Drifting Along or Dropping into Homelessness: A Class Analysis of Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people who have “fallen” on hard times and aspire to return to mainstream middle class lifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters.     

Mayors and urban governance: discursive power,identity and local politics

This article combines political and economic geographies with social and cultural theory by reviewing structural and actor-centred approaches to urban governance alongside work on identity, community, masculinity and ‘rights to the city’. The article seeks to bring these literatures into dialogue via an analysis of mayoral politics, presenting empirical research from a UK city in order to highlight the influence of class, sexuality and racism on urban politics. It shows how theoretical and empirical engagement with unequal social relations and their discursive construction through cultural forms and practices offers fruitful avenues for geographical understanding of territorial and relational urban governance.     

Multiculture,middle class competencies and friendship practices in super-diverse geographies

In this paper we use a small number of in-depth interviews with parents with primary school children to examine social mixing and friendship practices in two super-diverse North London boroughs. In these complex geographical contexts, characterized by gentrification processes and old and new migrations, we suggest that primary schools are convergent places where adults and children from different backgrounds are likely to meet and interact, and the paper explores the extent to which adults and children, thrown together in and through these sites, negotiate relationships with those who are differently socially and culturally situated to themselves. Informed by the interview narratives, the paper highlights the importance of focusing on the micro, quotidian ways in which differences in social and/or ethnic background shape those relationships and it explores some instances of the ways in which those differences are routinely encountered, managed and/or avoided. In this way the paper contributes theoretical and empirical nuance to current concerns around difference and diversity and the interactions of complex urban populations by ‘adding’ social class to everyday multiculture perspectives and everyday multiculture perspectives to urban middle class debates.     

Marco Denevi: An Argentine Anomaly

Hipotermia by the Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue was published in 2006. Even though it is considered an example of the most recent Latin American narrative, reflecting on the effects of globalization and neoliberalism in Mexico, the most evident effect of which is a blurring of the idea of nation, it has not been well acknowledged for depicting the incertitude of our days in a more social way. In this article I read Hipotermia as a novel where the Writer (as a social representation of the intellectual) deals with a creative block as a result of his anxiety regarding the traditional concept of an author in the boom period (1970s). The way he works through it consists in a fictional project about non-epic characters. As a result of this, the book creates a mosaic of voices that can be identified as experiences of the middle class in the context of a global society. I try to prove that the concept of “Global Class,” developed by Saskia Sassen, describes Enrigue’s conception of both the exile’s experience and the middle class’s subjectivity.     

Changing tides of industrial democracy: Red Clydeside and the UCS work-in as political heritage

ABSTRACT

Drawing on labour history, critical heritage studies and sociological literature on the entrepreneurial city, this article focuses on the cultural legacy of the famous 1971/72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in apropos Glasgow’s historical reputation as ‘Red Clydeside’. In doing so, the article considers the dispute’s continuing importance as a political resource for present-day debates about workers’ rights, Glasgow’s post-industrial identity, the rise of populist demagoguery and the future of Britain’s industry more generally.     

Words,songs and books. Oral history in Italy. A review and discussion

Abstract

This short article aims to do three things. First, tell the ‘history of Italian oral history’ — a history which begins on the Left and in the south, and then slowly moves towards the city and the big questions of conemporary Italian history: Fascism, the Resistance, 1968, gender studies. Second, the article examines some of the most important methodological debates concerning the collection, use and interpretation of oral historical material, and the links which have been made with other disciplines. Third, there is a discussion of the possible didactic uses of oral history in schools and universities. The piece also highlights some of the main ‘schools’ which have emerged within the discipline over the last fifty years and the possible trends for the future of oral history. In addition, the bibliography and notes bring together the most important (and sometimes obscure) works of oral history produced since the war.     

General Resolution of the Third Congress of the Geographical Society of the USSR

Calorimetric measurements show that the amount of energy accumulated in the organic matter of a semidesert community of Azerbaydzhan ranges from 3663 to 5754 calories per gram of dry mass. Under semidesert conditions only 1 to 3 percent of incoming light energy is accumulated in the mass of a plant community. This agrees with similar determinations of the accumulation of energy in a forest community (Ovington and Heitcamp, 1960). Empirical formulas are used to compute the energy accumulated in one gram of plant mass of an entire community and to calculate the level of use of radiation energy (the share of energy accumulated in plant matter plus the energy used to evaporate). The results agree fairly well with data derived by other techniques.     

国共党争与阶级分野--广州国民政府时期工商关系的实证考察

广州国民政府时期,不仅是国民革命迅速发展的高潮阶段,也是革命统一战线发生斗争与分化的转折点.以国共党争为主线,此阶段的工商关系因党派政治的渗入而愈趋复杂,并呈现出"对抗与合作"的双重态势.这主要表现为中国共产党领导的广州工人代表会与商界的阶级对垒,而广东总工会等国民党右派工会则与商界取合作姿态.尽管此时工商间的阶级分野取得明显实效,但也毕竟有限,这与国民党"阶级协调"的政治统治逻辑及广州"劳资混合"的行会传统有着密切关联.