Results by title
238 books match the query 'Social Classes & Economic Disparity' and 16 start with d
Dangerous Occupations
Archaeologies of Structural Violence, Immigrants, and Resilience in Early CaliforniaMarco G. Meniketti
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Addresses structural violence through history and archaeology of immigrant workers
Dangerous Occupations: Archaeologies of Structural Violence, Immigrants, and Resilience in Early California is an impactful work of historical archaeology combined with social history that addresses structural violence in key California industries from the Gold Rush in 1849 until 1920. Monopolistic industries, such as railroading, mining, timbering, explosive manufacturing, lime production, meatpacking, textile milling, and fishing/whaling, relied on immigrant laborers who were recruited and perceived as expendable. Restrictive laws and lack of employment opportunities based on bigotry often forced immigrants into the most dangerous occupations. In the days before workmen’s compensation insurance and strict labor safety laws, laborers often risked their health and even their lives for employment.
Marco G. Meniketti’s analysis comes from examining excavation of labor camps and housing, landscape studies, bioarchaeological data, architectural footprints, and archival sources. Each chapter offers a case study of industries to exemplify structural violence and its broader consequences among various immigrant labor groups, such as Chinese, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, Chilean, Cornish, and Portuguese. The narrative includes a historical overview of the industries, identifies who the immigrant laborers were and how they came to be there, examines the dangers and health risks of their jobs, and details their living conditions and daily life, including foodways, leisure, and efforts to treat their job-inflicted maladies. Dangerous Occupations introduces a new generation of readers to how immigrants built the West Coast and at what great cost.
Dardanelle and the Bottoms
Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819-1970Mildred D. Gleason
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
A reciprocal relationship between the town and the Bottoms formed the economic backbone on which the area’s well-being was balanced. The country people came to town on Saturdays to buy their groceries and supplies, to shop and take in a movie or visit the pool halls or barbershops. Merchants relied heavily on this country trade and had a long history of extending credit, keeping prices reasonable, and offering respect and appreciation to their customers.
This interdependence, stable for decades, began to unravel in the late 1940s with changes in farming, particularly the cotton industry. In Dardanelle and the Bottoms, Mildred Diane Gleason explores this complex rural/town dichotomy, revealing and analyzing key components of each area, including aspects of race, education, the cotton economy and its demise, the devastation of floods and droughts, leisure, crime, and the impact of the Great Depression.
Death to Fascism
Louis Adamic's Fight for DemocracyJohn P. Enyeart
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege
Critical Care Ethics PerspectivesSophie Bourgault
Rutgers University Press, 2024
This book advances this project by discussing the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege and by considering how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies. Written by scholars from different countries, disciplines, and intellectual traditions, the volume offers original care ethics contributions on epistemic injustice, privileged irresponsibility, ecofeminism, settler colonialism, social movements such as BLM, and various racialized and gendered inequities tied to care work.
Derelict Paradise
Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, OhioDaniel R. Kerr
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Seeking answers to the question, “Who benefits from homelessness?” this book takes the reader on a sweeping tour of Cleveland's history from the late nineteenth-century through the early twenty-first. Daniel Kerr shows that homelessness has deep roots in the shifting ground of urban labor markets, social policy, downtown development, the criminal justice system, and corporate power. Rather than being attributable to the illnesses and inadequacies of the unhoused themselves, it is a product of both structural and political dynamics shaping the city. Kerr locates the origins of today's shelter system in the era that followed the massive railroad rebellions of 1877. From that period through the Great Depression, business and political leaders sought to transform downtown Cleveland to their own advantage. As they focused on bringing business travelers and tourists to the city and beckoned upper-income residents to return to its center, they demolished two downtown working-class neighborhoods and institutionalized a shelter system to contain and control the unhoused and unemployed. The precedents from this period informed the strategies of the post–World War II urban renewal era as the "new urbanism" of the late twentieth century. The efforts of the city's elites have not gone uncontested. Kerr documents a rich history of opposition by people at the margins of whose organized resistance and everyday survival strategies have undermined the grand plans crafted by the powerful and transformed the institutions designed to constrain the lives of the homeless.
Destined for Greatness
Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music TownRamirez, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In Destined for Greatness, sociologist Michael Ramirez examines the lives of forty-eight independent rock musicians who seek out such non-normative choices in a college town renowned for its music scene. He explores the rich life course trajectories of women and men to explore the extent to which pathways are structured to allow some, but not all, individuals to fashion careers in music worlds. Ramirez suggests a more nuanced understanding of factors that enable the pursuit of musical livelihoods well into adulthood.
Developing the City
Community Development, Power, and Urban Democracy in U.S. CitiesEdited by Ashley E. Nickels and Zachary D. Wood
Temple University Press, 2027
Developing the City investigates the forms, levels, and spaces of power (visible, hidden, and invisible) involved in community development ecosystems. The editors and contributors, a mix of embedded activists, academics, and community leaders, provide a series of diverse case studies that evaluate the local dynamics that shape urban policy.
Chapters address racialized power dynamics in Cleveland, OH, community development funding in Memphis, TN, economic growth and inclusion in Newark, NJ, housing policies in Denver and Colorado Springs, CO, and participatory governance in Reno, NV among other topics. They reflect the unique manifestations of power within each local context, shaped by distinctive histories and sociopolitical dynamics.
In addition to exploring how various dimensions of power influence decision-making, resource allocation, democratic engagement, and civic participation, Developing the City provides a systematic framework for understanding and questioning these power dynamics, and advocates for a power-conscious approach to foster more equitable and democratic urban futures with respect to economic, racial, social, and environmental justice.
Contributors: Nakeefa Cilicia Bernard, Prentiss A. Dantzler, Caraline Feairheller, Austin Harrison, Brad A. M. Johnson, Katherine Lambert-Pennington, Eric Stokan, Robert Stoker, Jill Yordy, and the editors
Dialectical Imaginaries
Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of NeoliberalismMarcial González and Carlos Gallego, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Discriminating Taste
How Class Anxiety Created the American Food RevolutionFinn, S. Margot
Rutgers University Press, 2017
For the past four decades, increasing numbers of Americans have started paying greater attention to the food they eat, buying organic vegetables, drinking fine wines, and seeking out exotic cuisines. Yet they are often equally passionate about the items they refuse to eat: processed foods, generic brands, high-carb meals. While they may care deeply about issues like nutrition and sustainable agriculture, these discriminating diners also seek to differentiate themselves from the unrefined eater, the common person who lives on junk food.
Discriminating Taste argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the ever-widening income inequality gap. Offering an illuminating historical perspective on our current food trends, S. Margot Finn draws numerous parallels with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, an era infamous for its class divisions, when gourmet dinners, international cuisines, slimming diets, and pure foods first became fads.
Examining a diverse set of cultural touchstones ranging from Ratatouille to The Biggest Loser, Finn identifies the key ways that “good food” has become conflated with high status. She also considers how these taste hierarchies serve as a distraction, leading middle-class professionals to focus on small acts of glamorous and virtuous consumption while ignoring their class’s larger economic stagnation. A provocative look at the ideology of contemporary food culture, Discriminating Taste teaches us to question the maxim that you are what you eat.
Disruption in Detroit
Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar BoomDaniel J. Clark
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Dividing Lines
Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black FictionAndreá N. Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Doing Meritocracy Right
How Business Leaders Can Turn an American Aspiration into Reality (and Why They Should)Thomas A. Cole
University of Chicago Press, 2025
As America’s most vaunted cultural value, meritocracy is celebrated by some as an institution and derided by others as a myth—or even a trap. Thomas A. Cole argues in Doing Meritocracy Right that if meritocracy is to persist as an institution—and it must—it requires structural support in the private sector. For America to achieve a version of meritocracy that more closely matches our aspirations, our business leaders must first offer equity of opportunity for individuals to demonstrate and develop their talents on equal terms.
Drawing on his decades of experience in advising CEOs and corporate boards, personally serving on the boards of major not-for-profits, and leading a large global law firm, Cole cites elite professional-service institutions—consultancies and law firms especially—as improbable laboratories for equity of opportunity. These workplaces, out of self-interest, are laser-focused on the quality of their professionals, seeking out talent and representation and then judging these individuals on (ideally) equal terms once they’re in place. Here, Cole sees an opportunity that no public initiative or platitudes can deliver: if workplaces seek out representational diversity by applying, with thought and care, a single standard of merit—one that emphasizes character—and by providing training and mentoring on an equitable basis, then they will offer a ladder to social and economic mobility that serves both individuals and society.
Cole argues that a meritocratic society is achieved in two interrelated stages: access to education; and post-education promotion to membership in the elite. The latter, he says, is the domain of business. Cole argues that the private sector is better positioned to effect reform and he encourages leaders in the private sector to pursue reform both in their organizations, in government, and in the universities and communities where they have influence.
Meritocracy in the private sector can’t control the many American inequities that exist on the ground of American society. But it can do social good by serving as a reliable, merit-determined path to the highest echelons of business and industry. Cole sets the stage for the discussion of reforms with a “brief history of our imperfect meritocracy,” and rounds out the book with a to-do list for business leaders.
Down and Out in America
The Origins of HomelessnessPeter H. Rossi
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Durkheim
A Critical IntroductionKieran Allen and Brian O'Boyle
Pluto Press, 2017
This critical introduction argues that Durkheim's defence of Republican France in the 1890s had a considerable influence on his sociology, which cannot be fully understood when removed from its historical and political context. His dismissal of economic factors in suicide rates, the influence of his anti-feminist position on his findings on marriage rates, and the idealism behind his claim that religion is the key determinant in shaping society are all discussed.
Through analysing his writings, including The Division of Labour in Society, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this book provides a fascinating, critical counterpoint to the existing works on this key figure of sociology.
Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland
1945–2015Irina Tomescu-Dubrow
Central European University Press, 2018
Dynastic Democracy
Political Families of ThailandYoshinori Nishizaki
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Drawing extensively on Thai-language primary sources, including assets documents and cremation volumes for deceased politicians and their kin, Nishizaki traces the intricate blood and marriage connections among Thailand’s political families. These families may fall into two categories: influential commoner families that have held parliamentary seats since 1932 and form the core of Thailand’s dynastic democracy; and upper-class families that are kin to or aligned ideologically with the royal family and have repeatedly challenged dynastic democracy through coups, constitutional changes, and other political maneuvers. Nishizaki’s exploration of dynastic democracy illustrates how democratic pluralism in Thailand has been consistently stifled, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. Dynastic Democracy fleshes out a widely acknowledged yet heretofore empirically unsubstantiated facet of Thai political history—that in Thai politics, family matters.