Journal of Class & Culture - Current Issue

This article introduces a contemporary art and storytelling project that took place in January 2024 in Bestwood Village, an ex-coal community, showing a televised play filmed in the village (1963) written by Dennis Potter, Stand Up, Nigel Barton, about the son of a coal miner gaining a place at Oxford University during this period of social change. The project and the article show that the art of working-class storytelling is both political and personal, and despite the lack of working-class voices in the arts, in the culture industries and in academia, small storytelling events such as this one play an important part in strengthening working-class communities.

The history and work of the Independent Group, this important collective of creative practitioners which met from 1952 to 1955, has recently attracted unprecedented levels of attention. However, within the fields of architectural, art and design history, the issue of social class is largely absent in recent work and oversimplified in twentieth-century accounts. This is despite the recent increase in class analysis being applied to the British creative and university sectors. Using Potvin and Marchand’s methodology of agency and the work on social class by Bev Skeggs as well as my own background, the article brings more specificity to the question of the working-class avant-garde and the Independent Group, using new research into the backgrounds of its members. Public funding enabled many who would not traditionally have benefitted from tertiary education to undertake full-time study, and this class dynamic made a difference to the post-war cultural landscape in the United Kingdom. The power of working-class agency within and against pre-existing elite structures is a key theme of the article. Working-class culture is a vital, yet hitherto marginalized, component of the Independent Group project. The article asks why references to social class are notably absent from accounts of post-war British art and design.

The empirical focus of this study is Season 1 of the popular HBO series The White Lotus (2020) and Ruben Östlund’s film Triangle of Sadness (2022), both of which achieved worldwide popularity and critical acclaim. The study draws on narrative analysis, to examine class relations and class subjectivities in these productions. Anchored in today’s highly precarious and competitive neo-liberal capitalist context, with its growing inequalities and crises, these productions tackle different classed selves, relations and circumstances, depicted in both realistic and metaphorical terms. The White Lotus (S1) focuses on the high consumerism, of the White upper-middle class in a lavish gated tourist resort in Hawaii. Departing from profligate consumerist practices the Triangle of Sadness develops a metaphoric setting where social hierarchies are briefly overturned. Humour as a central practice of upper-class exposure and ridiculing is deployed in both productions. The analysis demonstrates that although cynicism and egotism prevail across all class identities, the middle and upper class proves to be resilient to all crises and struggles that appear in the plot, at the expense of the working class. This suggests the lack of a political vision for the working class and the reproduction of middle-class hegemony.

This article argues that class positions attained or inherited in one society cannot be easily transferred to another, and migration experience is inevitably linked to the process of re-classing. Drawing on Weiss’s analysis of social positions in the world society, Parreñas’s theory of ‘contradictory class mobility’ and Kelly’s fourfold definition of class, this article offers new insights into the impact of migration on scholars who moved from Poland – a semi-peripheral country, often considered a buffer zone between East and West – to the United States and United Kingdom. The empirical material, consisting of 36 biographically oriented in-depth interviews, suggests Polish scholars in the United Kingdom followed two main trajectories. The first trajectory (‘rollercoaster mobility’) involves educational migration, typical for middle- and upper-class individuals who plan their migration early in life. The second trajectory (‘uphill mobility’) encompasses the transition from a Polish secondary school or university student to a manual worker abroad, who eventually becomes an academic scholar.

The higher one’s social class status, the more likely one is to gain a place on the UK doctorate in clinical psychology (DClinPsy). Working-class trainees are a minority group in DClinPsy training and there are known detrimental impacts associated with being part of a minority group. The aim of this project was to capture the experiences of working-class trainee clinical psychologists when acculturating to UK DClinPsy training. Thematic analysis was used on the data collected from thirteen semi-structured interviews. A Bourdieusian and Yossosian framework and interactive acculturation model and social constructionist theoretic stance were adopted. There was a common trajectory that trainees described when acculturating to the profession (awareness of being different, shame and change, pride and embrace and integration of selves), one impacted by whether the respondents felt class was invisible (assumptions trainees are middle class, an unspoken social identity and unhelpful conversations) or visible (helpful conversations, being seen and represented) social identity during DClinPsy training. Leading to recommendations for DClinPsy courses to have clear structures that enable and facilitate helpful conversations about class. As well as ensuring support are structures available that can enrich trainees’ personal and professional identity development. Finally, having robust and transparent feedback channels allowing the course to adapt to meet working-class trainee’s needs.