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.
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.
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.
Who do America's wars against poverty turn out to be wars against the poor? Why does a nation so committed to fighting crime show such a bad record of combating it and so morbid a fascination with it? Why is American racism so deeply rooted?
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.
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.
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.
A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.
We have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts people’s lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice? This book considers what provokes everyday ‘views’ or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘racial’ or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.
