Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

an article by Matthew Sparkes (University of Cambridge, UK) published in The Sociological Review Volume 67 Issue: 6 (2019)

Abstract

Class analysis has re-emerged as a pertinent area of enquiry.

This development is linked to a growing body of work dubbed cultural class analysis, that utilises Bourdieu’s class scheme to develop rich understandings of how culture and lifestyle interacts with economic and social relations in Britain, generating inequalities and hierarchies. Yet cultural class analyses do not properly account for the way individuals resist their relative class positions, nor the role of unsecured credit in facilitating consumption.

This article contributes to this area by examining how unsecured credit and problem debt influences consumption and class position amongst individuals with modest incomes.

Drawing on 21 interviews with individuals managing problem debt, this article details how class inequality emerges through affective states that include anxiety and feelings of deficit. It also shows how these experiences motivate participants to rely on unsecured credit to consume cultural goods and engage in activities in a struggle against their class position, with the intention of enhancing how they are perceived and classified by others.

The findings indicate that cultural class analyses may have overlooked the symbolic importance of mundane consumption and goods in social differentiation.

This article further details how these processes entangle individuals into complex liens of debt – which lead to over-indebtedness, default, dispossession and financial expropriation – illustrating how investigations of credit-debt can better inform understandings of class inequality, exploitation and struggle.

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The Loneliness and Shame of Feeling Invisible: How to Find Your Voice

a post by Dr Margaret Rutherford for the Perfectly Hidden Depression blog [via World of Psychology]

A lot of people feel invisible. And for many different reasons.

What do I mean by “feeling invisible?” Like you don’t matter. As if you aren’t a vital part of things. As if you are being overlooked or seen only for what you can do instead of for who you are. You’re an object — not a real human being. Shame can whisper to you that you’re not worth as much as others — that you aren’t acceptable, or welcome, or important. Your invisibility can begin to define you.

If it’s part of depression, then some of that “invisibility” may be imagined or misperceived. Maybe you are important to people but you’re taking their own lives being busy or not texting you back or whatever too personally. So that’s an important distinction to make and you may want to check out your thinking with a therapist or someone you trust.

Continue reading

And note that you are soooooooo invisible [very poor English on my part – you are either visible or you are not] that there isn’t even an image to illustrate this very interesting piece!

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The labour market experiences and strategies of young undocumented migrants

an article by Alice Bloch (University of Manchester, UK) published in Work Employment & Society Volume 27 Number 2 (April 2013)

Abstract

The article draws on data from in-depth interviews and testimonies with 75 young undocumented migrants from Brazil, China, Kurds from Turkey, Ukraine and Zimbabwe living in England.

The article provides a detailed qualitative understanding of the working lives and decision making of undocumented migrants, a group about which little is known. Sectors of employment and working conditions are explored alongside job-seeking strategies and the role of and use of social capital in job seeking.

Variations in employment experiences between undocumented migrants, particularly in relation to work within or outside of the ethnic enclave, are evident from the data.

Moreover, the role of narrow, usually co-ethnic and often undocumented, social networks in finding work and the intersections between job-seeking strategies and being undocumented is clear throughout the narratives.

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Out of sight, out of mind: the exploitation of migrant workers in 21st-century Britain

an article by Mick Wilkinson published in Journal of Poverty and Social Justice Volume 20 Number 1 (February 2012)

Abstract

Over the past decade, a team at the University of Hull has undertaken four separate but linked research projects investigating the working and living conditions of migrant workers in the United Kingdom (UK). Those studies drew on the experiences of a broad range of service providers – national and local, statutory and voluntary – all of whom had regular interaction with vulnerable workers or their advocates, together with the testimonies of several hundred migrant workers who had themselves experienced or witnessed employment (and related accommodation) exploitation in gangmaster UK.

The findings, summarised here, are an indictment of British government indifference to the exploitation of the migrant workforce.

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