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Class Subjectivity (class + subjectivity)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Tracing landscapes of the past in class subjectivity: Practices of memory and distinction in marketizing Russia

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009
Michele Rivkin-Fish
ABSTRACT The creation of class subjectivities is an important but understudied topic for social memory studies, particularly in former socialist contexts. Soviet policies generated fertile conditions for the intertwining of class subjectivity and popular memory by deploying the categories of "intelligentsia" and "worker" as reified, enduring, and oppositional groups and privileging these groups in contradictory and often hypocritical ways. In this article, I explore the traces such policies left on contemporary, educated Russians' sense of themselves as long-standing victims of class-based dispossession. Ethnographically, I examine debates I had with Russian friends about Mikhail Bulgakov's popular novel, Heart of a Dog, which depicts the Bolsheviks' establishment of power in the 1920s through the eyes of an elite physician,scientist. Exploring Russians' reactions to this story and their sense of its broader relevance reveals how aspiring middle-class subjects embraced a narrative of the Soviet past to justify the emerging inequalities of market reforms. Narrative landscapes of the socialist past illuminate a politics of victimization and moral restitution that underlies the contemporary embrace of inequality and stratified consumption. [memory, class, stratified consumption, health care, postsocialism, Russia] [source]

Class belonging: a quantitative exploration of identity and consciousness

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
Paula Surridge
Abstract The recent revival in interest in class subjectivity has been largely premised on class belonging as a form of identity, eschewing talk of class-consciousness. Evidence in this debate has been mostly qualitative and focused on specific social groups. This paper uses data from the 2003 British Social Attitudes Survey to map the sense of class belonging in England and to assess the strength of class belonging when placed alongside other social identities, such as gender and nationality. The paper also explores the extent to which class identity could be conceived of as class-consciousness through its links with attitudes to redistribution and workplace relations. [source]