Empowerment Starts Here
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The Case of Social Class (Ep43)
Empowerment Starts Here with Angela Dye, the host (click here to listen).
Scroll down to access links and other resources mentioned in Episode 43- “The Case of Social Class.”
I started this season with Ep35- The Case of Social Change from the Margins, bringing attention to the ways margins exist around race, gender, sexuality and class. However, I find that most of our conversations on the ESH podcast, when talking with someone specifically from the margins, will center race or gender in the discussion.
Now we did have one episode that centralized social class in the case and that was Ep14- The Case of the Upper Lower Class (with the informant, C. Eric Irving). In that episode, he makes a compelling argument that many people in the margins push themselves further into poverty simply by trying to not be poor. In short, people in the margins suffer an even greater amount of poverty than they have been structurally positioned because of the interpersonal and intrapersonal power dynamics that compel them to take on debt as well as getting caught up in a trap of consumerism just to prove or to project middle class ranking.
So, in bringing all of this together, I have been thinking about my effectiveness with Ep35- The Case of Social Change from the Margins. If I am being fully transparent, I was not prepared to speak as detailed about class as I would have liked in that episode. So, today, I am here to rectify that. I hope that after our talk today, social class will get more consideration– a consideration equal to that of others markers of powerlessness – as we try to explore power, social change and disrupting margins.
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Key Points Discussed:
- Social class as an issue of property, power and prestige
- Social class as an inconsistent/unstable condition making it easy for it to go unnoticed as an issue of the margins
- Property as buildings, land, animals, machinery, cars, stocks, bonds, businesses, furniture, jewelry and bank accounts
- Power as the ability to carry out an agenda in spite of resistance
- Income as a flow of money and how it differs from wealth and property
- Prestige as an issue of occupation: pay, level of education, abstract thought, and autonomy
- Status consistency as having the same ranking on all three classifications of class (property, prestige and power)/ status inconsistency as not having the same ranking on all three classifications
- Power-over (and the pursuit of it) as a way to combat class inconsistency
- Contradictory class locations as in having an vested interest in the politics of one class while also physically dealing with the realities of a competing class
- Class stratification definitions of social power
- Education as a privilege and not a right
- Standardization, drill and practice and policed behavior as conditions of educating the poor
Other ESHpodcast Episodes Mentioned
- Ep14- The Case of Upper-lower Class (w/ C. Eric Irving as the Informant)
- Ep33- The Case of Self and the Resistance (w/the host, Angela Dye)
- Ep34- (Part 2) The Case of Self and the Resistance (w/the host, Angela Dye)
- Ep35- The Case of Social Class from the Margins (w/the host, Angela Dye)
Terms and Concepts Mentioned
character; class inconsistency; class stratification; traditional and choice public schools and private education; C. Wright Mills; property; power; wealth; income
Mistakes/Corrections
Please feel free to let me if you catch any mistakes. Thanks!!
The Full Link for the Episode…
http://eshpodcast.libsyn.com/ep43-the-case-of-social-class
Please visit our Episodes at a Glance page to get a full episode list for Seasons 1, 2 and 3.
