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How Class Background Shapes Academic Careers
You can watch the webinar talk here....WCSA Webinar with Allison Hurst and check out other WCSA webinar while you're at it! From Betsy Leondar Wright: Hello to everyone who registered for the 3/13 webinar on How Class Background Shapes Academic Car...
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Overcoming the Odds
Review of "Overcoming the Odds: The Benefits of Completing College for Unlikely Graduates", by Jennie E. Brand. Social Forces 103, no. 2 (2024): e1-e2. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/941801. In Overcoming the Odds, Brand conclusively demonstrates the... (Link)
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The Accidental Equalizer
review of The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College. by Jessi Streib. Journal of Working-Class Studies. https://journals.uwyo.edu/index.php/workingclassstudies/article/view/8907/6735 This is Jessi Streib’s third book, all pu... (Link)
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Deadbeat Creditors and Other Tales of Moral Hazard
Some twenty years ago, three years out of law school, my partner and I attended a friend’s wedding in New Jersey. Both of us had racked up a lot of debt and were struggling to find permanent jobs in NYC. I was paying more than half the money I made ... (Link)
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Hope and Concern
Great plagues subvert our expectations about how things work, opening up new opportunities and widespread mobilization for social change. According to one massive study of historical epidemics, “civil unrest” often follows – as we are seeing now. What... (Link)
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Living on the Edge
review of Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life by C.M. Pascale, Journal of Working-Class Studies (June 2022) This often poignant and moving book presents a vision of America and Americans that is often missing from dominant nar... (Link)
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What bell hooks Meant to Me
In the final month of a horrible year of many tragedies and too many deaths, we lost bell hooks, a writer, scholar, and activist whose work has had a profound influence on many of us. I want to add my own small heap of roses to the scores of published ... (Link)
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The Multiracial Working Class
One of the questions that you hear regularly in the Working-Class Studies Association is, “Why is the organization so White?” There are many possible answers to this question, of course. Some of it must surely be laid at our collective doorstep — f... (Link)
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What the World Needs Now
What the world needs now is some answers to our problems, … it looks as though faith alone won’t sustain us anymore. – Bad Religion Last year was a disaster that many did not survive. Many of us will carry deep wounds for the rest of our lives. M... (Link)
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The Unsettling
It’s fire season again. Two years ago, my parents lost their home in Paradise. This year, I almost lost mine. I live in Oregon, where scores of fires were stoked up by unusual Eastern blasts of dry wind over the Labor Day weekend. As of this wri... (Link)
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Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
review of Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Journal of Working-Class Studies (2020) In many ways, Tightrope is a counter-telling to Tara Westover’s Educated (2018) and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (201...
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What Is a Working-Class Academic?
Last week, a law professor from the UK was profiled by The Guardian. In the article, Geraldine Van Bueren, the daughter of a taxi driver and bookkeeper, discusses the need for people like her to come out publicly. She has formed a group to that end. ... (Link)
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Trouble in Paradise
On the 8th of November, Paradise went up in flames. This small town in Northern California held about 28,000 people, many retirees on a fixed budget. This was not a rich town. The median household income was $41,000, 94% of the residents were whi... (Link)
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