Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies

Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Tim Strangleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351780278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies is a timely volume that provides an overview of this interdisciplinary field that emerged in the 1990s in the context of deindustrialization, the rise of the service economy, and economic and cultural globalization. The Handbook brings together scholars, teachers, activists, and organizers from across three continents to focus on the study of working-class peoples, cultures, and politics in all their complexity and diversity.

The Handbook maps the current state of the field and presents a visionary agenda for future research by mingling the voices and perspectives of founding and emerging scholars. In addition to a framing Introduction and Conclusion written by the co-editors, the volume is divided into six sections: Methods and principles of research in working-class studies; Class and education; Work and community; Working-class cultures; Representations; and Activism and collective action. Each of the six sections opens with an overview that synthesizes research in the area and briefly summarizes each of the chapters in the section. Throughout the volume, contributors from various disciplines explore the ways in which experiences and understandings of class have shifted rapidly as a result of economic and cultural globalization, social and political changes, and global financial crises of the past two decades.

Written in a clear and accessible style, the Handbook is a comprehensive interdisciplinary anthology for this young but maturing field, foregrounding transnational and intersectional perspectives on working-class people and issues and focusing on teaching and activism in addition to scholarly research. It is a valuable resource for activists, as well as working-class studies researchers and teachers across the social sciences, arts, and humanities, and it can also be used as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses.

Part I

Methods and principles of research in working-class studies

Section introduction

Methods and principles of research in working-class studies

Christie Launius

The four chapters in this section aim to break new intellectual ground in the field of working-class studies by offering metalevel reflections on and insights into the methods used in working-class studies research, as well as the principles that inform and guide that research. In the years since the field’s founding in the mid-1990s, there have been several broad, ‘big picture’ discussions of the defining features of working-class studies and what sets the field apart from other fields, but not much explicit attention to questions of research methods or methodologies. Twenty plus years in, the field is poised to move that metalevel discussion forward; this section, then, seeks to suggest an agenda for the field and invite others to offer responses of their own. My introduction to this section offers some observations about methods in working-class studies and the principles that guide them, grounded in what has been written on the subject. It situates these four chapters in the larger context of the field and places them in conversation with one another.

It is my hope that the collective work contained in this section of the Handbook, which does a lot of intellectual ‘heavy lifting’, will clear a path forward for working-class studies practitioners, particularly its next generation, to take up some of the following questions, as well as pose new ones: How are researchers’ choices regarding methods guided by the ethos of the field? What method(s) help shed light on working-class lives, experiences, and cultures, and ‘bridge the gap between the concrete, material world of the majority class, the working class, and the more sequestered scholarly practices of the academy?’ (Zandy 1997, 159). Conversely, do some research methods potentially make that work more difficult? What tools and methods do we need in order to gain a better understanding of how class works two decades into the 21st century? What tools do we need as scholars to capture the changing nature of work and capitalism, new types of work and workers, and how people understand their own class position?

In considering these questions, an apt point of comparison comes from the interdisciplinary field of women’s and gender studies, which has generated a robust literature on epistemology, method, and methodology.¹ In women’s and gender studies, researchers use a variety of methods, both quantitative and qualitative, including survey research, in-depth interviewing, ethnography, focus groups, oral history, and textual analysis. A consistent point in discussions of methods within the field is that the methods themselves are not unique to the field, and not inherently feminist or anti-feminist, but instead are used in particular ways by feminist researchers. As such, exploring questions related to what tools and methods working-class studies practitioners need entails a consideration of how to use them, ethically speaking. For practitioners of working-class studies, choices about research methods and how to use them tend to follow from and be in line with the ethos of the field.

As a knowledge project, perhaps the most basic and key aspect of working-class studies is that it puts the working class at the center. As John Russo and Sherry Linkon assert, ‘working-class people and their lives take center stage’ (2005, 11), and the field tries to ‘make working-class voices a primary source for the study of working-class life’ (2005, 12). Likewise, Janet Zandy states that ‘The subjectivity of working people is at the center of working-class studies’ (1997, 162); working-class people are the subject, not only the object, of study in the field. Overall, a focus on the lived experience of class is at the heart of working-class studies, a feature which helps distinguish it from the way other academic disciplines have and continue to study class, and the working classes more specifically.

The centering of working-class people and their subjectivity is connected to the assertion made by Janet Zandy and Jack Metzgar, among others, that there is a working-class epistemology. Zandy, for example sees working-class studies as an ‘academic frame for working-class culture, history, language, stories, bodies—all forms and expressions of working-class knowledge, an epistemology that is generally excluded from institutional constructions of knowledge’ (2001, 159). Jack Metzgar sketches out a working-class epistemology that he sees as distinct from the ‘standard educated middle-class one’, and he somewhat playfully suggests that the differences between the two, in terms of how their respective knowledge claims are presented rhetorically, can be captured by the phrases ‘by my lights’ and ‘studies have shown’ (2012). Metzgar asserts that both working-class and middle-class epistemologies have limitations when taken alone, but that bringing these two ‘contrary, but potentially complementary epistemologies’ together dialogically can be fruitful and productive (Metzgar 2012). Within the field, this can take several forms. At base, practitioners of working-class studies grasp that working-class epistemology is not granted authority in academic settings, and as such, a key part of the field entails granting and asserting that working-class people are knowers who potentially have valuable insights into and perspectives on their own experiences and the world around them that can and should shape our understanding of social class. Working-class studies scholars, then, intervene in academic discourse by granting the epistemic authority of working-class people and integrating their perspectives into scholarly work, thereby expanding scholarly understanding of the working class, which provides a corrective to previous omissions and/or distortions.

A related way that working-class and middle-class epistemologies are brought into dialogue is by working-class studies practitioners who are themselves class straddlers and who write about their own experiences navigating or toggling between middle-class and working-class epistemological frameworks.² In her contribution to this section, Sherry Linkon argues that scholarly personal narratives by working-class academics are the signature genre of the field of working-class studies, and that these texts ‘make working-class people visible and central, as subjects and storytellers but also as interpreters, not only as objects of study’ (emphasis added). Authors of these scholarly personal narratives bring together working-class and middle-class epistemological frameworks through metalevel reflections on their own lives and through their discussions of working-class people they know.

Christine J. Walley’s chapter in this section also picks up on this thread about the interplay between working-class and middle-class epistemologies; her formulation of the contrast is characterized in terms of ‘stories’ and ‘theory’, and she asks whether stories can ‘be the stuff of rigorous scholarly work, and in what ways do they count as evidence and relate to theory?’ (p. 65). Walley suggests that one way out of seeing stories and theory as opposites and mutually exclusive is to instead emphasize analysis.

Analysis, after all, more firmly builds upon concrete engagement with the world and is as much part of everyday storytelling as it is of academic theory. Emphasizing analysis can further open such conversations to working-class voices, potentially providing alternative analyses to those commonly found in academia.

(p. 68)

Both Linkon and Walley explore these epistemological issues alongside and in relation to their discussions of methods in the field.

A second defining feature of the field has to do with definitions of class. For many reasons, working-class studies has no single, agreed-upon definition of class; its practitioners embrace ‘diverse and even contradictory ideas about how class works, why it matters, and how we can best understand it’ (Russo and Linkon 2005, 10). Linkon and Russo assert that ‘What do we mean by class?’ is one of four central questions that shape the field. The field ‘embraces this question but refuses to provide a simple answer’ (2016, 5). A practitioner’s understanding and definition of class, whether ‘class as a category of analysis’ or ‘class as a social category and a culture’, to use Linkon and Russo’s shorthand, surely shapes their choice of method (2016, 5). More broadly, the willingness to keep the question in play rather than trying to pin down a definitive answer speaks to another aspect of the ethos the field. In this section, Joseph Entin’s chapter explores this terrain, as clearly broadcast by his title, ‘Reconceiving class in contemporary working-class studies’. In Linkon and Russo’s formulation, Entin squarely situates himself in the ‘class as a category of analysis’ camp, though he shares with Linkon and Russo a desire to eschew ‘drawing lines between theoretical approaches and traditions’, instead advocating for the adoption of ‘a willfully creative and promiscuous approach to conceptualizing class formation and class struggle—one that embraces intersectional, post-colonial, and poststructuralist approaches, and a wide range of Marxisms’ (p. 34).

A third defining feature of the field has to do with how class is understood and taken up in relation to other categories of analysis, as alluded to by Entin’s quote above that invokes the framework of intersectionality. From its beginnings, practitioners of working-class studies have defined the field as focusing on the intersections between class and other categories of identity. The assertion of this focus has often operated on a dual level: as a positive description of what the field is and does, and as a corrective to misperceptions of it. As Janet Zandy puts it in ‘Toward Working-Class Studies’, ‘Working-Class Studies is not white studies; it must be multicultural’ (1997, 161). Twenty years later, Sara Appel uses the theoretical framework of intersectionality rather than multiculturalism in posing the question, ‘How can working-class studies be a form of intersectional studies…?’ (2017, 408). She writes,

We don’t assume that the complexities of socioeconomic inequality, labor relations, or class identity can be understood merely by examining class in isolation; we’ve adopted a multifaceted way of seeing and reading that recognizes the interconnectedness of class with race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of experience.

(2017, 406)

In two early pieces, Janet Zandy refers to this as a critical practice of ‘reciprocal visibility’ (2001, 250) and an ‘expanded relational vision’ (1997, x). A commitment to intersectionality is frequently reflected in practitioners’ choice and use of research methods.

A final core principle of the field is that it has a social justice component; as Russo and Linkon assert, working-class studies is ‘not just an academic exercise’ (2005, 15). Janet Zandy is prescriptive in her assertion that ‘If Working-Class Studies becomes merely an object of study, and not a means of struggle, then it would lose purpose. Working-Class Studies is intended to continue the struggle of earlier generations for an economically just society for us all’ (1997, 162). Since its beginnings, the ‘big tent’ approach to the field has explicitly included activism and activists outside academia, but as both Russo and Linkon and Zandy make clear, there is also an expectation that the scholarly work produced by its academic practitioners be a type of praxis—that is, that it support the aim of social justice.

This part of the ethos of the field can be seen in all four chapters in this section, though it is perhaps attended to most explicitly by Jane Van Galen and Christine Walley. In ‘Mediating stories of class borders: First-generation college students, digital storytelling, and social class’, Van Galen uses the work of Vivienne to discuss four levels of social change that are potential outcomes of her digital storytelling project. She writes about ‘the potential of these stories to provoke change’ (p. 53), starting from the individual level (i.e. how the students are personally changed by the experience of participating in the workshop), then outward to change that occurs from them sharing their stories both with their fellow students and their friends and families, and finally with a public audience, potentially resulting in institutional-level change. While Walley isn’t as explicit about overt social justice aims, she writes extensively in her chapter about her commitment to diversifying the audience for her work and further incorporating working-class perspectives into academic conversations and scholarship through her creation of multimedia work in tandem with a variety of collaborators. She writes of making a documentary film as an extension of her monograph, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago (2013), as well as developing an online archive and storytelling site for the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum.

Working-class studies scholars use a variety of methods; practitioners with training and interests in the humanities have focused on finding adequate methods for analyzing and interpreting working-class texts (literature, film, art, photography, etc.), while those in the social sciences have focused, for example on adapting methods for interviewing working-class people and studying working-class communities through ethnography, as well as interviewing and/or surveying people about social class. Historians with interests in studying working-class people, places, and movements have also discussed how best to adapt their field’s methods to this area. And across disciplines, those in working-class studies have adapted models of service learning and civic engagement to bridge the divide between their classrooms and the community.

As the above description suggests, most working-class studies practitioners utilize methods that stem from their primary disciplinary training; a much smaller number engage in research that spans disciplines and/or would be considered truly interdisciplinary. Linkon and Russo are among that number; in ‘Border crossings: Interdisciplinarity in new working-class studies’, Linkon and Russo describe and advocate the use of a method of ‘comparative, connective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of images
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Methods and principles of research in working-class studies
• Part II Class and education
• Part III Work and community
• Part IV Working-class cultures
• Part V Representations
• Part VI Activism and collective action
• Index