Class and Everyday Life

Book excerpt: Exploring the issues of class through in-depth studies of housing, sport, art, music and politics in Britain, Class and Everyday Life persuasively demonstrates the pervasive influence of class on everyday life and the need to centre a radical understanding of class within emancipatory political movements. The need for a more expansive understanding of class is politically urgent. There is a disconnect between descriptive and analytical approaches to class and the politics of class and realities around how class is lived. Discourse has been shaped by top-down frameworks of analysis and measurements which have stripped the study of class of its political radicalism. This book makes the case for a sociology of class which is informed by a politics of class, based upon using the everyday as the point of enquiry. It presents a sociology of class from the bottom-up which focuses on everyday life and the point at which class is made and remade. In doing so, it advocates for an attentiveness to class and everyday life through a conjunctural analysis. Using an everyday lens, this book examines how the shifting conjunctures manifest in everyday spaces in classed ways and how such changes are negotiated, resisted and shape the working-class subject and communities. This is based upon an understanding of everyday classed experiences which identifies and challenges inequalities while also recognising value and hope. This perspective aims to offer a recognition of both the opportunities and challenges of class as a way of developing a stronger, more politicised understanding of class which takes solidarity and class community power seriously to resist inequality and develop emancipatory politics. This urgent and impassioned book will be essential reading for students, academics and activists with an interest in the lived experience of class in Britain today.