Whose Best Friend? Dogs and Racial Boundary Maintenance in a Multiracial Neighborhood

In human–animal studies, dogs are often framed as promoters of interactions among strangers. Yet very few of these studies discuss how racial structure shapes human‐to‐human engagement. Similarly, race scholarship and urban studies have failed to incorporate human–animal studies fully to better understand racial dynamics and inequality in U.S. cities. I use in‐depth interview data from an 18‐month study of Creekridge Park, an urban, multiracial, and mixed‐income neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina, to explore the role of dogs for white residents. I focus on identifying if dogs helped bridge social differences between white residents and their Black and Latinx neighbors in a racially and economically diverse neighborhood. I find that while my white respondents shared many examples of dogs facilitating neighborly relationships and friendship, these relationships were largely between same‐race individuals. By reinforcing a white, urban, middle‐class habitus, white residents used dogs to maintain interracial boundaries and feelings of safety, as well as navigate racial‐ethnic differences between themselves and their Black and Latinx neighbors. These findings point to the necessity of more research that addresses racial structure and human–animal studies to better understand contemporary urban spaces.     

Re‐invigorating democracy?: White middle class identities and comprehensive schooling

Recent research on social class and whiteness points to disquieting and exclusive aspects of white middle class identities. This paper focuses on whether ‘alternative’ middle class identities might work against, and disrupt, normative views of what it means to be ‘middle class’ at the beginning of the 21^st Century. Drawing on data from those middle classes who choose to send their children to urban comprehensives, we examine processes of ‘thinking and acting otherwise’ in order to uncover some of the commitments and investments that might make for a renewed and reinvigorated democratic citizenry. The difficulties of turning these commitments and investments into more equitable ways of interacting with class and ethnic others which emerge as real challenges for this left leaning, pro‐welfare segment of the middle classes. Within a contemporary era of neo‐liberalism that valorises competition, individualism and the market even these white middle classes who express a strong commitment to community and social mixing struggle to convert inclinations into actions.     

Activating Controlling Images in the Racialized Interaction Order: Black Middle‐Class Interactions and the Creativity of Racist Action

This paper investigates the link between the racial hierarchy and the racialized interaction order, questioning how controlling images of blackness are mediated in interactions. I explore this through interviews with thirty‐two black British middle‐class individuals, examining their interactions in the professional workplace. I argue that white people often draw on a practical knowledge of “white ignorance” to activate controlling images in their interactions with black professionals. This white ignorance allows for white people to find creative ways to irrationally deploy controlling images, and to adapt controlling images to specific interactional settings.     

Changing Boundaries: Sorting Space,Class, Ethnicity and Race in Ontario*

This essay examines the components of space, class, ethnicity and race. The focus is on the Ontario urban system, including Toronto, Ottawa‐Hull, Hamilton and London. The emphasis is on how social class, ethnicity and race influence spatial residential differentiation. Toronto appears as a “Visible Minority” type. London follows an early British/Loyalist type, Hamilton an industrial blue‐collar type, and Thunder Bay a northwestern fringe. Urban areas in Ontario seem to serve a variety of functions, in line with Innis's conception of a core, semi‐core and fringe. Toronto acts as a magnet for immigrants. London is located in the agricultural base, Hamilton is a supplier of industrial jobs, and Thunder Bay provides staples supporting northern populations. Moreover, ethnicity and race are crucial indicators of boundaries, which must be accounted for in understanding urban communities.     

Unpacking the Power of the Mommy Wars

In recent years, Mommy Wars discourse, or an expressed judgment between mothers who work for pay and those who stay at home with their children, has emerged as a significant part of American culture. Yet knowledge about both its substantive underpinnings and the breadth of its influence across racial groups is limited. On these points, some research has suggested that racial differences regarding adherence to particular mothering ideologies will drive Mommy Wars discourse among white, middle‐class mothers but not among African American, middle‐class mothers. This study investigates 125 middle‐class yet racially diverse mothers about the content and prevalence of Mommy Wars discourse among their peers. Contrary to expectations, Mommy Wars discourse, although based on strong beliefs regarding appropriate maternal practices, was limited in its scope. In addition, Mommy Wars discourse was a minority perspective among the peers of white, middle‐class mothers, but a plurality perspective among the peers of African American, middle‐class mothers.     

The Making of the Urban Middle Class in South Korea (1961–1979): Nation‐Building,Discipline, and the Birth of the Ideal National Subjects*

This article examines the process through which the state nurtured urban middle‐class formation during the Park Chung Hee regime in South Korea. While existing studies have focused on the size and characteristics of the middle class, few studies explore the political process or mechanisms through which the middle class was on the rise as a mainstream force. This article argues that urban middle‐class formation was a political–ideological project of the authoritarian state to reconstruct the nation and strengthen the regime’s political legitimacy. In particular, this article explores the two concurrent processes of urban middle‐class formation in Korea: one is the growth of the middle class in an objective sense, as a result of state‐directed economic development; and the other is the production of urban middle‐class norms. Drawing on the discourses of the Korean government and the media disseminated during from 1961 to 1979, I trace how the formation of the middle class in Korea was intertwined with modernity and nationalism in order to consolidate state power.     

Is ethnic prejudice declining in Britain? Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minority Britons

Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non‐white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter‐related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from other ethnic groups has declined over time for both white and ethnic minority Britons. For the white majority there are both period and cohort elements to this decline. Secondly, we see some evidence that social distance between the majority and minority groups is reciprocal. Specifically, minorities who experience rejection by the white British feel a greater sense of distance from them. Thirdly, we find that all groups share the perception of the same ethnic hierarchy. We see evidence of particularly widespread hostility towards Muslim Britons from all ethnic groups suggesting that Muslims are singled out for negative attention from many British residents of all other backgrounds, including a large number who do not express hostility to other groups.     

Making the middle classes on shifting ground? Residential status,performativity and middle‐class subjectivities in contemporary London

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing – both in relation to rental and ownership – disrupt middle‐class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle‐class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures. In this paper, we consider two key questions: (1) What happens to middle‐class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change? (2) How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this? Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner‐occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction. We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape.     

Reconsidering identity: the ethnic and political dimensions of hybridity among majority and Turkish youth in Germany and England1

Sociological research has hitherto largely focused on majority ² and minority ethnic identities or citizenship identities. However, the social connections between youth are not simply ethnic dynamics but also political dynamics involving citizenship categories. This article argues that in postmodern societies, it is important to reconsider the ways we think about youth identities. Drawing upon qualitative data from a study into the political identities of majority (German and British) youth and Turkish youth, educated in two Stuttgart and two London secondary schools, the research found that fifteen‐year‐olds had no singular identity but hybrid ethno‐national, ethno‐local and national‐European identities as a result of governmental policies, their schooling and community experience, social class positioning, ethnicity and migration history. In working‐class educational contexts, many majority and Turkish youth privileged the ethnic dimension of hybridity whereas majority and Turkish youth in the two middle‐class dominated schools emphasized the political dimension of hybridity. The article demonstrates that social class and schooling (e.g. ethos and peer cultures) have a considerable role to play in who can afford to take on the more hybridized cosmopolitan identities on offer.     

Commerce,class and ethnicity: Cape Town at the advent of the mineral revolution (c.1875)

This paper is about economic activity, social structure and ethnicity in the Cape Town of the 1870s. In an attempt to combine quantative methodology with insight gained from written records, I have made extensive use of the Census of1875. Cape Town in that year displayed many similarities with Stedman Jones’ Outcast London. In both cities economic power lay with “those whose income derived from rent, banking and commerce.” Seasonality of production, types of casual occupations and a strong artisanal sector characterised both labour markets. Units of production were small. There was in both cities a notable absence of one of Marx and Engels’ fundamental classes, the industrial proletariat. Instead, amongst a sea of casual labour there was the strong presence of the self‐employed resisters of proletarianisation. I have attempted to show how the white ethnicity of dominant class consciousness both conformed to, and confirmed, class position. This white ethnicity differed from white racism in that it did not condemn people it defined as “Other than White” to perpetual inferiority or cultural difference. The nature of economic activity in the city, together with the reality of both white and coloured? Capetonians in almost all gradations of the under classes, made a rigidly ethnically ordered society or ethnically hierarchical division of labour unlikely.     

Automatic transmission: ethnicity,racialization and the car

This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Bradford, an ethnically diverse city situated in the north of England. The sample of over 60 participants mostly comprises males of British Pakistani Muslim heritage but varies in terms other markers of identity such as social class, profession and residential/working locale. The article analyses the cultural value and meaning of cars within a multicultural context and how a consumer object can feed into the processes which refine and embed racialized identities. Small case studies reveal the concrete and discursive ways through which ideas around identity and ethnicity are transmitted and how, in particular, racialization continues to feature as a live, active and recognizable process in everyday experience.     

Middle‐Class Parents and Urban Public Schools: Current Research and Future Directions

Middle‐class flight from urban public schools to suburban districts or private schools is a key source of educational inequality. Recently, however, a number of studies have focused on middle‐class and upper‐middle‐class families who have made a different choice, opting to remain in the city and send their children to neighborhood public schools. While the movement of advantaged families into urban public schools has received positive attention in the media, this growing body of research tells a more complicated story. Middle‐class families – with their economic, cultural, and social capital – can bring important resources to schools, resulting in widespread benefits. However, their engagement in urban public schools can also lead to marginalization and exclusion. We review the emergent literature on this topic, highlighting four themes: (i) parent preferences, identities, and values; (ii) the role of marketing campaigns and informal networks in attracting the middle class; (iii) the nature and consequences of middle‐class parent engagement in urban schooling; and (iv) the relationship between neighborhood change and school change. We conclude by outlining a research agenda aimed at deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which middle‐class parent engagement in urban schooling may serve to mitigate, reproduce, or exacerbate educational inequalities.     

Ethnic and class factors affecting mental health clinic service

Service delivery by a mental health clinic to clients from an older suburban catchment area containing both lower and middle class blacks and whites was studied. The epidemiologic method was employed, relating service delivery to the characteristics of the various population groups within the catchment. The findings indicate that low service rates for blacks were not related to ethnicity alone, but to the combination of black ethnicity and low social status; however, middle class blacks and middle class whites who entered treatment received similar service. Poor blacks had higher admission rates than poor whites with similar need indicators. In continued treatment, poor blacks received lowest service rates while minority status poor whites living in a predominantly black area received highest service rates. Social class mediated black service utilization. Severity of illness, interacting with social class and minority status mediated white service utilization. Outreach is suggested not only for poor blacks but also for poor whites, especially those living in areas in which they represent an ethnic minority.     

Mapping the relational construction of people and places

ABSTRACT

A new method is proposed here aimed at eliciting the mechanisms which maintain the relational positioning of people and places within social space. This ‘mapping tool’ is inherently relational by design and involves participants creating visual representations of their geographic imaginaries, encompassing their perceptions and preferences of different localities. This is followed by an interviewing approach wherein participants ‘speak to’ their map, producing ‘thick’ narratives detailing the ties that bind people and places. The method was developed and used as part of a 3-year study into the geographic imaginaries of young people in the UK, involving the collection of 1,000 maps, together with over 200 interviews, across 20 diverse localities. We draw on empirical examples of using the method from this study, including processes of differentiation within the middle classes and the place-based identities of towns, cities and localities.     

Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English

This study has two goals: empirically, it accounts for variation found in the use of ethnically‐marked variants among British‐born Asians; methodologically, it assesses the variationist approach against a repertoire approach. In Part I, analysis of one Punjabi‐derived phonetic trait, examined in interview data only, suggests that younger women shift to exclusive use of the British prestige variant. Part II expands the analysis to four variables and to broader speech repertoires for four individuals. The repertoire analysis shows the conclusions in Part I to be inaccurate, and instead reveals: (1) retention of Punjabi traits by young women in the home domain; (2) two types of repertoire – flexible and fused; (3) a gendered reversal in repertoire type over time; and (4) a network diversity basis for these differences. Unlike the initial variationist analysis, the use of repertoire analysis and a new Network Diversity Index leads to the discovery of a shift among lower‐middle‐class British Asians from traditional Punjabi to urban British social structures.     

Who's Afraid of the Big,Bad Wolf? Young People's Responses to the Conflicts Over Large Carnivores in Eastern Norway*

Abstract Controversies over large carnivores are often interpreted as clashes between rural traditionalism and urban modernity. Rural communities, however, have never been culturally monolithic, and modernization will increase the diversity. To probe such diverse and changing attitudes towards nature, I conducted a qualitative study of young people in a rural community in eastern Norway. Contrary to popular images of such communities as unified against “pests,” all typical views of the carnivore issue were present. Those in favor of the large carnivores were typically middle‐class youths with a strong “outward” orientation, while those who wanted to shoot the predators were mostly working‐class boys with strong ties to the local hunting culture. This pattern was interpreted as a conflict between dominant and subordinate forms of knowledge, and between abstraction‐oriented and production‐oriented cultural forms. Aside from the growth of the pro‐carnivore middle‐class segments, the most significant effect of modernization appeared to be the removal of many young people from the subject matter of the conflict. A “subculturalization” of the working‐class hunting culture also could be discerned, however.     

Education and egalitarianism: the culture of the Norwegian middle class

It is well documented that educational achievement in Western societies is related to family background. Yet we know less about how people who have completed university degrees experience the importance of their education. How is education related to the different culturally embedded structures of nation states? How do highly educated people perceive the pertinence of their education? Such questions are rarely posed in the literature on social class, but recent research on the middle class in Britain offers a background for comparisons. Based on results from interviews with a sample of people having higher educational diplomas, the article discusses the particularities of the Norwegian case. We find much ambivalence over class identification and there is a remarkable tendency to downplay the importance of education. Our findings indicate that the Norwegian middle class has internalized egalitarian values embedded in Norwegian culture and thus, compared to the British case, more often hesitates to set up boundaries between itself and other classes. We argue that such findings diverge from conventional typifications of western ‘middle‐classes’ and have wider methodological implications for the study of class systems.     

Urban multiculture and everyday encounters in semi‐public,franchised cafe spaces

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two‐year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co‐presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.     

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

The English words “middle class” have experienced much more connotations and denotations—typically “bourgeoisie,” “white‐collar,” and professional—than any other class‐referring word since the latter half of the 18th century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalistic theories of class, in that the middle classes were not created until they were named by contemporaries. On the other hand, my view diverges from those theories, in my asserting that the contemporaries have had an interpretative freedom to recognize “middle classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The typical middle class in each period has emerged in such a way that Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leadership but still obtain inconsistent statuses, to be recognized as “middle class”ex post facto in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle classes into a modern society, contrary to the so‐called class decomposition into the two poles.     

Interethnic Relationships: The Role of Social Network Diversity

We examine the degree to which ethnic diversity in social networks relates to the frequency of interethnic romantic relationships for 318 college students. In a multinomial logit, we find that the odds of having an interethnic relationship once or twice, versus never, increase significantly if the respondent has a relatively ethnically diverse friendship network, is male, and supports interethnic dating. The odds of having an interethnic relationship often, versus once or twice, are significantly higher for persons of color and when the friends of the respondent's parents are relatively diverse ethnically. Findings from open‐ended data also provide support for a social network perspective, and point to the processes by which networks, gender, and ethnicity shape interethnic courtship.