Working-Class Studies Association
The Working-Class Studies Association supports scholarship, teaching, and activism related to working-class life and cultures.
Did you know that the Journal of Working-Class Studies is open access and available online? Well, now you do. Keep your eyes peeled for more insightful quotes on working-class lives and experiences.
You can access the journal here.
See the call out for papers on “Teaching about Socialism” in Radical Teacher, an open-access (free to readers) academic Journal. Deadline: Dec. 12, 2022.
And don’t forget the call out for papers on “Popular Music and the Working-Class!” For the next issue of our open-access Journal for Working-Class Studies. Deadline: Aug. 31, 2022.
Photo of musical instruments, Creative Commons, Chris Hawes. Photo of pencil, Lucas Santos, Unsplash.
This quote from Alice Whittenburg appeared in her article ‘A Dozen Images Made in or Near Youngstown, Ohio, That Show Why People Need Both Jobs and Fish’ in the December 2021 issue of the Journal of Working-Class Studies.
The articles states that cultural geographers have shown that depictions of a landscape contribute to its meaning(s). Linkon & Russo (2002) have examined the landscape of Youngstown through the lens of images and stories. In this article Whittenburg focuses more specific on the landscape of the Mahoning River examining a dozen images created in or near Youngstown since the early twentieth century. Whittenburg explores how the images in the piece help to clarify the way the conflict between economy and ecology has played out in the Mahoning Valley.
You can read the full article here. Co-edited by Sarah Attfield and Liz Giuffre (University of Technology Sydney), the journal operates as an independent, adjudicated, open-access, scholarly publication alongside WCSA. For more information or to view the journal click here.
In December 2020, we published a special issue of The Journal of Working-Class Studies: the Working-Class Poetry Issue. Featuring poems about factory working conditions, working as a garbage collector, as well as the experiences of Indigenous Australian and queer Arab working-class poets, the issue also offers several book reviews and essays about working-class art, culture, and poetry.
Editors Sarah Attfield (University of Technology Sydney), Liz Guiffre (University of Technology Sydney), and Jen Vernon (Sierra College) write of the issue:
WORKING-CLASS POETRY PLAYS WITH LANGUAGE AND OFTEN UTILISES A WORKING-CLASS VERNACULAR. THERE MIGHT BE SLANG OR CODE-SWITCHING BETWEEN LANGUAGES AND THERE WILL BE THE RHYTHM OF EVERYDAY SPEECH. TO ENHANCE OUR COMMUNICATION, WE MIGHT NEED TO DEVELOP AN UPDATEABLE GLOSSARY OF KEY-TERMS AS MANY USE VERNACULAR EXPRESSIONS TO SAY WHAT THEY MEAN, BEAUTIFULLY. AND THE EVERYDAY OFTEN DOMINATES WORKING-CLASS POETRY. POEMS ABOUT WORK, ABOUT HOME, ABOUT FAMILY REVEAL MUCH ABOUT HOW CLASS WORKS. THESE POEMS DON’T RELY ON ABSTRACT IDEAS – THEY GROUND THEM IN PALPABLE EXPERIENCE AND REVEAL THE CONCRETE, THE SPECIFIC AND THE SMALL DETAILS THAT SPEAK VOLUMES ABOUT WHAT IT IS LIKE TO REALLY BE WORKING CLASS.
Check out the poetry issue and our current call for papers!
The Journal of Working-Class Studies is seeking contributions to a special mini-issue focused on the upcoming US elections. We are looking for scholarly or commentary-style pieces that consider the potential impact of the election on working-class people across the US.
Please send submissions to editorial@workingclassstudiesjournal.com. The deadline for submissions is September 14th.
Volume 5, Issue 1 of the The Journal of Working-Class Studies is out now at the journal’s website: https://workingclassstudiesjournal.com/
This issue includes a series of reviewed articles, a review essay, a student essay pod, and book reviews. Each can be accessed separately as a PDF file or the full issue can be downloaded here
June 2019 Issue: Open Call, No Theme
The Journal of Working-Class Studies seeks submissions that explore working-class life around the world. Submissions should explore topics that actively involve and serve the interests of working-class people. We welcome submissions that promote critical discussions of the relationships among class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and other structures of inequality. We also welcome interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and disciplinary explorations of working-class experience.
We endeavour to publish timely, as well as academically rigorous articles, therefore the deadline for submissions is March 25th, 2019.
Send submissions and inquiries to editorial@workingclassstudiesjournal.com
Please consult the Instructions for Authors page prior to submission.
December 2019, Special Issue: Social Haunting, Classed Affect, and the Afterlives of Deindustrialization
This Special Issue of the Journal of Working-Class Studies will bring together essays that explore the lingering afterlives of deindustrialization.
Everyone knows deindustrialization as an economic process: the loss of factory jobs as production facilities shift location, and leave behind shuttered buildings and localities having to reinvent themselves or face economic ruin. It is not a new process, but is intrinsic to capitalism’s “spatial fix”, the need to maintain profit in the face of increased competition. But how does deindustrialization feel, what does it sound like, and how does it continue to hold meaning in its absent presence, long after the factory has closed? What are its affective remnants, vibrations, sights, smells, and how do they assert an affectual presence?
This call seeks essays that explore the affective entanglement of haunted spaces of deindustrialization and the lived experiences of social haunting across the globe, and we are particularly interested in work that connects to emergent social, cultural, and political formations and makes visible new contestations, solidarities and collectivities. Believing that a classed, placed and historically situated “politics of affect” is indispensable for any account of contemporary domestic phenomena such as the rise of Trump or the UK Brexit vote, we are keen to develop a theoretical and methodological vocabulary around ‘classed affect’ as an approach to understanding class after de-industrialization. Consequently, we are especially interested in research that identifies affectual registers of deindustrialization in haunted spaces as relevant to class re-composition, shifting political alliances, and the rise of ‘new populisms’ across the globe.
In line with the approach of the journal, the editors seek submissions from across the disciplinary fields, from beyond the academy, and in a variety of forms. We strongly encourage papers that deal with non-western processes of deindustrialization as well as those that consider the ‘gendering’ of classed affect. While there is no period limitation, and papers dealing with the longer history of deindustrialization are welcome, we will give preference to work on the contemporary scene.
Keywords: class, affect, social haunting, deindustrialization
Submission: please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and a brief CV to affectJWCS@gmail.com by February 1, 2019.
Full papers of accepted abstracts will be due by April 1, 2019.
Dr. Kim A. Case, Professor of Psychology at University of Houston-Clear Lake, published her essay “Insider Without: Journey across the Working-Class Academic Arc” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Working-Class Studies. In the article, which is available here, she applies intersectional theory in connecting personal experiences with existing working-class studies scholarship. In introducing a three-phase academic arc, she writes to “raise awareness of the invisible academic class culture which invalidates working-class ways of being and knowledge production.”
Dr. Case provides lots of useful, and free, resources on intersectional and privilege pedagogies at her website, here.
The Working-Class Studies Association is pleased to announce The Journal of Working-Class Studies. JWCS is an online, open-access, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that brings together the work of scholars, writers, artists and activists who are committed to the study and representation of working-class life. We aim to publish writing about the global working class – a diverse group of people whose commonality is their position in classed societies.
The inaugural issue features an introduction by editors Sarah Attfield and Liz Giuffre; articles by leaders in the field of working-class studies such as Sherry Lee Linkon, John Russo, Jack Metzgar, and Michael Zweig; and work from emerging voices whose scholarship focuses on the many intersections of class. Also included are reviews of books by Tim Sheard, Michelle Tokarczyk and George Lakey.
We invite submissions that contribute significant knowledge to our understanding of who the global working class(es) are and have been, as well as what it means to ‘study’ class, conceptually and as a socio-economic reality. We especially encourage work that explores how class intersects with other vectors of identity and experience, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship status. The journal reviews books that feature working-class people, communities, culture, history, politics, and/or experience as a crucial component of their scholarly or artistic vision. We also invite artists to submit short comics or excerpts of longer works. For further information about submissions, please visit our “Instructions for Authors” page.
Formed in 2003, the Working-Class Studies Association is an international organization which promotes the study of working-class people and their culture. The Working-Class Studies Association is made up of academics, activists, teachers, writers, poets, journalists, practitioners, students, artists and a wide range of others interested in developing the field of working-class studies. The organization holds an annual conference as well as other events to promote the field (including a variety of awards), and act as a discussion forum for working-class issues. The organization is based in North America and has members world-wide.
We hope you will enjoy the new Journal of Working-Class Studies!
To contact the founding editors, Sarah Attfield and Liz Giuffre, please email editorial@workingclassstudiesjournal.com.
The Journal of Working-Class Studies is published by the Working-Class Studies Association c/o The Texas Center for Working-Class Studies, Collin College, Spring Creek Campus, 2800 E. Spring Creek Parkway, Plano, Texas 75074, USA.
