Abstract
This book examines the cultural and symbolic practices of class, and their role in the making of class cultures within the social lives of rural children. It explores how such practices inform the social labour of children to navigate economic difference and insecurity within a rural Australian community of scarce and unequal resources. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, it focuses on the role of morality in the classed lives of children, and shows how children draw on broader classed discourses of moral worth within their everyday negotiation of economic life, which they claim, contest and put to work in ways which afford feelings of self-worth, dignity and belonging.
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Notes
- 1.
In Bourdieu’s analysis, ‘economic’ capital includes monetary assets, income, inheritance and wealth. ‘Social’ capital refers to the resources we gain through social connections and relationships, and which bring with them access to economic, social and cultural capital, among others. See Bourdieu (1986).
- 2.
Brown (1995) also classically writes of moralising projects which take place through the formation of resentment, mobilised by those who feel the loss of previously taken for granted privileges and powers.
- 3.
See Western (1991) for detailed accounts of historical formations of class structure in Australia.
- 4.
This poll measured and defined social class by respondents’ possession of certain types of ‘capital’ using a five-class model. See Biddle and Sheppard (2015) for further details.
- 5.
‘Fairness ’, for example, is widely mobilised in a range of political agendas and fed both by post-colonial nation-building ideologies and collective identity narratives, and by market-driven agendas of self-responsibility, flexibility and entrepreneurialism. For example, the Australian Labor Government’s 2013 national disability insurance scheme, DisabilityCare Australia, promoted the policy as being ‘Stronger. Smarter. Fairer’, while asserting that ‘Labor is for fairness’. In the Coalition’s 2013 Policy to Improve the Fair Work Laws, among the stated goals was an aim to ‘Guarantee workers have the right to access fair flexibility’. Just as governments continue to use ‘fairness’ to frame their policy, the language remains in public discourse evident in a brief sweep of Australian metropolitan news titles. E.g. ‘Land of the fair go takes refuge from the helpless’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 October 2012), ‘We’re just doing this for fairness: Rinehart son’ (The West Australian, 17 March 2012), ‘No fair go at school: Gonski’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 9 September 2012), and ‘Virgin boss calls for a fair go’ (SBS News, 28 February 2014).
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Butler, R. (2019). Class, Culture and Childhood. In: Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4_2
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