Results by title
238 books match the query 'Social Classes & Economic Disparity' and 17 start with w
WPAing in a Pandemic and Beyond
Revision, Innovation, and AdvocacyTodd Ruecker
Utah State University Press, 2025
The chapters in this collection include a variety of voices who have been involved in writing program administration in recent years to reflect on the work done in this moment of crisis. Through both short vignettes and longer chapters, this book explores the complicated interactions between WPA work and navigating times of crisis to provide insights for moving forward. Authors explore a variety of topics including professional development, curricular change, advocating in the face of intransigent administrations and others, caring for students, and taking time for self-care. Pointing to specific actions for continued advocacy, WPAing in a Pandemic and Beyond will be of great interest to WPAs and writing studies scholars.
War Against the People
Israel, the Palestinians and Global PacificationJeff Halper
Pluto Press, 2015
Modern warfare has a new form. The days of international combat are fading. So how do major world powers maintain control over their people today?
This book is a disturbing insight into the new ways world powers such as the US, Israel, Britain and China forge war today. It is a subliminal war of surveillance and whitewashed terror, conducted through new, high-tech military apparatuses, designed and first used in Israel against the Palestinian population. Including nano-technology, hidden camera systems, information databases on civilian activity, automated targeting systems and unmanned drones, it is used to control the very people the nation's leaders profess to serve.
Jeff Halper reveals that this practice is much more insidious than was previously thought. As Western governments claw back individual liberties, War Against the People is a reminder that fundamental human rights are being compromised for vast sections of the world, and that this is a subject that should concern everyone.
We Belong Here
Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of PlaceShani Adia Evans
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In We Belong Here, sociologist Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of Albina residents as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As White culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “White watching,” the questioning look on the faces of White people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “White spacemaking”: the establishment of White space—spaces in which Whiteness is assumed to be the norm and non-Whites are treated with suspicion—in formerly non-White neighborhoods. Evans also documents Black residents’ efforts to create and maintain places for Black belonging in White-dominated Portland. While gentrification typically describes socioeconomic changes that may have racial implications, White spacemaking allows us to understand racism as a primary mechanism of neighborhood change. We Belong Here illuminates why gentrification and White spacemaking should be examined as intersecting, but not interchangeable, processes of neighborhood change.
We Fight To Win
Inequality and the Politics of Youth ActivismHava Rachel Gordon
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.
Welfare for Markets
A Global History of Basic IncomeAnton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state’s policy-in-waiting.
The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty—now known as basic income—is hardly new. Often dated as far back as ancient Rome, basic income’s modern conception truly emerged in the late nineteenth century. Yet as one of today’s most controversial proposals, it draws supporters from across the political spectrum.
In this eye-opening work, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas trace basic income from its rise in American and British policy debates following periods of economic tumult to its modern relationship with technopopulist figures in Silicon Valley. They chronicle how the idea first arose in the United States and Europe as a market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis and COVID-19 crash.
An incisive, comprehensive history, Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global, revealing the most significant shift in political culture since the end of the Cold War.
What the Butler Winked At
Being the Life and Adventures of Eric Horne, ButlerEric Horne
Westholme Publishing, 2011
A Memoir of the Real Downton Abbey Experience
Eric Horne served as a butler in some of the great English country manors from the 1860s until just after World War I, when many of the families whose heirs died in battle were forced to sell off their homes. Born in Southampton, Horne came from a humble family who valued education. Horne excelled in school and wished to go to sea, but lacking his parents’ permission, he instead ended up as a footboy for a local household. Over the years, Horne moved up in the service of the aristocracy: his goal was to become butler to the king of England, a position he very nearly secured. He did end up in the service of several distinguished households for many decades, and upon his retirement in 1922, he decided to write his memoir. Horne is a unique voice; not only did he have intimate contact with his employers and the household staff, he also possessed literary talent, so that his account provides authentic detail as well as shrewd—and often witty—views of the aristocracy, the servants, and their activities. Horne is not sentimental though; he does not think that he used his life wisely, having never learned a true trade. He reveals the plight of the servant class, where once a butler lost his employment—particularly following the devastation of World War I—he was likely to end up in a poorhouse, because employers did not usually provide pensions and servants were rarely able to save enough money to survive on their own. What the Butler Winked At is a fascinating and essential account of life in a country house during the height of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People
Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in AmericaDara Z. Strolovitch
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States.
From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do?
In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.
When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People
Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in AmericaDara Z. Strolovitch
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States.
From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do?
In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.
When Care is Conditional
Immigrants and the U.S. Safety NetDani Carrillo
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Through in-depth interviews with Latinx immigrants in northern California, Carrillo examines three circumstances—place, gender, and immigration status—that intersect to influence an individual’s access to health care, food assistance, and other benefits. She demonstrates that place of residence affects undocumented immigrants’ ability to get care since more services are available in urban areas, where many immigrants cannot afford to live, than suburban areas, where public transportation is limited. She also shows that while both men and women who are undocumented have difficulty obtaining care, men often confront more challenges. Undocumented women who are pregnant or mothers are eligible for some government safety net programs and rely on informal coethnic networks or a “guiding figure”—a relative, friend, neighbor, or coworker—who explains how to get care and makes them feel confident in accessing it. Most undocumented men, in contrast, are not eligible for public programs except in a medical emergency and often lack someone to guide them directly to care. Men sometimes steer one another to jobs through worker centers—where they may learn about various services and take advantage of those that increase their employability, like English or computer classes—but a culture of masculinity leads them to downplay medical problems and seek health care only in a crisis.
As undocumented immigrants navigate this exclusionary system, Carrillo finds that they resist the rhetoric stigmatizing them as lawbreakers. Dismissing the importance of “papers” and highlighting their work ethic, they question the fairness of U.S. immigration policies and challenge ideas about who deserves care.
Carrillo offers concrete recommendations, such as improving labor conditions and reexamining benefit eligibility, to increase access to care for not only undocumented immigrants but also people who have been excluded because of their race, criminal record, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. She argues that working with and across populations creates a powerful form of solidarity in advocating for inclusive care.
When Care Is Conditional provides compelling insights into how safety net and immigration policies intersect to affect people’s everyday lives and calls for a cultural shift so that the United States can provide unconditional care for all.
Where Are the Workers?
Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic SitesEdited by Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti
University of Illinois Press, 2022
A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism.
Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linné, Erik Loomis, Tom MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon
Where Bad Jobs Are Better
Retail Jobs Across Countries and CompaniesFrancoise Carre
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017
In surveying retail work across the United States, Carré and Tilly find that the majority of retail workers receive low pay and nearly half work part-time, which contributes to high turnover and low productivity. Jobs staffed predominantly by women, such as grocery store cashiers, pay even less than retail jobs in male-dominated fields, such as consumer electronics. Yet, when comparing these jobs to similar positions in Western Europe, Carré and Tilly find surprising differences. In France, though supermarket cashiers perform essentially the same work as cashiers in the United States, they receive higher pay, are mostly full-time, and experience lower turnover and higher productivity. And unlike the United States, where many retail employees are subject to unpredictable schedules, in Germany, retailers are required by law to provide their employees notice of work schedules six months in advance.
The authors show that disparities in job quality are largely the result of differing social norms and national institutions. For instance, weak labor regulations and the decline of unions in the United States have enabled retailers to cut labor costs aggressively in ways that depress wages and discourage full-time work. On the other hand, higher minimum wages, greater government regulation of work schedules, and stronger collective bargaining through unions and works councils have improved the quality of retail jobs in Europe.
As retail and service work continue to expand, American employers and policymakers will have to decide the extent to which these jobs will be good or bad. Where Bad Jobs Are Better shows how stronger rules and regulations can improve the lives of retail workers and boost the quality of low-wage jobs across the board.
Where the Hood At?
Fifty Years of Change in Black NeighborhoodsMichael C. Lens
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Hip hop music was born out of Black neighborhoods in the 1970s and has evolved alongside them. In Where the Hood At? Lens uses rap’s growth and influence across the country to frame discussions about the development and conditions of Black neighborhoods. Lens finds that social and economic improvement in Black neighborhoods since the 1970s has been slow. However, how well Black neighborhoods are doing varies substantially by region. Overall, Black neighborhoods in the South are doing well and growing quickly. Washington D.C. and Atlanta, in particular, stand out as centers of Black affluence. Black neighborhoods in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, on the other hand, are particularly disadvantaged. The welfare of Black neighborhoods is related not only to factors within neighborhoods, such as the unemployment rate, but also to characteristics of the larger metropolitan area, such as overall income inequality. Lens finds that while gentrification is increasingly prevalent, it is growing slowly, and is not as pressing an issue as public discourse would make it seem. Instead, concentrated disadvantage is by far the most common and pressing problem in Black neighborhoods.
Lens argues that Black neighborhoods represent urban America’s greatest policy failures, and that recent housing policies have only had mild success. He provides several suggestions for policies with the goal of uplifting Black neighborhoods. One radical proposal is enacting policies and programs, such as tax breaks for entrepreneurs or other small business owners, that would encourage Black Americans to move back to the South. Black Americans migrating South would have a better chance at moving to an advantaged Black neighborhood as improving neighborhood location is higher when moving across regions. It would also help Black Americans expand their political and economic power. He also suggests a regional focus for economic development policies, particularly in the Midwest where Black neighborhoods are struggling the most. One way to boost economic development would be to move federal agencies to the area. He also calls for building more affordable housing in Black suburbs. Black poverty is lower in suburbs than in central cities, so increasing housing in Black suburbs would allow Black households to relocate to more advantaged neighborhoods, which research has shown leads to improved life outcomes.
Where the Hood At? is a remarkable and comprehensive account of Black neighborhoods that helps us to better understand the places and conditions that allow them flourish or impedes their advancement.
Wives, Slaves, and Servant Girls
Advertisements for Female Runaways in American Newspapers, 1770–1783Don N. Hagist
Westholme Publishing, 2007
In an age when individuals could be owned by others, people were lost and found just like other property. Indentured servants and slaves absconded from the custody of their masters, and their value prompted the masters to seek their return. Wives ran from abusive husbands or into the arms of another. Newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carried large numbers of advertisements offering rewards for the return of runaways or announcing the detention of fugitives. Each ad provided a description of the individual and often included some circumstances of their elopement. The overall effectiveness of these advertisements cannot be measured, but the sheer number of ads suggests they were perceived as useful tools by those who placed them. What could not have been known at the time was the substantial contribution to history that these ads make. The descriptive advertisements provide textual snapshots of thousands of individuals who would otherwise be lost to history, people whose names might not otherwise be recorded. In Wives, Slaves, and Servant Girls: Advertisements for Female Runaways in American Newspapers, 1770–1783, historian Don N. Hagist focuses on the American Revolutionary period to provide a striking portrait of a substantial but largely forgotten segment of the population. Comprised of four hundred advertisements presented chronologically, the volume provides invaluable descriptions of women’s clothes, footwear, jewelry, physical appearances, education, nationalities, occupations, and other details.
Work Better, Live Better
Motivation, Labor, and Management IdeologyDavid A. Gray
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
In the United States, a strong work ethic has long been upheld as a necessity, and tributes to motivation abound—from the motivational posters that line the walls of the workplace to the self-help gurus who draw in millions of viewers online. Americans are repeatedly told they can achieve financial success and personal well-being by adopting a motivated attitude toward work. But where did this obsession come from? And whose interests does it serve?
Work Better, Live Better traces the rise of motivational rhetoric in the workplace across the expanse of two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Beginning in the early twentieth century, managers recognized that force and coercion—the traditional tools of workplace discipline—inflamed industrial tensions, so they sought more subtle means of enlisting workers' cooperation. David Gray demonstrates how this “motivational project” became a highly orchestrated affair as managers and their allies deployed films, posters, and other media, and drew on the ideas of industrial psychologists and advertising specialists to advance their quests for power at the expense of worker and union interests.
Workers of the World, Enjoy!
Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice MovementKenneth H. Tucker, Jr.
Temple University Press, 2012
The aesthetic politics of social movements turn public life into a public stage, where mutual displays of performance often trump rational debate, and urban streets become sites of festivals and carnival. In his penetrating new book, Workers of the World, Enjoy!, Kenneth Tucker provides a new model for understanding social change in our image-saturated and aesthetically charged world. As emotional and artistic images inform our perceptions and evaluation of politics, art and performance often provide new and creative ways of understanding self and society.
Spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, Workers of the World, Enjoy! uses examples from major social movements that have dramatically changed the dominant capitalist society—often in the name of labor. Tucker investigates how class and culture develop as he raises questions about what it means for public life and social movements when politics and drama come together.
Tucker catalogues how aesthetic politics influences social movements—from French Revolutionary syndicalism and fascism to the selling of the President and the street theater of the contemporary global justice movement. He also discusses the work of political theorists including Jurgen Habermas, Jeffrey Alexander, and Nancy Fraser to critique the ways public sphere has been studied.
Working-Class America
Essays on Labor, Community, and American SocietyEdited by Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz
University of Illinois Press, 1983
Working-Class Women in the Academy
Laborers in the Knowledge FactoryMichelle M. Tokarczyk
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993
The voices of 20 women from working-class backgrounds are heard in this collection of essays. Each of the women has lived through the process of academic socialization—as both student and teacher—and each has thought long and deeply about her experiences from an explicitly feminist perspective.