Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture. Offering a powerful call to transform the cultural and creative industries, Culture is bad for you examines the intersections between race, class, and gender in the mechanisms of exclusion in cultural occupations. Exclusion from culture begins at an early age, the authors argue, and despite claims by cultural institutions and businesses to hire talented and hardworking individuals, women, people of colour, and those from working class backgrounds are systematically disbarred. While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised.
2011 Educator's Award. Delta Kappa Gamma Society International2011 Outstanding Publication in Postsecondary Education, American Educational Research Association, Division J Degrees of Inequality reveals the powerful patterns of social inequality in American higher education by analyzing how the social background of students shapes nearly every facet of the college experience. Even as the most prestigious institutions claim to open their doors to students from diverse backgrounds, class disparities remain. Just two miles apart stand two institutions that represent the stark class contrast in American higher education. Yale, an elite Ivy League university, boasts accomplished alumni, including national and world leaders in business and politics. Southern Connecticut State University graduates mostly commuter students seeking credential degrees in fields with good job prospects. Ann L. Mullen interviewed students from both universities and found that their college choices and experiences were strongly linked to social background and gender. Yale students, most having generations of family members with college degrees, are encouraged to approach their college years as an opportunity for intellectual and personal enrichment. Southern students, however, perceive a college degree as a path to a better career, and many work full- or part-time jobs to help fund their education. Moving interviews with 100 students at the two institutions highlight how American higher education reinforces the same inequities it has been aiming to transcend.
This book critically examines the overall interplay between globalisation, social inequality and education. It explores conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches applicable in the research covering the State, globalisation, social stratification and education. The book, constructed against this pervasive anti-dialogical backdrop, aims to widen, deepen, and in some cases open, discourse related to globalisation, and new dimensions of social inequality in the global culture.
CHOICE 2015 Outstanding Academic TitleWhat do women academics classify as challenging, inequitable, or “hostile” work environments and experiences? How do these vary by women’s race/ethnicity, rank, sexual orientation, or other social locations?How do academic cultures and organizational structures work independently and in tandem to foster or challenge such work climates?What actions can institutions and individuals–independently and collectively–take toward equity in the academy?Despite tremendous progress toward gender equality and equity in institutions of higher education, deep patterns of discrimination against women in the academy persist. From the “chilly climate” to the “old boys’ club,” women academics must navigate structures and cultures that continue to marginalize, penalize, and undermine their success.This book is a “tool kit” for advancing greater gender equality and equity in higher education. It presents the latest research on issues of concern to them, and to anyone interested in a more equitable academy. It documents the challenging, sometimes hostile experiences of women academics through feminist analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including narratives from women of different races and ethnicities across disciplines, ranks, and university types. The contributors’ research draws upon the experiences of women academics including those with under-examined identities such as lesbian, feminist, married or unmarried, and contingent faculty. And, it offers new perspectives on persistent issues such as family policies, pay and promotion inequalities, and disproportionate service burdens. The editors provide case studies of women who have encountered antagonistic workplaces, and offer action steps, best practices, and more than 100 online resources for individuals navigating similar situations. Beyond women in academe, this book is for their allies and for administrators interested in changing the climates, cultures, and policies that allow gender inequality to exist on their campuses, and to researchers/scholars investigating these phenomena. It aims to disrupt complacency amongst those who claim that things are “better” or “good enough” and to provide readers with strategies and resources to counter barriers created by culture, climate, or institutional structures.
This book analyzes the discourse generated by pundits, politicians, and artists to examine how poverty and the income gap is framed through specific modes of representation. Set against the dichotomy of the structural narrative of poverty and the opportunity narrative, Lemke's modified concept of precarity reveals new insights into the American situation as well as into the textuality of contemporary demands for equity. Her acute study of a vast range of artistic and journalistic texts brings attention to a mode of representation that is itself precarious, both in the modern and etymological sense, denoting both insecurity and entreaty. With the keen eye of a cultural studies scholar her innovative book makes a necessary contribution to academic and popular critiques of the social effects of neoliberal capitalism.
This book contends that conventional class concepts are not able to adequately capture social inequality and socio-cultural differentiation in Africa. Earlier empirical findings concerning ethnicity, neo-traditional authorities, patron-client relations, lifestyles, gender, social networks, informal social security, and even the older debate on class in Africa, have provided evidence that class concepts do not apply; yet these findings have mostly been ignored. For an analysis of the social structures and persisting extreme inequality in African societies – and in other societies of the world – we need to go beyond class, consider the empirical realities and provincialise our conventional theories. This book develops a new framework for the analysis of social structure based on empirical findings and more nuanced approaches, including livelihood analysis and intersectionality, and will be useful for students and scholars in African studies and development studies, sociology, social anthropology, political science and geography.
Creative Justice examines issues of inequality and injustice in the cultural industries and cultural workplace. It first aims to ‘do justice’ to the kinds of objects and texts produced by artists, musicians, designersand other kinds of symbol-makers – by appreciating them as meaningful goods with objective qualities. It also shows how cultural work itself has objective quality as a rewarding and socially-engaging practice, and not just a means to an economic end. But this book is also about injustice – made evident in the workings of arts education and cultural policy, and through the inequities and degradations of cultural work. In worlds where low pay and wage inequality are endemic, and where access to the best cultural academies, jobs and positions is becoming more strongly determined by social background, what chance do ordinary people have of obtaining their own ‘creative justice’? Aimed at students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Sociology, Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Critical Management Studies,and Human Geography, Creative Justice examines the evidence for – and proposes some solutions to - the problem of obtaining fairer and more equalitarian systems of arts and cultural work.
The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.
How are boundaries created between groups in society? And what do these boundaries have to do with social inequality? In this pioneering collection of original essays, a group of leading scholars helps set the agenda for the sociology of culture by exploring the factors that push us to segregate and integrate and the institutional arrangements that shape classification systems. Each examines the power of culture to shape our everyday lives as clearly as does economics, and studies the dimensions along which boundaries are frequently drawn. The essays cover four topic areas: the institutionalization of cultural categories, from morality to popular culture; the exclusionary effects of high culture, from musical tastes to the role of art museums; the role of ethnicity and gender in shaping symbolic boundaries; and the role of democracy in creating inclusion and exclusion. The contributors are Jeffrey Alexander, Nicola Beisel, Randall Collins, Diana Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Joseph Gusfield, John R. Hall, David Halle, Richard A. Peterson, Albert Simkus, Alan Wolfe, and Vera Zolberg.
Economic development and a dramatic improvement in living standards in many parts of the People’s Republic of China during the past three decades of economic reforms have been hailed by the Chinese Communist Party and many commentators in the international arena as the most spectacular achievements in the history of humanity. However, three decades of economic reforms have also transformed China from one of the world’s most egalitarian societies into one of the most unequal. This book offers a comprehensive account of inequality in China from an interdisciplinary perspective. It both draws on, and speaks to, the existing body of literature that is generated mainly in the fields of economics and sociology, while extending its scope to also examine the political, social, moral and cultural dimensions of inequality. Each chapter addresses the question of inequality from a specific context of research, including housing, health care, social welfare, education, migration, land distribution, law, gender and sexuality. Moving beyond traditional socio-economic theories, the contributors to this volume explore a wide range of social, political, economic and cultural practices that result from, as well as further entrench, the inequalities in Chinese society. Importantly, the essays in Unequal China probe the hidden causes of inequality - namely, the role of state power and the importance of culture - and underline how both state power and cultural factors have a key part to play in legitimating inequality. With an innovative approach that moves beyond the economic and sociological roots of inequality in China, this volume is a welcome addition to what is a growing field of study, and will appeal to students and scholars interested in Chinese culture and society, Chinese politics and Asian social policy.
