>
<p>Somewhat more surprising is what has been happening in a purple state like Florida, where Republicans have improved on both their turnout and overall performance in <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/415441-americas-urban-rural-divide-deepens">rural areas for several elections in a row.</a></p>
<p>Newly elected Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ran ahead of Trump’s 2016 performance and former Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/415441-americas-urban-rural-divide-deepens">2014 vote share in 13 of 16 counties in the Florida Panhandle</a>. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-florida-elections.html">Rick Scott unseated longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson</a> by piling up large margins in the small towns and rural areas of the state. Similar scenarios in U.S. Senate races took place in key states like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-missouri-elections.html">Missouri</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-indiana-elections.html">Indiana</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-texas-elections.html">Texas</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-tennessee-elections.html">Tennessee</a>, where Republicans won huge victories in rural counties.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266437/original/file-20190328-139352-p2c6kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trump won Iowa in 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Trump-s-Iowa-Voters/36abb3bec83d44d1afdbd41c9973b8dc/19/0">AP/Charlie Neibergall</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Beyond Trump</h2>
<p>Survey data collected from over 90,000 people by the <a href="http://www.norc.org/Pages/default.aspx">National Opinion Research Center</a> at the University of Chicago in November 2018 paint a vivid picture of the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/graphics/election-2018-votecast-poll">continuing urban-rural/small-town divide</a>.</p>
<p>Results show that residents of small towns and rural areas are much more supportive of the Republican Party and its candidates than people in urban and suburban areas.</p>
<p>In addition, the most ardent supporters of Republicans are among those small-town and rural dwellers who are white and male, have less than a college education and vote on a regular basis.</p>
<p>I believe that the urban-rural/small-town divide will continue to act as a major force in politics for the remainder of the Trump era – and probably longer.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to correct a reference to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114415/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>J. Edwin Benton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Rural and small-town residents believe they aren’t getting their fair share from the government. A majority of them were Trump supporters in 2016. How will they vote when Trump is gone?J. Edwin Benton, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of South FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/960872018-05-04T20:56:25Z2018-05-04T20:56:25ZShould we celebrate Karl Marx on his 200th birthday?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217800/original/file-20180504-166890-8ta56q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz, in eastern Germany.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Jens Meyer</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Some would argue that Karl Marx, author of “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/">Capital</a>,” has been proven wrong on just about everything he wrote. The founder of scientific socialism was born 200 years ago on May 5.</p>
<p>These naysayers would point out that Soviet socialism imploded decades ago, and that China <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-went-from-communist-to-capitalist-2015-10">is heading merrily</a> down the capitalist path. Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote in “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/">The Communist Manifesto</a>” that the capitalist ruling class “produced its own grave-diggers” in the proletariat – that is, the working class. However, we have yet to see workers pick up the shovel and bury capitalism once and for all.</p>
<p>Activists seeking to combat injustice and inequality, it can be argued, <a href="https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/%7Eoliver/SOC924/Articles/JohnstonLaranaGusfieldIdentitiesgrievancesandnewsocialmovements.pdf">have turned</a> not to class struggle but to social movements focused on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and the environment. “Intersectionality” – the notion that people are defined by multiple identities, where class is just one among many – would seem to have <a href="https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/siso.2018.82.2.248?journalCode=siso">a lot more appeal</a> today than the effort to end “exploitation.” </p>
<p>However, as a <a href="https://ncas.rutgers.edu/about-us/faculty-staff/barbara-c-foley">scholar of Marxist theory and practice</a>, I find that such announcements of the death of Marxism are premature. </p>
<h2>Marx’s message is still relevant</h2>
<p>In the wake of World War II, various economists heralded the <a href="https://econ.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2016/02/Pini-The-Kuznets-Curve-and-Inequality.pdf">narrowing of the gap</a> between the richest and the poorest as evidence of the disappearance of class antagonisms. </p>
<p>But the long curve of capitalist development suggests that has widened, as illustrated in economist Thomas Piketty’s book “<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674430006&content=reviews">Capital in the Twenty-First Century</a>.”</p>
<p>The candle of the 2012 Occupy movement may have guttered, but its mantra of the 99 percent opposing the 1 percent <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35339475">is now a truiusm</a>. Everyone knows that the super-rich are <a href="https://www.globalresearch.ca/wealth-inequality-the-1-versus-the-99-realignment-repression-or-revolution/5495658">richer than ever</a>, while for most of the working-class majority – many of them caught in the uncertainty of the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/ubers-100-million-settlement-with-drivers-settles-very-little-heres-why-58336">gig economy</a>” – <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2006/07/01/six-points-on-class/">belt-tightening</a> has become the new normal.</p>
<p>Those laboring in the formal and informal economies of much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, needless to say, <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2015/07/01/imperialism-in-the-twenty-first-century">face conditions</a> that are far more dire. </p>
<p>Marx was correct, it would seem, when he wrote that capitalism keeps the working class poor.</p>
<p>He was also spot-on about capital’s inherent instability. There is some validity to <a href="https://isreview.org/issue/73/explaining-crisis">the joke</a> that “Marxists have predicted correctly 12 of the last three financial crises.” </p>
<p>Marx’s reputation has made a startling comeback, however, at times in unexpected circles.</p>
<p>In discussing the 2008 financial meltdown, one Wall Street Journal commentator <a href="http://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/cape-times/20150311/281947426321874">wrote</a>: “Karl Marx got it right, at some point capitalism can destroy itself. We thought markets worked. They’re not working.”</p>
<p>In 2017, the National Review <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/03/socialism-poll-american-culture-faith-institute-george-barna-tradition-liberty-capitalism/">reported that a poll</a> found as many as 40 percent of people in the U.S. “now prefer socialism to capitalism.” </p>
<p>Notably, too, the C-word – Communism – has been making a reappearance, as is indicated by recent series of titles: <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/513-the-idea-of-communism">The Idea of Communism</a>,“ ”<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1872-the-communist-hypothesis">The Communist Hypothesis</a>,“ ”<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1755-the-actuality-of-communism">The Actuality of Communism</a>,“ and ”<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1151-the-communist-horizon">The Communist Horizon</a>.“ Until recently, the word was largely avoided by neo- and post-Marxist academics.</p>
<p>Class analysis remains alive and well. This is because capitalism is no longer as seemingly natural as the air we breathe. It is a system that came into being and can also go out of being.</p>
<h2>Is a better world possible?</h2>
<p>To say that there are threads connecting the present to a possible future of universal human emancipation is not to state that capitalism will collapse by itself. People have to make this happen.</p>
<p>Those who would like to see the world move through and past its present state face huge challenges, both theoretical and practical. Not least among these challenges is the need to parse out what succeeded and what failed in the past century’s attempts to create egalitarian societies.</p>
<p>But Marxism is not equivalent to everything that has been performed in its name. Marx’s work remains, to my mind, the most compelling framework for analyzing how the conflicting tendencies in present-day society contain the seeds of a more humane future.</p>
<p>Thanks, Karl. And, happy birthday.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96087/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Foley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A scholar of literary radicalism asks whether Marx’s writings are at all relevant to the world’s struggles with inequality today and why he’s no longer being relegated to the dustbin of history.Barbara Foley, Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies, Rutgers University - NewarkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/938102018-03-29T10:25:11Z2018-03-29T10:25:11ZThe Victorians portrayed paedophiles as strangers – and the myth persists today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212426/original/file-20180328-109179-qdgiqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/confirm/514093894?src=1ex8_Xx2QvZH5KV0li4wJQ-1-0&size=medium_jpg">Dm_Cherry/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Victorians portrayed paedophiles as scary strangers and social outsiders. By portraying them in this way, it was possible to avoid the unthinkable reality that children could be abused in respectable middle-class homes. </p>
<p>This myth of the stranger paedophile is still persistent today. And even though the evidence shows that most child sexual abuse is <a href="http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604167718/abstract">perpetrated by close family members</a>, the stranger myth continues to distract our attention from the most common type of abuse.</p>
<p>The way we understand child sexual abuse today has its roots in social and medical theories developed in the late-19th century. The stranger myth originated partly in these theories and also in sensational journalism and popular fiction. Because it was a taboo subject, it was impossible to represent child sexual abuse directly in cultural works like novels. It was even difficult to discuss it in textbooks or newspaper articles, and the focus was kept firmly on stranger perpetrators. </p>
<p>An important event that helped make the discussion of child sexual abuse public was the publication of a series of newspaper exposés of child prostitution in 1885 by the investigative journalist, WT Stead. With the sensational title, <a href="https://attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute/mt1.php">The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon</a>, the reports described a booming London trade in providing young girls for violent sexual exploitation. </p>
<p>Another event that opened up the discussion was the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595948/">creation in 1896 of the medical concept of paedophilia</a>. It was publicised in a <a href="https://archive.org/details/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft">very successful textbook</a> on deviant sexuality, which focused on violent sexual crimes committed by strangers and almost entirely overlooked the act of incest. These treatments of the issue helped keep the focus off domestic problems. They allowed child sexual abuse to be <a href="https://www.crcpress.com/Child-Sexual-Abuse-in-Victorian-England/Jackson/p/book/9780415226509">portrayed as a lower-class problem of public morality</a>, associated with stereotypes of poverty, slums, substance abuse and poor hygiene.</p>
<h2>Gothic conventions</h2>
<p>In the realm of fiction, some writers got around the taboo by using the metaphors of gothic writing to sneak sexual content past the censor. In this way, child sexual abuse could be represented using the figure of the monster who preys on children. </p>
<p>For example, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), there is a bizarre incident where Mr Hyde cruelly tramples a little girl underfoot on a nighttime London street. This has been <a href="https://books.google.ie/books?id=sK3SeTvmm7QC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">interpreted</a> as a covert reference to the problem of child prostitution, coming just after the maiden tribute scandal the year before.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The monstrous Mr Hyde, who ‘tramples’ a young girl.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10048960">National Printing & Engraving Company/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The vampirism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, probably the best-known Victorian gothic tale, has <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560">long been interpreted as violently sexual</a>. But the fact that most of the vampires’ victims in the book are children, means it too can be read as covertly representing child sexual abuse. By showing highly sexualised monsters preying on children, Dracula and many similar popular tales may have helped to circulate the stranger myth to a wide audience. </p>
<p>Gothic writing also gave credence to the stranger myth in another important way. Because it was difficult to describe child sexual abuse directly, even the non-fiction accounts often used gothic conventions to hint at unmentionable acts. The child prostitution articles used the sensational metaphor of the “sacrifice” of girls to the “insatiable” “maw” of “the London minotaur”. And the medical textbook, which featured a number of cases that involved cannibalism, even referred to the perpetrators of sexual murder as “modern vampires”.</p>
<h2>Victorian attitudes die hard</h2>
<p>Although it is no longer taboo to discuss child sexual abuse or to describe it explicitly, it is still not an experience or issue that is easily raised, especially when it occurs in a domestic setting. The <a href="https://arrow.dit.ie/icr/vol10/iss1/1/">focus is still on extreme cases</a> committed by strangers and treated in a sensational way by the media, such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Madeleine_McCann">disappearance of Madeleine McCann</a>. </p>
<p>And the modern horror genre still seems to be used often to engage with child sexual abuse, with a continuing tendency to distance the perpetrators by making them monstrous. For example, in the classic 1984 horror movie, Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger was <a href="http://www.overlookpress.com/categories/screams-and-nightmares-1.html">originally conceived of as a child molester</a>, and this is made <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/nightmare-film-casts-freddy-child-molester-70239">explicit in the 2010 remake</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Freddy Krueger, originally conceived as a child molester.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23238422">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although we like to think we live in more enlightened times, we seem to be reproducing the unhelpful disavowal of domestic child sexual abuse that was so prevalent in Victorian times, and over-focusing on “stranger danger” and extreme cases. We are now willing to point the finger at institutional abuse, for example, but we are still unwilling to admit that child sexual abuse happens behind the closed doors of ordinary-seeming families. And this makes it even more difficult for the survivors of abuse to deal with their experiences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93810/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ailise Bulfin receives funding from the Trinity College Dublin Wellcome Trust-SFI-HRB co-funded Institutional Strategic Support Fund. </span></em></p>Most child sex abuse happens within families, but we still cling on to the Victorian idea of paedophiles as outsiders.Ailise Bulfin, Research Fellow, ‘Catalysing Neurohumanities research into Child Sexual Abuse’, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/926022018-03-06T14:59:24Z2018-03-06T14:59:24ZHow class and social capital affect university students<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208477/original/file-20180301-152575-1494gth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C160%2C849%2C837&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Work hard, read your books, and university will be a breeze...or will it? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a great deal of comfort to be had in the idea that success at university is primarily or exclusively the result of a student’s hard work. All that’s needed is for students to do their best and fairness will prevail. Students who don’t apply themselves will fail. End of story. </p>
<p>Or is it?</p>
<p>A far more complex picture of student success and failure has emerged from <a href="http://www.africanminds.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/9781928331698_web.pdf">a study</a> tracking the influence of higher education on young people’s lives. We worked with 73 people who first registered for a BA or BSc six years before the data was collected. They had pursued these degrees at three South African research-intensive universities.</p>
<p>Many of the participants shared a strong sense that their university years had provided them with access to powerful knowledge. They felt better able to act in ways aligned to their values and goals. But not all had been able to attain this overwhelmingly positive experience equally. Social class – as well as a range of other factors in the institutions themselves – played a huge role in people’s experiences of accessing and succeeding in higher education, and then getting into the workplace.</p>
<p>Those from impoverished rural settlements or towns, or from peri-urban townships, experienced far more significant hurdles than their urban, middle-class counterparts. This was in part about connections: middle-class, urban students were able to draw on networks before, during and after university. So they tended to enjoy shorter, smoother routes through the institution.</p>
<p>This finding is neither new, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212017/the-tyranny-of-the-meritocracy-by-lani-guinier/9780807078129/">nor specific to South Africa</a>. The study refutes common sense explanations of higher education success and failure that continue to dominate in our <a href="https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1391&context=ij-sotl">universities</a>. These understand higher education success to be predominantly a function of attributes inherent in the individual. Failure is understood to result from the student’s <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2015.1072148">lack of such attributes</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, common sense explanations <a href="http://cristal.epubs.ac.za/index.php/cristal/article/view/80">conceptualise universities</a> as being acultural, apolitical spaces where people acquire skills. This maintains the fiction that higher education is a <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088023&content=reviews">meritocracy</a> which fairly rewards individual students’ hard work, motivation, “language skills” and intelligence.</p>
<p>Our data shows the institutional culture, the curriculum structure, teaching and learning approaches, and family support and relatives’ own knowledge of how universities work all played a role in students’ making their way through the system.</p>
<p>Our findings raise a number of concerns for institutions – and individuals – who would like to see fair opportunities for young people wanting to advance their education. </p>
<h2>Family support</h2>
<p>In South Africa, as in similar economies, it is a huge investment for a family to have a young person who is not earning for a number of years after school, and who might also add costs to the household during this period. </p>
<p>The families of some of the participants were able to manage this investment. Some funded their studies through a combination of resources from bursaries, family, or part-time work.</p>
<p>Others, though, came from families with absolutely no financial flexibility and were frequently in financial crisis. This pressure took a toll on the students’ academic progress. Even those who had some funding from the <a href="http://www.nsfas.org.za/content/">National Student Financial Aid Scheme</a> struggled: they had no safety net for any crisis. It took a great deal of energy to manage their basic financial requirements. </p>
<p>But the extent to which the family was able to foster aspirations and engage with the young person’s deliberations and choices was perhaps even more important than financial support. </p>
<p>The data showed that having people with whom to discuss their decisions played a very important role in participants’ higher education journey. This meant having informed people – not necessarily graduates themselves – to talk through their choices. </p>
<p>For instance, a young person might not get access to their first choice of university, and could turn to relatives for discussions and alternative ideas. A more challenging experience for some participants was when they failed academically in their chosen degree and had to figure out a new course of action. </p>
<p>Much of this kind of understanding came from another family member’s experience of going to university. But it was also closely tied to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0142569042000236952">cultural capital</a>: social class played <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01425692.2011.527723">a significant role</a>. The transition to the expectations of the university, to its peculiar and discipline specific knowledge making practices for example, is difficult for all students. But access to these powerful knowledge practices is uneven and it is a disservice to pretend <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/books/review/degrees-of-inequality-by-suzanne-mettler.html">otherwise</a>. </p>
<p>The social side of university life was also enormously important to these young people, as might be expected. Fitting in, making friends and experiencing campus life were often mentioned. Students from less well-off families sometimes struggled, feeling they had to keep up with more affluent friends in a materialistic culture.</p>
<h2>Cohesion</h2>
<p>How can prospective students from settings where family members or teachers do not have the cultural capital related to university study get support in making decisions? And how can universities assist in attending to these needs once they have made their way into higher education? </p>
<p>While universities can’t attend to all societal problems, the data would suggest that institutions have some role to play in forging social cohesion among their own staff and student body.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited abstract from “Going to University: The influence of Higher Education on the lives of young South Africans” (2018) Case, J., Marshall, D., McKenna, S. & Mogashana, D. African Minds. Available for <a href="http://www.africanminds.co.za/dd-product/going-to-university-the-influence-of-higher-education-on-the-lives-of-young-south-africans/">download here</a>.</em> </p>
<p><em>The other authors of the book from which this piece is extracted are Professor Jenni Case (Head of Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech), Professor Delia Marshall (Faculty of Natural Science at the University of the Western Cape) and Dr Disaapele Mogashana (student success coach and consultant at <a href="http://www.mytsi.co.za/">True Success Institute</a>).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92602/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors of the book 'Going to University: The influence of higher education on the lives of young South Africans' are grateful for the financial support of the NRF.</span></em></p>Social class plays a huge role in people’s experiences of accessing and succeeding in higher education.Sioux McKenna, Director of PG Studies & Higher Education Studies PhD Co-ordinator, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/841082017-09-26T23:40:01Z2017-09-26T23:40:01ZOnline learning punishes minority students, but video chats can help<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187460/original/file-20170925-21172-1jbc6hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">English language minority students can struggle to express themselves authentically in online courses if they are new to the conventions of Western discourse and written academic style. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Online learning is expanding in Canada <a href="https://www.tonybates.ca/2016/03/23/a-national-survey-of-university-online-and-distance-learning-in-canada/">at a rate of about 8.75 per cent every year</a>. This shift to online environments has redefined the format of education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for example, have become wildly popular, with <a href="https://www.class-central.com/report/mooc-stats-2016/">more than 700 universities offering 6,850 courses to 58 million students in 2016</a>.</p>
<p>Universities promote online education as a <a href="https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/students-appreciate-flexibility-of-distance-learning/article32799209/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&">flexible option for students</a>, but with this flexibility comes complexity.</p>
<p>In our respective roles — as an education professor who writes online courses, and as a graduate student and online course instructor (also known as a “tutor marker”) — we can run entire courses without meeting our students face-to-face. We do not know what they look like, what their voices sound like or how they interact in the classroom.</p>
<p>We have witnessed the struggle that English language minority students often face to fulfil requirements. And the negative impact of the online format on their engagement and success. We also believe online courses can work to support these students — when instructors provide safe spaces for ungraded dialogue. </p>
<h2>Language, identity and self-expression</h2>
<p>English language minority students, also known as <a href="http://edglossary.org/english-language-learner/">English language learners</a>, face unique challenges in online courses. The online course features pre-written content that students read and respond to. But not everybody understands or expresses knowledge in the same way.</p>
<p>Language minority students are disadvantaged by having to adhere to dominant Western structures of writing in online discussion forums, their only opportunity to interact with peers in the course. Online discussion forums are often graded to the same academic standards as formal essays. Minority students may struggle to communicate using only the academic English that is required. They are devalued by their differences in discourse.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"908812753372160001"}"></div></p>
<p>Often, English language minority students are also being socialized into North American higher education, and the general Western setting. From a socio-cultural perspective, language use is tied closely to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8869-4_13">race, ethnicity, social class and identity</a>. This indicates a relationship between their ability to express themselves authentically in an online course, and the language they are expected to use. </p>
<p>Minority students’ methods of engagement with course content and their peers may differ intuitively from those of students who are already familiar with the style and content of writing required in this setting. </p>
<h2>Video chats and ‘safe houses’</h2>
<p>The current means of defining, engaging with and evaluating students’ discourse in online courses must change to enable language minority students to freely share their perspectives. </p>
<p>Offering opportunities for non-written interaction provides these students with alternative outlets for communication. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2014.938357">Online video chats between students and instructors</a> can help promote dialogue and interaction with course material. It enables students who feel inhibited to grow more familiar with academic discourse. </p>
<p>A “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/25170">safe house</a>” is a platform in which students can merge colloquial and academic discourse as they develop their writing style. In an online course, this safe house could take the form of an unevaluated discussion forum in which students are free to engage with the course material, with the instructor, and with each other. These spaces can be used for ungraded, informal communication, enabling more inclusive discussion for all students.</p>
<h2>Grading, discussion and consultation</h2>
<p>Even instructors who are unable to change the structure of their online course can help support language minority students by altering their grading techniques. Despite the weighting of some rubrics, it is important to remember that students’ formatting and grammar is secondary to their ideas. Educators can support students by <a href="http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Gray-WritingCorrection.html">redirecting their efforts away</a> from spelling, grammar, citation or the structure of their responses, and focusing their efforts on crafting a unique argument. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.schreyerinstitute.psu.edu/ta/comments">Providing comments</a> and asking prompting questions throughout students’ work engages discussion. This helps shift our written interactions to emphasize the sharing of ideas rather than the correction of students’ writing. It makes the online course more accessible for language minority students.</p>
<p>Overall it’s clear that we need to establish <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/canajeducrevucan.36.1.305"> more inclusive curricula and assessment</a> to best support language minority students in online course environments. </p>
<p>Whenever course authors have the opportunity to revise, even in minor ways, their courses for content, we would recommend they consult with students who have taken the course to determine more inclusive examples and attend to all voices in the course design. Such a measure will ensure that all learners identify with and engage in the course content.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84108/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Allan MacKinnon has received funding from the Canadian International Development Agency and the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma MacFarlane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The discourse and structure of online learning can exclude English language minority students. Techniques such as video chats, “safe houses” and content-focused grading can support their success.Allan MacKinnon, Associate Professor of Education, Simon Fraser UniversityEmma MacFarlane, M.A. Candidate, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/815602017-08-02T20:17:28Z2017-08-02T20:17:28ZClass divide defies social mixing and keeps public housing stigma alive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180316/original/file-20170731-5515-tl25c6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Forty years on, there is still resistance to mixing with the 'sort of people' who were segregated in social housing tower blocks.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/djackmanson/23229006691">David Jackmanson/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Public housing reform is again agitating the inner suburbs, just as it did four decades ago when citizen action and courageous academic research brought the tower-block model crashing down. </p>
<p>Michael Jones <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/10534747?q&sort=holdings+desc&_=1501216734214&versionId=196423150">exposed it</a> as cost-ineffective and socially destructive, but he also discovered a dirty little secret about the Victorian Housing Commission: the system paid for itself because only the “<a href="http://www.experiencewoodhorn.com/part-2-deserving-or-undeserving-poor/">deserving</a>” working class were admitted.</p>
<p>Forty years on, the physical legacy of that heroic era of tower blocks and walk-up flats is shabby and in need of renewal. </p>
<p>Whereas the Victorian housing program was designed to be self-funding from public rents, these days public housing is the only viable option for an expanding population of older residents, newly settled migrant families, sole parents, people with disabilities and those experiencing chronic physical and mental ill-health, most of whom are on pensions.</p>
<p>But there are new groups in need of social housing: people trapped in the gig economy, hawking their ABNs as drivers, disability carers, child-carers, removalists, tradespeople, casual office workers of all kinds, hospitality workers. They are the growing army of the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-class-rise-of-populism/">precariat</a> who may even have a couple of university degrees but who cannot find job security. </p>
<p>They cannot see, even when they earn good money, a predictable path to home ownership while rents and insecurity rise all around them.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-precariat-is-recruiting-youth-please-apply-10550">The precariat is recruiting: youth, please apply</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>Then there are essential city workers who have a secure job but who need to live near their work. In Melbourne, city hospital nurses should not be commuting from Craigieburn and Frankston; teachers should be able to live near their school; service workers of all kinds should not be travelling for hours to do their jobs. </p>
<p>All big cities have to deal with this as gentrification and property speculation squeeze the lower-income earners out of the inner city.</p>
<h2>Class prejudice: a case study in Flemington</h2>
<p>The immediate controversy is in the inner Melbourne suburb of Flemington. Here, the walk-up flats are to be replaced with apartment blocks of varying heights, with one to match the high rises that have to remain. </p>
<p>The town plan will be denser, with street frontages for apartment buildings, nearby parking and landscaped gardens. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/about-the-department/plans,-programs-and-projects/projects-and-initiatives/housing-and-accommodation/completed-building-projects/kensington-redevelopment">Kensington estate</a> overlooking J.J. Holland Park has already had such a makeover. The new public and private buildings are indistinguishable from each other, with gardens cascading down the embankment.</p>
<p>Local residents have several objections to the <a href="http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/about-the-department/plans,-programs-and-projects/projects-and-initiatives/housing-and-accommodation/flemington-renewal">Flemington proposals</a>. The estate will be too dense and too tall for the surrounding suburb, and its redevelopment has to be funded by selling part of the land to private developers for a mix of social, affordable and shared equity housing. The public component will increase by 10%. </p>
<p>The residents are supportive of public housing and want more, but more would have to be on the existing footprint, which will increase the population density that they deplore. More importantly, the inhabitants will remain sequestered.</p>
<p>Another objection is that the development is intended to break up the old public estate into a mixed community and that <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/social-mix-approach-to-public-housing-is-failing-research-finds-20170616-gwsj3m.html">research can be found</a> that engineered social mixing doesn’t “work”. </p>
<p>Certainly, many inner Melbourne families go to extraordinary financial and geographic lengths to ensure their children do not go to school with children from “the flats”. </p>
<p>The primary school at the edge of the Flemington estate was built for 1,000 and has fewer than 100 students, while all the surrounding schools are bursting at the seams. The same applies in the inner suburbs Carlton and Fitzroy. </p>
<p>The arguments are more sophisticated — that social mixing is “gentrification by stealth” — but the result remains that public tenants must inhabit a world apart.</p>
<p>But research can also be found that social mixing is working all around us every day. It’s working in streets sprinkled with infill housing, small developments, mixed developments, public apartments in private developments. It already works in Flemington away from the flats and in Kensington, where the two local schools are flourishing. </p>
<p>Above all there is abundant research to show that concentrating people into public housing estates <a href="https://www.bsl.org.au/knowledge/social-exclusion-monitor/who-experiences-social-exclusion/housing/">breeds social exclusion</a> and that’s bad for all of us.</p>
<p>A city needs social and economic diversity to function, but it <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html">doesn’t need enclaves and ghettos</a>. And a creative, knowledge city of the future will need to remain <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-white-flight-to-bright-flight-the-looming-risk-for-our-growing-cities-76787">affordable for young creatives</a>, just as it needs a mix of people to make it work. </p>
<hr>
<p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-white-flight-to-bright-flight-the-looming-risk-for-our-growing-cities-76787">‘Bright flight’ – the looming risk for our growing cities</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>All great cities are grappling with this downside of gentrification, and public and affordable social housing has to be part of the solution. </p>
<p>London has teachers, police, nurses and young doctors in council housing. Yet Paris has got it horribly wrong, with its <em>banlieues</em> full of great architecture and human misery that can only make itself heard by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/22/nothings-changed-10-years-after-french-riots-banlieues-remain-in-crisis">burning cars and detonating bombs</a>.</p>
<h2>Solutions must embrace diversity</h2>
<p>Solutions will be various. They will need imaginative and bold leadership from governments and well-regulated partnerships with the private sector to raise the funds. </p>
<p>The walk-ups and sequestered public estates of Melbourne have passed their use-by date both physically and socially. </p>
<p>With land prices so high, the private sector will have to <a href="http://www.fmsa.com.au/opinion-acgp-housing/">step up and contribute</a>, and its pleas that it’s uneconomic regulated away. In Canberra, public housing is sprinkled throughout the city. Other countries, such as Germany and Japan, can do it and so can we.</p>
<p>But to do all this we also need a new civility in our inner suburbs, a civility that endorses necessary change for the common good above private interests. And we will know that we are succeeding when all our schools represent the diversity that is modern Australia.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81560/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janet McCalman receives funding from the Australian Research Council for historical population history. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Deborah Warr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Even where communities are mixed, many inner-city families go to extraordinary financial and geographic lengths to ensure their children do not go to school with children from ‘the flats’.Janet McCalman AC, Professor of Population Health, The University of MelbourneDeborah Warr, Associate Professor, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/804092017-07-17T13:44:13Z2017-07-17T13:44:13ZWhy upward social mobility means some people move downwards<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176642/original/file-20170703-32612-1w1qkv3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The only way isn't up.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/side-view-man-climbing-concrete-stairs-520162933?src=Du4OxGZn2dnBYT4AA_Oa9Q-1-1">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/28/labour-and-tories-have-both-failed-on-social-mobility-report-finds">damning report</a> into social mobility has concluded that successive UK governments have failed to tackle the issue for the past 20 years. But <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/social-mobility-policies-between-1997-and-2017-time-for-change">the analysis</a> by the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/social-mobility-commission">Social Mobility Commission</a> (SMC) also fails on this front. Very little of its review of the past two decades is actually about social mobility.</p>
<p>This is not really a surprise. Ever since it was set up in 2012, the SMC has concerned itself with social inequality in general, rather than the life chances of escaping from one’s family background – the essence of being mobile. Social mobility usually means people from low-income families leaving that background behind. The more that happens, the “better” we are at social mobility. </p>
<p>According to the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/an-analysis-of-2-decades-of-efforts-to-improve-social-mobility">SMC’s chair</a>, Alan Milburn: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Higher social mobility can be a rallying point to prove that modern capitalist economies like our own are capable of creating better, fairer and more inclusive societies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this view, mobility is of symbolic importance rather than being a central issue in its own right. Of course, there is nothing wrong in working for “better, fairer and more inclusive societies”. And the SMC has done a valuable job in documenting how government policies have failed to tackle social inequality. But the central question of whether mobility rates have risen or not remains unanswered in the SMC’s reports.</p>
<p>This latest one, Time for Change, starts by presenting the changing economic environment since 1997. It discusses GDP, employment rates, earnings, public expenditure and housing. Although the report does not spell it out, this is actually a useful reminder that the conditions in which mobility takes place are constantly evolving. </p>
<p>To measure the flow between people’s family origins and their adult destinations (and their changing shares of advantage and disadvantage), we need to take into account the changing proportions of those origins and destinations. As the report says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Two decades ago there were more manual than professional jobs. Now the reverse is true […] Today nearly 5m people are in self-employment, over 1.5m people are on short-term contracts and approaching a million people are on zero-hours contracts. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Social mobility is measured in terms of social class (or income percentiles if you are an economist). And because occupations are used to place people into social classes, the kinds of employment available are a central factor in understanding mobility. </p>
<p>If we take one kind, let’s say senior managers and professionals, the fact that there are now more of these types of jobs available creates new opportunities for recruitment to their ranks. In 1997, about 16% of male employment and 5% of female employment was in this type of job, <a href="https://policypress.co.uk/the-new-social-mobility#book-detail-tabs-stison-block-content-1-0-tab0">compared with 20% and 12% now</a>.</p>
<p>But this “occupational transition” does not mean more people are automatically upwardly mobile from working-class origins. Some of the new opportunities are taken up by the offspring of already advantaged families. </p>
<p>Added to this is the expansion of the middle classes, which means there are more middle-class families seeking to place their children in these kind of jobs. But even if the middle classes are doing relatively well in taking a big share of the new destination opportunities, there is still widespread “mobility anxiety”. In other words, the mobility competition has hotted up. </p>
<h2>What goes up…</h2>
<p>Unless the number of professional destinations continues to increase, there can be no room at the top for all the children of the middle classes – let alone upward mobility from working-class children. And if the expansion of professional destinations remains low, more middle-class children will have to be displaced – to become downwardly mobile. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178461/original/file-20170717-6091-ojsd44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Clearing the path.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/women-janitor-mopping-floor-interior-new-568068676">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Political discussions about rates of social mobility tend to ignore this embarrassing element of the topic. But it cannot be avoided. Achieving higher upward social mobility means it must be balanced by more downward mobility too.
If we are really concerned about social mobility, this brute fact should trump the SMC report’s focus on general social inequalities (vitally important though they are). </p>
<p>The chapter titles in Time for Change – “early years”, “schools”, and “young people” – give the game away. They deal with unfairness and exclusions which may well be related to mobility. But even the remaining chapter, “working lives”, deals mainly with poor pay and low skills, rather than mobility itself. </p>
<p>Nowhere are we reminded that a <a href="https://policypress.co.uk/the-new-social-mobility#book-detail-tabs-stison-block-content-1-0-tab3">series of studies</a> has consistently shown that more than three-quarters of today’s adults are in a different social class to their parents. True, not enough of these movements were in an upward direction. But they cannot all be. And it is hard to see how current government policies will generate more future upward mobility than in the previous 20 years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80409/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Geoff Payne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The tricky truth is that change goes in both directions.Geoff Payne, Associate Researcher, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/702222016-12-09T13:56:21Z2016-12-09T13:56:21ZThe state has helped poor pupils into private schools before – did it work?<p>The Independent Schools Council, a body representing 1,200 private schools, is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/09/private-schools-in-england-propose-10000-free-places">offering to provide 10,000 annual free places</a> to low-income pupils. As we prepare for an extended debate over the benefits of getting deprived children into private schools, we would do well to look back at the last government-backed attempt to do this: the long-gone Assisted Places Scheme. </p>
<p>The first education policy that <a href="http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110858">Margaret Thatcher</a> announced after she came to power in 1979, the scheme saw more than 75,000 pupils receive publicly-funded and means-tested assistance to attend some of the most selective and prestigious private schools in England and Wales over the course of 17 years.</p>
<p>The scheme was highly controversial, and when New Labour came to power in 1997 it was quickly abolished – and the arguments over its merits are now set to resume. They generally revolve around three main questions: whether it reached the right students, whether those students actually benefited from it, and whether it hurt nearby state-maintained schools.</p>
<p>Even with the benefit of hindsight, these are still complex questions. Here’s a brief outline of some evidence we can use to answer them.</p>
<h2>#1: Did the scheme reach the right children?</h2>
<p>One of the main criticisms of the scheme was that it didn’t reach the right pupils. While it was often framed as an attempt to “rescue” bright children from working class families and disadvantaged communities, the main criterion for eligibility, other than passing the school’s entrance examination, was financial need. </p>
<p>This meant the policy was significantly “colonised” by parents who might have been suffering short-term financial hardship (often because of divorce), but who were in many ways quite culturally and economically advantaged. </p>
<p>An <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0142569900110206?journalCode=cbse20">early study</a> of the scheme in 1989 found that fewer than 10% of those with an assisted place had fathers in manual jobs, whereas 50% had fathers in middle-class jobs. Almost all the employed mothers of assisted place pupils were also in middle-class jobs. </p>
<p>In general, it became clear that the majority of children who received assistance came from families with relatively strong educational inheritances, meaning the gap between what they’d have achieved without assisted places and what they managed with them was probably not as wide as imagined.</p>
<h2>#2: Did pupils who received assisted places actually benefit?</h2>
<p>There’s no straightforward answer to this one, but there’s little doubt that many individuals did benefit measurably from the scheme. </p>
<p>My colleagues and I have tracked the careers of a cohort of assisted place-holders over the last 30 years, and <a href="http://orca.cf.ac.uk/3042/">have found</a> that for many of them, the scheme provided access to learning opportunities and experiences that they might not otherwise have had. In terms of qualifications, simple comparison of GCSE and A-level results revealed that our assisted place holders did better than our state-educated respondents, and better than might have been predicted on the basis of background socio-economic and educational inheritance variables. </p>
<p>But the academic achievement of those who held assisted places varies widely. The place-holders who saw the highest gains in qualifications were from middle-class backgrounds. The advantages for those from working-class backgrounds were less clear cut, and overall these pupils did <em>worse</em> than might be expected. This is largely because these pupils were disproportionately likely to have dropped out school before they were 18. </p>
<p>It seems these students found it difficult to thrive in the more socially exclusive environments of elite private schools. And while the degree results of assisted place-holders compare favourably with their state-educated counterparts, they were less likely to have completed their studies. Nearly one in ten dropped out of or failed their university courses. </p>
<p>In general, we <a href="http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/educational-career-trajectories-assisted-place-holders/">concluded</a> that if children from disadvantaged backgrounds stayed on at school and at university, they did well. However, the odds of these students “dropping out” were high. </p>
<h2>#3: How did it affect neighbouring schools?</h2>
<p>This is perhaps the most difficult question of all to answer. There is already considerable <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/academies-increase-divisions-between-the-rich-and-poor-study-finds-segregation-made-worse-by-a-wider-8797105.html">social segregation</a> between many state-maintained schools, and it’s impossible to know what choices parents might have made had the Assisted Places Scheme not been available. </p>
<p>It might be argued that the impact was minimal, especially if the scheme benefited those who might have sent their children to private school anyway (as was often suggested – see question #1). The number of assisted places certainly wasn’t large enough to have any significant system-wide effect on admissions statistics. But the scheme’s ideological impact was perhaps more significant than the numbers of pupils involved. Simply by virtue of being in place, it sent a clear message that state-maintained non-selective schools are unable to meet the needs of the academically able. </p>
<p>Overall, then, the scheme’s history is a chequered one. Although individual schools and students did benefit, there’s plenty of evidence that this 30-year-long experiment was hardly an unqualified triumph. If the Independent Schools Council’s latest proposal is taken up and the government commits to once again helping poor and deprived pupils into private schools, the Assisted Places Scheme provides clear benchmarks for success. </p>
<p>Any new scheme must serve the people it’s actually meant to serve, and any schools that participate need to find ways of making students from disadvantaged backgrounds feel like they belong. And more than that, any such scheme has to be careful what message it’s sending about the state sector, where the overwhelming majority of eligible children will still spend their school years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70222/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Power receives funding from HEFCW, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Sutton Trust, who also funded projects that produced research cited in this article.</span></em></p>The Assisted Places Scheme was a controversial policy that got 75,000 poorer pupils a top-tier education. Or so it was claimed.Sally Power, Director of WISERD Education, WISERD, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/669762016-10-17T01:25:03Z2016-10-17T01:25:03ZHow the housing boom is remaking Australia’s social class structure<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141917/original/image-20161017-30269-11637ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The renting class faces the unrelenting burden of ever-rising rents.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mick Tsikas</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The relentless housing boom in Australia’s cities, especially Melbourne and Sydney, is <a href="http://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/is-it-generational-warfare-or-generation-notshare/news-story/5dcaca8e9fa97a520433406e255643ee">often framed</a> as an intergenerational conflict in which younger generations are being priced out of the market by baby boomers. However, sociological theories of social class suggest parents’ wealth and social status will eventually be passed onto their children anyway.</p>
<p>So, by focusing on intergenerational inequalities that will eventually be reversed, we are framing the housing affordability question the wrong way. At the same time, the impact of the housing boom is so deep that some long-established ideas about social class may be no longer relevant.</p>
<p>The housing boom has blurred existing boundaries between upper, middle and lower classes that applied to the baby boomers and previous generations. New social class boundaries and formations are being produced.</p>
<p>This does not mean younger generations, as a collective, are disadvantaged compared to their parents. Rather, these younger generations will be subdivided differently and more unequally.</p>
<h2>The renting class</h2>
<p>In the industrial city, the term “working class” was defined by the experiences of low-income workers in manufacturing jobs. Yet in a post-industrial Australian city it makes more sense to talk about the “renting class”. </p>
<p>Not all renters are poor, and not all poor households are private renters. However, the correlation between the two is significant and strengthening. The proportion of private renters in the total population is slowly but surely increasing – <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/5762/AHURI_Final_Report_No259_Accessing_and_sustaining_private_rental_tenancies_critical_life_events_housing_shocks_and_insurances.pdf?utm_source=website&utm_medium=report.PDF&utm_campaign=https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/259">from 20.3% in 1981 to 23.4% in 2011</a>. </p>
<p>Simultaneously, public housing – once a symbol of the working class – is undergoing a <a href="http://www.treasury.gov.au/%7E/media/Treasury/Publications%20and%20Media/Publications/2014/NHSC/Documents/PDF/NHSC-State-of-Supply-Report-Consolidated.ashx">dramatic demise</a>.</p>
<p>Largely abandoned by the state to fend for itself, with weak regulation for security of tenure or rent control, the renting class faces the unrelenting burden of ever-rising rents. The average renter paid 19% of their income on rent in 1981. In 2011, this proportion <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/5762/AHURI_Final_Report_No259_Accessing_and_sustaining_private_rental_tenancies_critical_life_events_housing_shocks_and_insurances.pdf?utm_source=website&utm_medium=report.PDF&utm_campaign=https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/259">increased to 26.9%</a>. </p>
<p>And, in 2014, around 40% of low-income private renters were in <a href="http://www.aihw.gov.au/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=60129549033">housing affordability stress</a>, paying more than one-third of their income on housing. </p>
<p>With hardly enough “after-housing” disposable income to meet basic living standards, savings for retirement is almost impossible for the low-income renter. And with little or no wealth to assist their children to buy a home, the renter’s social class status is likely to be passed from one generation to the next.</p>
<h2>The home-owner class</h2>
<p>More than just a status symbol, home ownership has become increasingly central to the way most Australians accumulate wealth. About half of the home-owner’s wealth is <a href="http://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Inequality_in_Australia_FINAL.pdf">held in their own home</a>. Each housing boom enriches them further through tax-free capital gain on their homes.</p>
<p>The housing boom also creates work in the construction industry, which is the third-largest employer in Australia with more than one million workers. These are no longer working-class occupations, with most skilled jobs paying average weekly earnings of <a href="http://cdn.aigroup.com.au/Economic_Indicators/Construction_Survey/2015/Construction_industry_profile_and_Outlook.pdf">close to A$1,500</a>. So, it is arguably the home-owner class that benefits most from each construction boom. </p>
<p>One consequence of the housing boom is that a growing cohort of moderate-income households is now priced out of home ownership. Had they been born a generation earlier, they would have probably been <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/nrv-research-papers/nrv3-10">able to afford a house</a>. Now it is beyond their reach. </p>
<p>Over the years, as their rents rise and their wealth stagnates, the gap between the renter and a home owner will become unbridgeable. Their experience of retirement <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AUJlHRights/2006/10.pdf">will be worlds apart</a>. </p>
<p>One lifeline for this cohort is the prospect of inheriting some of the housing wealth of their baby boomer parents. But when this will happen is highly uncertain.</p>
<h2>The housing elite</h2>
<p>The housing elite is rewarded by the housing boom well beyond the capital gain on their own homes. Much of the massive wealth of Australia’s elite is generated through the housing market – through investment, construction and financing of housing. </p>
<p>Harry Triguboff, Australia’s third-richest person, earned his fortune in the apartment development business. So did the three youngest entrants into the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/business/brw-rich-list-apartment-developers-make-up-the-young-guns-20160524-gp31nd.html">2016 BRW Rich List</a>. Their entry marks the rising importance of housing in the making of Australia’s super-rich. </p>
<p>The top 20% of the wealthiest Australians hold most of their wealth in their home and in other investment properties. They also hold significant wealth <a href="http://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Inequality_in_Australia_FINAL.pdf">in the sharemarket</a>, which is commanded by big banks whose portfolios are <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-14/australian-bank-mortgage-focus-worries-analysts/6392316">heavily dominated by housing loans</a>. Each housing boom significantly adds to their wealth.</p>
<p>Social class, however, is more than just financial wealth. The wealthiest Australians secure their social class position by living in exclusive suburbs where they are able to associate with the right people and live an elite lifestyle. The astronomical prices of houses <a href="http://www.realestate.com.au/news/most-expensive-suburbs-in-australia-2016/">in some of these suburbs</a> ensure their hermetically exclusive nature. </p>
<h2>Breaking the loop</h2>
<p>None of these social class categories is natural or universal. These categories will not apply in some European countries, for example, <a href="https://theconversation.com/without-affordable-housing-we-wont-have-a-society-worth-living-in-41962">that have very different housing systems</a>.</p>
<p>The deepening fusion between Australia’s housing system and its social class system creates a dangerous cycle. The further house prices grow, the more important housing becomes as a determinant of social class. And when social class is increasingly defined by housing, people are willing to bid even higher to enter home ownership or the housing elite.</p>
<p>Unless we break this cycle, Australia will continue in its path of becoming <a href="https://theconversation.com/home-equity-australias-growing-wealth-divide-17697">a more polarised society</a>, with a weakened renting class, an impenetrable elite, and a shrunken home-owner class between them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66976/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ilan Wiesel receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>By focusing on intergenerational inequalities that will eventually be reversed, we are framing the housing affordability question the wrong way.Ilan Wiesel, Lecturer in Urban Geography, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/670742016-10-14T13:22:46Z2016-10-14T13:22:46ZAxing A-level art history only amplifies class divides<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141816/original/image-20161014-30277-6ibl9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Popova Valeriya/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Posh, soft, elite, decorative on the one hand, unreadably intellectual, dry and obscure on the other. Either too soft or too tough. So let’s cheer as the last chance for it to be studied at A-level gets binned.</p>
<p>That’s art history for you, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/13/art-history-a-level-subject-private-schools-kenneth-clark">according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones</a>, venting his class spleen against the subject by effectively calling it girly, even a bit queer – his sideswipe against art history students he met at Cambridge all “kitted out like Sebastien Flyte” of Brideshead Revisited. It’s the “posh white girls” (and, for Jones, it seems, the fay young men) who are unjustifiably taking the brunt of the reports on exam board <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-37642722">AQA’s axing of the one proposed A-level in art history</a>. </p>
<p>Internationally considered a serious scholarly field, the subject in question, art history, is dedicated to both historical research and the critical conservation and analysis of cultural heritage in its material forms and its immaterial, imaginative and political effects.</p>
<p>So let us start with that loaded word: posh. If we analyse <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31005170">the figures</a> for students doing any A-levels and turning up in Russell Group universities in all subjects, we find a high percentage are still from private schools. This is not something unique to art history students.</p>
<p>So you cannot use the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/13/art-history-a-level-subject-private-schools-kenneth-clark">figures</a> currently being bandied about in the press about art history being taught more in private schools to “stain” art history any more than other arts subjects. For all our struggle to democratise access, education in the UK is still a strongly white middle-class aspiration supported by that class’s financial resources. And this situation is only worsening since the abolition of the 20th century experiment in free higher education as a method of increasing social mobility. Class is a fact of British society. We should not be making it worse.</p>
<h2>A different perspective</h2>
<p>That’s my point. The killing off of art history at A-level is a blow against democratisation. A lack of art history will deprive all young people of opportunities for new kinds of knowledge of the world they live in. It will close down the chance to acquire an understanding of the past and of the present through image and object, place and building, powerful patrons and craftspeople and makers.</p>
<p>Far from dismissing this subject because at present it is more often taught in independent schools, we need to be insisting on the value of this way of learning about the world through its cultures, its monuments, its legends, its visual story-telling, its creative imaginations — for all young people in all schools. </p>
<p>We need to insist that the way art history is conceived and taught now expands horizons and is not just the old story of European white men. We should be trying harder to give more opportunities to young people in state education to have access to art and culture as the means of learning about themselves, their histories and their worlds through its study.</p>
<p>Prior to the decision to axe the subject, AQA had been <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-37642722">developing a new A-level that received widespread approval</a>. It was specifically designed to speak to a socially diverse and multicultural society, to make visible issues of class, race, gender and sexualities, to address the question of global citizenship through encounter with varied visual and material cultures. The proposed A-level was aimed specifically to teach critical skills in visual analysis in the face of mass information and the spectacle and lure of media image culture. Such skills are urgently needed by young people because of the visual cultures of the social media they inhabit.</p>
<p>For many children in state schools, who may not have the advantages of frequent travel or other occasions to encounter not just art but material culture, this may have been their only opportunity to have these doors opened.</p>
<p>And other doors – because art history is a portal to a range of work fields, from high-level art marketing to curation and conservation and, of course, museum and gallery education that is aimed a future generations. And let us also remember that the A-level is also a doorway to architecture and design.</p>
<h2>Hardly soft</h2>
<p>Art history is neither soft nor decorative – nor am I, as a middle class white woman and professor. It is a way to see what people thought, felt, believed, did, and imagined, by looking at the material things – buildings, paintings, gardens, sculptures, images, cities, objects – and the worlds that they made. It encompasses theology as much as pigment, philosophy as much as building techniques, languages as much as global histories of trade or the violence of enslavement. One has to grasp the systems of thought, political and economic processes as much as the image worlds and visual cultures of the many civilisations and cultures on the globe. </p>
<p>It is intellectually challenging, historically sensitive, and, above all, it trained me to look analytically and think historically.</p>
<p>That is why some of the great minds of the past and present turn to it, including white and black, straight and queer, and from every corner of the globe. Jones only seems to have heard of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/18/kenneth-clark-civilised-man-art-historian-civilisation">Clark</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/nov/05/guardianobituaries.books1">Gombrich</a> – distinguished art historians but of an earlier era. The <a href="http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/b9789004231702_024">growth of the subject</a> in British schools and universities since the 1960s is testament to this interest.</p>
<p>I cannot protest loudly enough at the ignorant, prejudiced and gender and class stereotyped caricature of art history as not a “proper” discipline or a substantial subject and the hostility to art and thinking critically about it that underlies it.</p>
<p>Rather than attack the subject, give all the kids a chance to study it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67074/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Griselda Pollock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>‘Posh white girls’ are unjustifiably taking the brunt of reports of the last art history A-level but casualties are all those the exam board had been moving to reach out to.Griselda Pollock, Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/658642016-09-26T14:54:09Z2016-09-26T14:54:09ZIt’s employment status, not class, that affects mental health<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138845/original/image-20160922-22514-k09usy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-423868981/stock-photo-depressed-young-man-contemplating-suicide-on-top-of-tall-building.html?src=pcUOdDsR9bVc3EIekVX6TA-1-1">SpeedKingz/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For the last few decades, research into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_determinants_of_health">social determinants</a> of health and well-being <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361530191X">seemed to tell a simple story</a>: the poorer you are, or the lower your class, the worse your health and well-being is likely to be. </p>
<p>The gradient can be replicated with <a href="http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/5/e001790.full">level of education</a>, <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953610006702">income</a>, or <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12700221">job seniority</a>, but let’s focus on social class which is based on people’s occupation. </p>
<p>Figure 1 below shows a clear gradient of psychological well-being by class. The larger differences, compared with the professional class, are at the bottom of the hierarchy with those in unskilled jobs being the worst off, while the managerial class are more similar to professionals (the professionals are at zero and not shown on this chart as they serve as a comparison category in our analysis).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=137&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=137&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138687/original/image-20160921-21707-ps04vx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 1: At face value, lower social classes have worse psychological well-being. Numbers are differences compared to professional class, after accounting for age, sex, and ethnicity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Health Survey for England</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But what lies behind this gradient? What causes psychological well-being to be unequally distributed by social class? It is usually explained in terms of several <a href="https://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/default/files/jrf/migrated/files/income-health-poverty-full.pdf">“causal pathways”</a>. One possible pathway is that people who in the lower classes not only have lower incomes but also probably have less stability in their incomes, making life <a href="http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/12/4/119.full">more stressful</a>. A second pathway is that people in lower classes may experience more <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/the-clearest-proof-yet-that-your-job-is-killing-you-a7145636.html">job-related stress</a>. Third, people in the lower classes tend to engage in more unhealthy behaviour (including smoking and lack of exercise – although <a href="http://www.ias.org.uk/Alcohol-knowledge-centre/Socioeconomic-groups/Factsheets/Socioeconomic-groups-relationship-with-alcohol.aspx">this is not the case for drinking alcohol</a>). Fourth is the “psychosocial” pathway – that being in a lower position in the social hierarchy reduces <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of-social/">feelings of worth and self-respect</a>, which in turn damage psychological well-being and health.</p>
<h2>A new pathway</h2>
<p>All these factors are probably important to differing degrees. However, in our <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953616304786">new research</a> on social class and psychological well-being, we suggest that employment status is another pathway that can explain the class gradient. We noticed that employment status is forgotten in many studies of well-being gradients. </p>
<p>Yet employment status is associated with far larger differences in well-being than class (see figure 2 – note that the scale is now much wider than in figure 1). We can see that the long-term ill average six points below those in employment, for the unemployed the difference is three points, with smaller differences for the early retired and those looking after the home or family.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=137&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=137&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138688/original/image-20160921-21683-1k7so3l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 2: People outside the labour market have worse psychological well-being. Numbers are differences compared to those in employment, after accounting for age, sex, ethnicity and income.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Health Survey for England</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We are making no claims of causality here. Of course the long-term ill have lower well-being than others. In fact, among people who are outside the labour market due to illness, it is becoming increasingly likely that this is due to <a href="http://bjpo.rcpsych.org/content/2/1/18">mental rather than physical health reasons</a>. For unemployment, the causal direction could run either way: people are more likely to lose their job if they have low psychological well-being, but unemployment also makes people feel miserable.</p>
<p>But what does employment status have to do with the class gradient? The answer is: quite a lot, as employment itself is <a href="http://jech.bmj.com/content/64/3/277.full">unevenly distributed by social class</a>. When we measure class for everyone, based on the last job if not currently in work, we can see (figure 3) that among professionals 91% are in the labour market and less than 1% are unable to work due to long term illness. Contrast this to the unskilled where just 55% are in employment and 8% have a long term illness.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138689/original/image-20160921-21723-155cysl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 3 – The chances of being in the labour market are far higher in the higher social classes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Health Survey for England</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, given this association, it is perhaps not surprising that when we controlled for employment status in our analysis, the class gradient disappeared completely. In our analysis, we also delved deeper and asked whether pre-existing factors, such as childhood illness, might be able to explain these outcomes in adulthood. </p>
<p>We used <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_effects_model">a type of statistical model</a> that compares the well-being of individuals at different points of time, when they have changed social class or their labour market status. Our results showed that changes in labour market status (such as moving from being employed to being ill, or returning to the labour market after having stayed at home due to caring responsibilities) are accompanied by changes in well-being. On the other hand, changes in social class make no difference at all.</p>
<p>Does this mean that <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953600002926">class does not matter</a>? Have sociologists been barking up the wrong tree all these years by talking about social class? We shouldn’t be too hasty. We have seen that social class is a key factor in determining access to the labour market, which has clear implications for psychological health. But the real culprit, as we’ve demonstrated, is employment status.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65864/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For years, social scientist have assumed that it’s class that determines a person’s health and well-being. Have they been barking up the wrong tree?Lindsay Richards, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of OxfordMarii Paskov, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.