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The book is a comprehensive and definitive history of the Leeds Jewish community, which was – and remains – the third largest in Britain. It is organised in three parts: Context (history, urban, demography); Chronology (covering the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s); and Contours (analysing themes and aspects of the history up to the present time). The book shows how a small community was affected by mass immigration, and through economic progress and social mobility achieved integration into the host society. It is a story of entrepreneurial success which transformed a proletarian community into a middle-class society. Its members contributed extensively to the economic, social, political and cultural life of Leeds, which provided a supportive environment for Jews to pursue their religion, generally free from persecution. The Leeds Jewish community lived predominantly in three locations which changed over time as they moved in a northerly direction to suburbia.
Art and culture are supposed to bring society together. Culture is bad for you challenges the received wisdom that culture is good for us. It does this by demonstrating who makes who and consumes culture are marked by significant inequalities and social divisions.
The book combines the first large-scale study of social mobility into cultural and creative jobs, hundreds of interviews with creative workers, and a detailed analysis of secondary datasets. The book shows how unpaid work is endemic to the cultural occupations, excluding those without money and contacts. It explores unequal access to cultural education and demonstrates the importance of culture in childhood. The book looks at gender inequalities, analysing key moments when women leave cultural occupations, while men go on to senior roles. Culture is bad for you also theorises the mechanisms underpinning the long-term and long-standing class crisis in cultural occupations. In doing so it highlights the experiences of working-class origin women of colour as central to how we understand inequality.
Addressing the intersections between social mobility, ethnicity, and gender, the book argues that the creative sector needs to change. At the moment cultural occupations strengthen social inequalities, rather than supporting social justice. It is only then that everyone in society will be able to say that culture is good for you.
of work has increased. This includes the growth of insecure, poorly paid temporary work and marginal forms of self-employment ( TUC, 2017 ). Wages have stagnated, and social mobility stalled. Moreover, it is widely accepted that today’s young no longer enjoy the life chances of their parents ( Corlett, 2017 ). Given this downturn, living the dream has meant a massive expansion of debt financing ( Streeck, 2017 ). The acceleration of economic informality in the global South has been matched by the residualisation of market protection
In the majority of German towns, access to learned culture was provided not through universities, academies or princely courts, but through Latin schools, the German equivalent to English grammar schools. This book is the first in-depth study of a footsoldier of the seventeenth-century German Republic of Letters. Its subject, the polymath and schoolteacher Christian Daum established himself as a scholar by focusing on how he convinced others that he was one. He did so through his dress, the way he conducted his married life and the ideal of scholarship to which he ascribed. Schools in the German culture, were focal points of Lutheran learning outside of universities and courts, as places not just of education but of intense scholarship. The most influential paradigm concerning German education remains Gerald Strauss' concept of an 'indoctrination of the young', where he argued that reformers had been able to restructure Lutheran schooling to suit their doctrinal purposes. In the seventeenth century, the Lutheran territories of the Holy Roman Empire saw a flood of publications on pedagogical method and matters of education in general. The book examines the changes that the Zwickau curriculum underwent in the seventeenth century. Anthony La Vopa's seminal study on poor students and clerical careers in eighteenth-century Germany raised important questions on social mobility through education. Christian Daum's network of correspondents was an instrument for maintaining and expanding his position within the Respublica litteraria. Teacher-scholars like Daum expressed a sense of mission towards the cause of humanist education and scholarship.
This book explores the Spanish elite’s fixation on social and racial “passing” and “passers” as represented in a wide range of texts produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines literary and non-literary works that express the dominant Spaniards’ anxiety that socially mobile New Christians could impersonate and pass as versions of themselves. Current scholarship has implicitly postulated that the social energy that led to the massive marginalization of New Christians and/or lowborns from central social spaces, and the marginals’ attempts to hide their true identity, had its roots in the elite’s rejection of sociocultural and genealogical heterogeneity, or “difference.” Christina Lee makes a key intervention in this discussion by proposing that there was a parallel phenomenon at play that might have been as resounding as an anxiety roused by the presence of those who were clearly different, a phenomenon she calls “the anxiety of sameness.” Lee argues that while conspicuous religious and socio-cultural difference was certainly perturbing and unsettling, in some ways, it was not as threatening to the dominant Spanish identity as the potential discovery of the arbitrariness that separated them from the undesirables of society. Students and seasoned scholars of Spanish history and literature will not only benefit from Lee’s arguments about the elite’s attempt to deny the fluidity of early modern identity, but also gain from her fresh readings of the works of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Quevedo, as well as her analyses of lesser known works, such as joke books, treatises, genealogical catalogues, and documentary accounts.
Introduction: Lisa’s experience of social mobility Well if you look at what’s happened culturally, and you look at the ’50s and the ’60s, and you look at the rise of somebody like Joe Orton from a leafier upper working class estate … Then if you go into the ’70s and the early ’80s, when culture was community-driven, you look at all the political stuff that came out, not all of them were posh kids. Quite a lot of them were working class kids … it’s because it was being run by working class people. In the ’50s and ’40s it had been run by very upper
This book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants’ Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. It demonstrates how literary texts are determined by class relations and how they represent the interaction of classes in profound and apparently trivial ways. The book argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial Revolution but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies and that it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialization; servitude; the relationship between agrarian and urban society; rebellion; gender relations; and colonization. After outlining the history of class relations in England and, after the union of 1707, Scotland, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Taylor, Robert Herrick, Aphra Behn, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, Daniel Defoe, Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Frances Burney, Robert Burns, William Blake and William Wordsworth. The book concludes with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s An Address to the Irish People (1812), pointing to the need to explore class relations in the context of the British Isles and Ireland, as well as the British Empire, which a future work will analyse.
Recent pressures for change in France have impacted upon a country which, from 1945 to 1975, had featured both unprecedented economic growth and the building of a powerful state. Drawing upon a plethora of social science research and data, this book sets out what has been made in France since that period and, as importantly, what this ‘made’ the French. By examining the institutions and asymmetric power relations that have structured French society, together with the ‘political work’ that has changed or reproduced them, in seven chapters the book takes the reader ‘from the cradle to the grave’ to assess whether and where significant change has occurred over the last four decades, then explain the outcomes identified. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive account of French society and politics, while proposing an original generic analytical framework that is applicable to other nations and their comparative analysis.
element in the explanation of the overall inequalities we have demonstrated in cultural production and consumption in Chapters 3 and 4 . To explore this, we’re going to look at a subset of our interviewees, those who are socially mobile from working-class origins into cultural and creative jobs. We use three ideas to frame our analysis. First, we’ll extend Chapter 7 ’s discussion of social mobility. Rather than explaining the concept again, we’re going to think about various criticisms of the idea. In doing so, we introduce a second theoretical insight, the idea
4 The pupils: educational strategies and social mobility Pupils in the Holy Roman Empire’s Lutheran regions were spoilt for choice: at the more ambitious end of the spectrum, teacher-scholars vied with each other to attract pupils and promised esoteric topics and teaching methods not available elsewhere, while lesser schools competed by charging less and by promising a faster and less gruelling transition through their more modest curricula. Yet how did pupils negotiate these options, and to what uses did they put their education? We still know very little about