Two widespread narratives attempt to account for the decline of social democratic parties over the past decades. The economic narrative points to these parties’ centrist positioning as the key cause and the Radical Left and Right as the key beneficiaries. By contrast, the cultural narrative focuses on the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality, and European integration and points to the Radical Right as key beneficiaries. What links these two narratives is the idea that Social Democrats have alienated the working class. In this chapter, we use individual-level survey data from eight countries to show that although social democratic parties have seen losses among all electoral groups, the voters who left social democratic parties were disproportionately centrist and educated. Second, we find that only a small share of former social democratic voters defected directly to parties of the Radical Right. Instead, social democratic parties lost most voters to moderate right, green, and left-libertarian parties. We additionally show that cultural attitudes play only a small role for choosing between moderate right and social democratic parties. By contrast, they are strongly linked to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.

The radical Right has turned to the Left’s iconic hero Antonio Gramsci for inspiration and guidance on how to launch a counter-hegemonic struggle against liberal cultural and political domination. Gramsci provides a powerful way to understand the globalisation of the Right, and many of Gramsci’s ideas, particularly cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the Right. What radical Right intellectuals call ‘metapolitics’ provides them with a global sociological, ideological, and political framing, as well as a political economy with capitalism and class at its centre. It provides a strategic direction that seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them from classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves. The global Right is not ideologically unified, nor does it have centralised controlling institutions. Instead, their counter-hegemonic ideologies enable diverse actors and agendas to find common cause despite their differences.

To support experiential learning, HLVC data are available for research (by permission, and with protections for the participants). This chapter illustrates the integration of research and community-engaged learning, which is critical to the success of the project. It presents activities that support critical and creative thinking, enable theoretical knowledge to be empirically tested, and facilitate and enhance quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and the communication of research. It includes a section on how to best conduct and teach research methods to support the vitality of the languages being examined and one on ethical practices. Sociolinguistics trails other subfields in analyzing data outside the majority language (English). With these supports, students can change this situation. The exercises exemplify tasks that students have undertaken and can help others get started. Exercises provide prompts and show how to gain access to instruments and data. In addition, the course Exploring Heritage Languages, which has modules that can be (adapted and) used, is introduced. The HLVC corpus and these modules provide instructional infrastructure to scaffold undergraduate and graduate class assignments teaching relevant theory and research skills.

“’Flung out of Space’: Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" explores the relationship between class and queer sexuality in American literary history, suggesting how neither of these histories can be understood without accounting for the other. Reading literary texts such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” alongside queer theory and LGBTQ history, Lecklider suggests how class structures queer literature throughout American history, particularly since the 19th century. Particularly emphasizing how labor structures desire, this chapter argues that working-class sexualities – and their intersections with race and gender – must be taken seriously in order to fully appreciate both the contributions of queer literature and the legibility of labor in American history.

This essay considers the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) on the production of a particular kind of queer subject, a subject coded by the court as a part of heteronormative queer couple. After tracking the court’s representation, I turn to fiction published since this decision, demonstrating that fiction offers the nuanced and complex sense of queer subjectivity that is erased in the Lawrence representation. Contemporary queer fiction, I demonstrate, disrupts the court’s representation by offering representations of kin formations that are far more complex than a homonormative assimilative couple. These depictions explore the worlds inhabited by characters who more closely resemble Lawrence and Garner—kept out of the public view—than the metropolitan, privileged queer subjects of the Lawrence ruling. The representations of contemporary fiction disrupt the homogenizing national implications of the Supreme Court as well, by locating queer subjectivity in both diasporic and transnational subjects. Finally, the growth of queer speculative fiction challenges the concept of the normative more broadly, in both form and content.

Chapter 5 details the workings of social estates of eighteenth-century Germany. Many of Goethe’s works of prose and drama either directly depict his own society, or transpose significant features of that social world to a different historical setting. The chapter highlights the differences in the social organisation of rural areas on the one hand, and of towns and cities on the other. Further, it distinguishes between the social structure of Frankfurt, Goethe’s birthplace and a large city, and Weimar, a small residence town with the duke at the top of its hierarchy.

This chapter reviews the study of variation in gesture and its theoretical underpinnings in the field of gesture studies. It questions the use of culture, language, or nationality as the default unit of analysis in studies of gesture variation. Drawing on theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and recent anthropologial analyses of gesture, it argues for the possibility that social factors and divisions other than linguistic/cultural boundaries may provide a more robust and comprehensive theoretical account for variation in gesture.

The second chapter considers the Inns of Court in their relationship to the broader city, both the people who lived, worked, or visited central London and the governing bodies responsible for regulating the capital. The chapter highlights the societies’ struggle to maintain their local autonomy while fulfilling obligations to the public good and, increasingly, to public opinion. The Inns were geographically and legally separate from the rest of the capital, but they connected with the central London populace via efforts to promote citizens’ physical, moral, and cultural well-being. At the same time, the societies clashed with newly created, centralized metropolitan bodies designed to order the metropolis in the name of public health. Disputes between the Inns and entities like the Metropolitan Board of Works represented a conflict between an ancient system of local authority and processes of urban rationalization, a tension that defined metropolitan modernity in Britain. As competing strains within liberalism pushed institutions to engage in philanthropy in ways that could undermine institutional authority, the Inns found themselves unable to fully salvage their autonomy.

This chapter opens up a fuller discussion of how sites of socialisation outside the family reworked the meaning of stories about the past. Looking at Huddersfield, it focuses on the consequences of selective grammar schooling for disrupting ‘traditional’ attachments to working-class cultures of politics, shifting people’s class- and place-based identities and weakening the political status of memory. It explores these issues from the perspectives of both socially mobile grammar school leavers and their parents left in Huddersfield. It also highlights cases in which parents and their children concurred about these issues.

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.

This chapter focuses initially on the context within which Ratu Mara first articulated his notion of the Pacific Way, including his congenial relationship with the British colonial administration in Fiji. The next section examines another important articulation of the Pacific Way by an expatriate commentator, reflecting a much more critical approach to colonialism. But there is also a judicious appraisal of the Pacific Way’s Polynesian associations, something that compromised its ability to function as a pan-Pacific identity. Polynesian elite values are also implicated in an aversion to the adversarial nature of Western democratic politics. In (apparent) contrast, the Pacific Way is claimed to be based primarily on traditional modes of ‘consensus politics’. This issue is explored partly in comparative perspective, noting that the positing of consensus politics as an alternative to adversarial (Western) democracy has often been deployed in other post-colonial settings as a culturally more authentic expression of local political values.

Despite the central role of employment for integration, refugees are particularly vulnerable to under- and unemployment, and are more likely to find themselves in precarious working conditions compared to host country residents. Frequently discussed reasons for this are, for example, legal restrictions, health issues, and non-recognition of qualifications. We draw on the concept of intersectionality and the psychology of working theory and use data that we have collected with women and men refugees in Turkey and in the Netherlands. We use narrative accounts of four refugees to show how refugees’ gender relates to their vulnerability towards precarious work and how this relationship is further complicated by refugees’ economic status in their home country as well as by the societal expectations and protection in the host environment. By discussing these relationships and their relevance in the larger context of economic and societal upheaval, we suggest several avenues for future research.

This chapter assesses the interplay among social class and the growing centralization of African American literature in the marketplace. Since the 1980s the production of black literature has been increasingly shaped by the economic and aesthetic priorities of commercial bookselling. Contemporary African American writers have expressed their awareness of the ways that the commodification of black literary expression has both imposed limits and created new possibilities for literary art. These authors have been particularly attentive to new patterns of consumption and reception that emphasize class distinctions among consumers and genres of writing. These changes have prompted writers to rethink traditional assumptions about the social and aesthetic obligations of black middle-class writers in forging alliances with the working class. The chapter considers these shifting social relations with reference to literary works by Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead.

This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.