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This is a study of how lifestyle choices intersect with migration, and how this relationship frames and shapes post-migration lives. It presents a conceptual framework for understanding post-migration lives that incorporates culturally specific imaginings, lived experiences, individual life histories, and personal circumstances. Through an ethnographic lens incorporating in-depth interviews, participant observation, life and migration histories, this monograph reveals the complex process by which migrants negotiate and make meaningful their lives following migration. By promoting their own ideologies and lifestyle choices relative to those of others, British migrants in rural France reinforce their position as members of the British middle class, but also take authorship of their lives in a way not possible before migration. This is evident in the pursuit of a better life that initially motivated migration and continues to characterise post-migration lives. As the book argues, this ongoing quest is both reflective of wider ideologies about living, particularly the desire for authentic living, and subtle processes of social distinction. In these respects, the book provides an empirical example of the relationship between the pursuit of authenticity and middle-class identification practices.
The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
7 Urban chaos and the imagined other: remaking middle-class hegemony While Chapters 5 and 6 explored how students navigated and negotiated Dreamfields’ conveyor belt, where middle-class and mostly white students were positioned as a buffer zone against urban chaos, this chapter examines parents’ orientations to the institution. Responses to the urban chaos discourse show how parents and students conceptualise their positions within this imagined Urbanderry landscape. Discourses of pathology shape the relationships developed between parents and teachers
, heteronormative and (upper-)middle-class family. The historian Patricia Holland suggests that these portraits are often idealised, ensuring that the middle-class family is coded as aspirational and desirable. 4 But considering that traditional family photograph albums have been displaced by digital cultures, their evocation on Instagram by the Cambridges is bound up with nostalgia for traditional family values. It appeals to the nuclear, middle-class family when families and class identifications in Britain are becoming more
it produce and bring raced and classed positions into focus by highlighting who needs to ‘adjust’ themselves to accrue value. While market mechanisms privilege and perpetuate the white middle-class pupil as ideal, openings are also provided for other students to be incorporated into this valued space if they can fit the template. Meanwhile, many participants found naming and discussing persistent inequalities difficult within a supposedly post-racial, meritocratic environment. These institutional practices connect to the world beyond Dreamfields’ gates, generating
tales of mobility become. The mobility of the exceptional individual does not provide social justice, but only reshuffles society’s winners and losers into new hierarchies. This book has shown how the aspirational rhetoric of Dreamfields and English education policy does not do what it advertises. It overlooks existing structures, while its own structuring effects play into the creation and reification of hierarchies. Rather than liberating students from their positions, Dreamfields’ practices remake and reorder inequality by positioning white middle-classness as
the experiences of the socially mobile, we show that the assumptions of those hiring, commissioning, and taking decisions in creative occupations are heavily shaped by a somatic norm of White, male, middle-classness. These two intersecting issues provide a powerful set of barriers in addition to previous chapters’ discussions. Being the somatic norm for the creative industries is an important resource for the individuals who possess those characteristics. 2 Attempts to change inequalities in cultural occupations are often based on suggesting that people should
intersection between age and social class, and how class origins insulate some from the worst elements of unpaid labour. For those from middle-class, affluent origins, unpaid work is affordable. It can be an investment that pays off artistically and in terms of access to a creative career. For those from working-class origins unpaid work will often lead nowhere. It is experienced only as exploitation and certainly not as an opportunity for creative development. Our younger middle-class respondents spoke of the ability to take a show to Edinburgh, to take a long
16 Marco Oberti and Edmond Préteceille Urban segregation, inequalities and local welfare: the challenges of neoliberalisation The central argument of this chapter is twofold: the transformation of social structures and that of welfare-state regimes have to be considered together; urban inequalities and segregation are crucial in relating these two processes. The first part discusses the relevance of social class analysis in the face of the fragmentation produced by changing work relations, the growth of the service sector, the expansion of the middle classes
weaker as the unions were forced into retreat. The divisive politics of the 1980s fuelled hatred on both sides. At a time when class language and analysis were being suppressed in public discourse, Thatcherism was wielding a class politics from above. Just at the moment when turbulent change was radically transforming the working class, it was being silenced. Indeed, many class analyses subsequently concentrated upon middle-class individuality within the marketplace. It became less tenable to unite a diversity of groups under a class banner as gay, black and women