Book Launch: Class and Everyday Life

Kirsteen will introduce the book, followed by responses from special guest discussants:

Les Back, Professor in Sociology, University of Glasgow
Ala Sirriyeh, Senior lecturer in Sociology, Lancaster University
Ruth Gilbert, trade union and tenant union organiser

Followed by a Q & A and drinks reception.

The event will be chaired by Dr Kirsty Morrin, University of Liverpool

About the book:

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. 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.

Published by Routledge

About the author:

Kirsteen Paton is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Class at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores the complex relationship between urban restructuring and class restructuring, with a focus on housing accumulation, dispossession and resistance. This includes analyses of the changing urban political economy and class and everyday life in neighbourhoods and cities, with a central focus on Glasgow. Her previous book Gentrification: a working-class perspective, explores gentrification in relation to the Glasgow Harbour development in Partick.