This book is written by people of varying ages and professions who have broken through from poor social beginnings, deprived backgrounds and many disadvantages into a high level of professional achievement. Starting in working class or slum environments in areas such as Sheffield, Wales, Manchester, Leeds, Huddersfield, London, Glasgow and Birmingham they describe their struggles and the ways in which they attempted to over-come their earlier deprivations.
Social mobility, educational priority areas and equality of opportunity are topics discussed as much today as when this book was first published over 30 years ago. This book is written by people of varying ages and professions who have broken through from poor social beginnings, deprived backgrounds and many disadvantages into a high level of professional achievement. Starting in working class or slum environments in areas such as Sheffield, Wales, Manchester, Leeds, Huddersfield, London, Glasgow and Birmingham they describe their struggles and the ways in which they attempted to over-come their earlier deprivations. The descriptions in this volume are illustrations of potential which is present in the most unpromising beginnings.
In this pioneering work about the precursor to the comic book, Kelly Boyd traces the evolution of the boys' story paper and its impact on the imaginative world of working-class readers. From the penny dreadful and the Boy's Own Paper to the tales of Billy Bunter and Sexton Blake, this cultural form shaped ideas about gender, race, class and empire in response to social change. This study is an important analysis of a neglected part of popular culture.
The Burden of Academic Success: Loyalists, Renegades, and Double Agents explores class identity reconstructions among working-class students attending a public university. Rather than focus on working-class failure, this book takes a critical look at the psychological and social costs of academic success. Based on several hours of interviews with a diverse group of working-class students, this book describes how successful students respond to, react to, and manage their academic success. The book does for class what other theorists have done for race, examining the dynamic interplay of class identity and educational success/social mobility. The distinguishing features of the book are rich narrative detail; compelling stories of student success and struggle; intersectional analysis exploring the ways class, race, and gender inform each other in students' understandings and narratives with an interwoven theory throughout; and a new typology for understanding working-class student responses to the burden of academic success. The Burden of Academic Success is ideal for courses on sociology, education, and American studies as well as for use by college educators and administrators.
Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity. Each self contained chapter consists of an essay of historical analysis, introducing students to the ways historians use evidence to understand change, as well as useful chronologies, statistics and tables, suggested topics for discussion, and selective further reading.
This book takes a novel approach to the topic, combining biographical approaches and local history, a synthesis of sociological and historical literature, with new research to address a variety of themes and provide a comprehensive, rounded history demonstrating the entanglement of educational experience and the influence of different modes of discrimination and prejudice. Using the lens of gender, Jane Martin reassesses the gendered nature of the modern history of education and provides an overview of intertwined aspects of education, society, politics and power. Its organisation is user friendly, providing accessible information with regard to chronologies of legislation and key events to reflect constancy and change, whilst ‘mapping’ the larger political, economic, social and cultural contexts, making it ideal for use as a textbook or a resource for teachers and students.
