Contesting racism: how do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?

ABSTRACT

Drawing on interviews with thirty-two black British professionals, and ethnographic work in middle-class cultural spaces across London, this paper asks ‘How do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?’ I argue that the black middle-class contest the racial hierarchy at three levels through their cultural consumption: the material, the ideological, and the symbolic. At the material level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms they decode as ‘white’ in order to establish an equity with whites in levels of cultural capital. At the ideological level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms that uplift meanings and representations of blackness, thus challenging controlling images of blackness. Lastly, at the symbolic level, black middle-class folks create and sustain cultural spaces where black people’s cultural and symbolic knowledge is given proper recognition and authority.     

Inequality and 21-year-olds' negotiation of uncertain transitions to employment: a Bourdieusian approach

Faced with uncertainty, how do young people navigate the transition from school to work? Applying Bourdieu's concept of habitus to the ‘fields’ of education and employment, I argue that past experience, family background and unequal access to economic, social and symbolic forms of capital differentiate their transitions. Drawing on the tenth wave of the Australian longitudinal Life Chances Study, we found that all of the twenty-five 21-year-olds interviewed expressed uncertainty when discussing their futures. However, those from high-income backgrounds with access to strong social, economic and cultural resources were better able to manage the risks arising from uncertainty than their counterparts from low-income backgrounds. The following article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of young people's experiences at age 21 through the application of Bourdieu's conceptual framework. The interviewees’ habitus and cultivation of varying forms of capital tend towards social reproduction, yet also reveal opportunities for those considered ‘disadvantaged’ to mobilise their cultural resources. Bourdieu's model of the field, and its component conceptual tools, provide an explanatory frame to make sense of the seemingly incoherent paths that young people trace between education and employment.     

Diverse students and literacy in social work education: pedagogies for a new tertiary landscape

In the Western policy landscape, students from diverse cultural, linguistic, economic and other backgrounds are increasingly represented in an expanded tertiary education system. Structural and technological changes have challenged traditional pedagogies designed for more elite cohorts, and shifted the boundaries of textual practices in both universities and professional worlds. In spite of these momentous trends, university literacies often remain tacit and inaccessible to those new to them, and pedagogies rarely explicitly engage with the complexities of these shifting boundaries. University students unfamiliar with these tacit literacies can become marginalised and ultimately struggle with the literacy demands of their academic and professional worlds. This is problematic in social work education, as professional practice demands complex written and oral communication, with potentially significant social and legal repercussions. This paper reports on pedagogies initiated by action research in a Bachelor of Social Work programme in an Australian University. Pedagogies were introduced to make elite codes explicit, use students’ literacies as assets for learning and encourage ‘code switching’ between literacy practices to resist colonising into more powerful literacies. Students’ capacities in academic and professional literacies were significantly enhanced by these practices, and their cultural inheritances valorised, encouraging their contribution to the social work discipline.     

Conquering with capital: social,cultural, and economic capital’s role in combating socioeconomic disadvantage and contributing to educational attainment

While socioeconomic barriers to learning have been well-documented by education, sociology, and social policy scholars, further research is needed to understand how students with low-socioeconomic status excel in high-performing schools. The collection and analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with female college students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds provide rich insights into the stark differences between the educational practices of low and high-SES students. Building on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of how habitus and capital influence practices in the field of education exposes unique, strategic practices that low-SES students use to attain educational success within a system of reproduction and power. While entering a high-performing school is often perceived as a definitive step for accessing high-quality educational resources, my findings illustrate how it is actually an important intermediary step within a more complex process. Increasing educational opportunity and attainment for low-SES students requires improving their access to social, cultural, and economic capital through knowledgeable mentors who contribute to a habitus and portfolio of capital which enable practices to successfully navigate and challenge the educational system.     

The magic of mundane objects: culture,identity and power in a country vets' practice

This article explores and extends the idea that material objects lie at the heart of many of our social, and specifically workplace, interactions. The site of exploration is an ethnography of a British farm animal veterinary surgery. Drawing upon traditional cultural studies approaches alongside contemporary sociological understandings about the place of materials in social life, the article analyses how objects function to track and structure the ways that people of different professional status experience work at a veterinary surgery. It is argued that the power of the veterinary elite in this setting is best understood by paying close attention to ‘mundane’ artefacts. The article argues that such objects, having almost no meaning on their own, can become potent cultural symbols if actors have the necessary social capital to ‘transform’ them. Here, Latimer's concept of ‘strong moves’ (2004) is extended to consider how the reinterpretation of objects might constitute a form of ‘cultural magic’. This article seeks to uncover some of the practical scenarios in which such ‘magical’ transformations play out and describes, through a series of tales from the field (Van Maanen, 1985), the ways in which vets control and regulate their interactions with those outside the professional elite.     

Karen cultural capital and the political economy of symbolic power

For the Karen of northern Thailand, constructing the image of Karen as forest guardians and conservationists has produced an instrument of struggle against the official hegemonic discourse. This image construction is the accumulation of cultural capital and its transformation into symbolic power. The Karen cultural producers promote this strategy by investing their local knowledge and cultural resources into political action and alliances that reinforce their identification as ‘children of the forest’, in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Through image construction, the largely negative identities embodied in ‘Karen’ and their communities—as denigrated ‘hill‐tribes’, forest‐destroyers and illiterate peasants—are transformed into a single social and political category defined as the ‘indigenous’ forest managers.     

Reading European football,critiquing China: Chinese urban middle class fans as reflexive audience

ABSTRACT

This essay explores European football’s cross-cultural appeals in China by focusing on Chinese fans’ active readings of this globalized cultural text. Using analytical tools from both sport sociology and transnational reception studies, I understand Chinese urban middle-class supporters as a reflexive audience whose meaning-making of European football is contextualized in their local urban experience. The in-depth interviewing reveals that these fans’ interpretations of their favourite European football teams as symbols of ‘collective cooperation’ and ‘beautiful football’ produce critical reflections on the discourses of ‘competitive individualism’ and ‘utilitarian commercialism’ which are part of the rising ideology during China’s neoliberal reform. Through the comparison among European football, Chinese football, and popular ‘national’ sports in China, the participants further contest the prevalence of these discourses in China’s broader economic and social arrangements over which they are engaged in constant material struggles. I further discuss how the transnational consumption of European football offers the Chinese urban middle-class a symbolic space to project their reflexivity on the reforming process.     

The mobility imperative for rural youth: the structural,symbolic and non-representational dimensions rural youth mobilities

Mobilities of money, symbols and young people themselves are central to the formation of the contemporary youth period. While rural young people remain marginal to theoretical development in youth studies, this paper shows that mobilities are especially significant for rural youth, who experience a kind of mobility imperative created by the accelerating concentration of economic and cultural capital in cities. Drawing on theory and evidence from contexts including Europe, Australia, Africa and South America, this paper explores the mobility imperative for rural youth and offers a new theoretical framework for understanding rural youth mobilities. The framework understands mobilities across three dimensions: the structural, the symbolic and the non-representational. These dimensions refer to material inequalities between rural and urban places in a global context; symbolic hierarchies that concentrate the resources for ‘youthfulness’ in cities and the affective entanglements between embodied subjectivities and spaces that emerge as young people move. The paper shows how these dimensions interact in the production and experience of the mobility imperative, offering an ontological and theoretical platform for future research into rural youth mobilities.     

The relational costs of crossing class lines

How do low socioeconomic status students navigate cross-class interactions in extremely unequal contexts? Previous research has described the high costs of college integration for underprivileged students, which in turn, negatively impact academic performance and general wellbeing. These studies tend to concentrate on cultural capital costs, such as catching up with assumed middle-class or elite capital and dealing with two worlds. Less has been said about social capital costs, the costs of making friends, especially more privileged friends. Through 61 in-depth interviews with various types of students as part of a broader ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses the experiences of low-income scholarship holders in an elite institution in a very unequal society, Colombia. Rather than isolating themselves or resorting to safe homophilic relations, they faced their new elite environment engaging with the hidden relational cost of making friends with more affluent students. In so doing, they had to overcome fears and experiences of discrimination and micro-aggressions, as well as cultural and economic capital barriers, and employed either camouflaging or disclosure strategies, sometimes becoming culturally and socially omnivorous. Symbolic belonging to the institution and the acquisition of middle-class cultural capital were among the benefits that made overcoming the costs worthy. Our results shed light on what institutions can do to reduce the costs for underprivileged students and, theoretically, unveil an important mechanism and barrier for social mobility: building cross-class ties.     

Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora

Abstract In this article I examine the role of education in the family strategies of recent East Asian migrants, contributing to intellectual debates around transnationalism and the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Empirically, the article provides an insight into the experiences and objectives of an often‐neglected group within studies of Chinese migration – students. I also attempt to understand the particular role that children play within a wider family project of capital accumulation. Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, I emphasize the significance of different forms of capital in underpinning the spatial strategies of East Asian families. The research for this article was conducted in Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong, involving in‐depth interviews with university students, recent graduates and their families. In conclusion, in the article I maintain that a geographically informed theory of ‘cultural capital’ and its relationship to the family unit can help elucidate recent patterns of trans‐Pacific, transnational mobility, moving beyond more common ‘political’ and ‘economic’ interpretations of this contemporary migration.     

Microbusiness, household and class dynamics: the embedding of minority ethnic petty commerce

Microbusinesses are embedded in wider social processes, and it is the nature of this social embeddedness that is the principal focus of the article. In particular,‘domestic embedding’ of petty commerce is crucial, and involves a mixture of competition, domination, negotiation, and custom (Wheelock and Mariussen, 1997). Furthermore, as a socio‐economic group, petty traders and producers occupy an ambivalent position in the class structure, as they are vulnerable both to upward and downward social mobility. While the petty capital class has the advantage of possessing property assets, many members lack significant symbolic and cultural assets. Nonetheless, property assets offer the most robust bases for class formation (Savage et al., 1992). In addition, the embedding of petty commerce can be both ‘identity‐sensitive’ and ‘identity‐neutral’(Sayer, 1995; 2000; Fraser, 1995). Extra‐ethnic factors are significant in this process. The research uses formal interviews and ‘quasi‐ethnographic’ methodology to explore the different contexts in which restaurateurs and market traders operated in Birmingham, UK. The article draws critically on several literatures on industrial organisation, economic sociology, family businesses and minority ethnic businesses. One aim is to give the rather indifferent concept of ‘embedding’ substantive content, and in this way to make an empirically informed contribution to ‘new economic sociology’.     

Being Tough and Belonging: Technologies of Masculinity among Martial Arts Students in China

Literary masculinity has dominated Chinese society for thousands of years. Even in today's academic schools, boys with good academic performance have a higher status than those who are seen as ‘aggressive’ or ‘tough’. In this article I examine how students reconstruct the hierarchy of literary/martial masculinity in Shaolin martial arts schools, an alternative form of education in China. Rather than being disciplined into socially useful subjects, as expected by parents and school authorities, I show how martial arts students have reconstructed the symbolic meanings of masculinity and shaped a new space of belonging. Through displays of violence and cultivating toughness, students deploy technologies of martial masculinity to fit in with their peers and reproduce the masculine ethos of martial arts schools.     

Cultural identity as a social construct

Social changes such as economic globalisation and international mobility have led to an increase in the number of people who spend substantial periods of time in more than one cultural context. This has led to a cultural diversity within nations that is reflected in schools and classrooms, where increasing numbers of students are from non-mainstream cultural backgrounds. Although this cultural diversity is now acknowledged in the education policies of many culturally diverse nations, the sub-text of these same policies is still based on an assumption that coming from a non-mainstream cultural background is a disadvantage. This assumption fails to acknowledge the success of many students from non-mainstream cultural backgrounds and the fact that in contemporary society, the ability to move across cultural boundaries is an advantage rather than a disadvantage.     

‘It’s Quite Stylish’: Representations of American English and American Culture in English-Training Milieus in Delhi,India

English-training institutes seem to be ubiquitous in India, and they often index the United States through reference to ‘American accent’ training, American teachers, or simply American flags on their storefront signs. Against the broader backdrop of globalization, and through an examination of institute signs and advertisements and interviews with institute students and teachers, I show how ‘America’ is represented, produced, and consumed as a symbolic and cultural category within the cultural domain of English-training institutes.     

On the moral economy of country life

The role that elite rural women play in the fields of community service and social networking ensures the creation and reproduction of cultural and symbolic capital. Their work, which contributes a necessary ‘service’ for the functioning of village life, also serves to enact women's positions in these fields. Through these strategies and distributions of capital one can see that the social world is mirrored in a homologous symbolic system which is organised according to a specific logic of differences specific to New Zealand rural communities. This paper focuses on how this moral economy of service structures a North Island hill country farming community.     

A struggle on two fronts: boundary drawing in the lower region of the social space and the symbolic market for ‘down‐to‐earthness’

In this article we use qualitative interviews to examine how Norwegians possessing low volumes of cultural and economic capital demarcate themselves symbolically from the lifestyles of those above and below them in social space. In downward boundary drawing, a range of types of people are regarded as inferior because of perceived moral and aesthetic deficiencies. In upward boundary drawing, anti‐elitist sentiments are strong: people practising resource‐demanding lifestyles are viewed as harbouring ‘snobbish’ and ‘elitist’ attitudes. However, our analysis suggests that contemporary forms of anti‐elitism are far from absolute, as symbolic expressions of privilege are markedly less challenged if they are parcelled in a ‘down‐to‐earth’ attitude. Previous studies have shown attempts by the privileged to downplay differences in cross‐class encounters, accompanied by displays of openness and down‐to‐earthness. Our findings suggest that there is in fact a symbolic ‘market’ for such performances in the lower region of social space. This cross‐class sympathy, we argue, helps naturalize, and thereby legitimize, class inequalities. The implications of this finding are outlined with reference to current scholarly debates about politics and populism, status and recognition and intersections between class and gender in the structuring of social inequalities. The article also contributes key methodological insights into the mapping of symbolic boundaries. Challenging Lamont's influential framework, we demonstrate that there is a need for a more complex analytical strategy rather than simply measuring the ‘relative salience’ of various boundaries in terms of their occurrence in qualitative interview data. In distinguishing analytically between usurpationary and exclusionary boundary strategies, we show that moral boundaries in particular can take on qualitatively different forms and that subtypes of boundaries are sometimes so tightly intertwined that separating them to measure their relative salience would neglect the complex ways in which they combine to engender both aversion to and sympathies for others.     

Class and family

This paper seeks to make a contribution to debates on ‘class analysis’, as well as exploring the role of the family in class reproduction. A broad distinction is drawn between primarily ‘economic’ and primarily ‘culturalist’ accounts of class reproduction. It is argued that despite their differences, these accounts also share many similarities. In particular, both approaches identify the role of the family as central to the reproduction of class. However, economic and cultural accounts cannot be integrated into a single ‘theory’, one reason being that the mechanisms whereby economic and cultural capital are transmitted are different. Nevertheless, economic and cultural approaches may be (and should be) used in combination with each other in order to develop a full account of the reproduction of class inequalities. In developing these arguments, a critique is offered of current theories of ‘individualisation’ in relation to class and the family. The argument is illustrated by two ‘worked examples’; teenage motherhood, and the patterning of mothers’ employment.     

Where tradition and ‘modern’ knowledge meet: exploring two Islamic schools in Singapore and Britain

Muslims live in a ‘modern’ world where subjects such as the English language, mathematics, sciences, and information and communication technology (ICT) are highly valued and enthusiastically transmitted in schools. How some Islamic schools attempt to equip their students with ‘modern knowledge’ while remaining faithful to their religious traditions is the focus of this exploratory study. Using two Islamic schools in Singapore and Britain as illustrative case studies, this paper examines their history, aims, curriculum and pedagogy in their aspiration to acquire ‘modern’ knowledge within their Islamic world views. It further explores some common challenges faced by students and teachers in both schools in their quest for a balanced curriculum. By highlighting the Islamic schools in two Muslim minority countries, this paper aims to contribute towards the international literature on how religious schools assert their cultural heritage and negotiate their learning in the modern age.     

Who's the fairest of them all? Television ads for skin-whitening cosmetics in Hong Kong

This paper explores the notion of fair skin and its relationship to the construction of a Hong Kong ‘racial’ identity by Hong Kongers. It examines a local television advertisement for a cosmetic product named ‘UVWhite whitening softener’. Based on the interpretations of focus-group participants in Hong Kong and the UK, and his own in the role of analyst, the author explores three different perspectives on the advertisement. A triangulation of these three perspectives reveals a number of possible meanings and symbolic functions of fair skin in forming identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and their relationships with class, gender and, above all, race in various sociocultural contexts. These perspectives, and the differences between them, also closely reflect the sociocultural backgrounds of the participants and provide clues to an understanding of the ways in which skin colour operates as a visual agent in defining the boundaries of cultural identity, and in identifying a person's place in a local social hierarchy, if not an increasingly global one.