College access does not begin or end with an acceptance letter; it continues throughout students’ college experiences, especially for first-generation, working-class Latinx students who are experiencing many college milestones for the first time. It is predicted by scholars that the rapid growth of the Latinx population will make them a large college applicant pool in the near future. These predictions show that retention efforts for Latinx students are an important investment for institutions of higher education. However, support for Latinx first-generation, working-class college students is often lacking at universities. In this conceptual chapter, we center on first-generation, working-class Latinx students of immigrant origin and the identity intersections experienced by individual students to equip administrators, academic advisors, and university data analysts with the knowledge to improve Latinx student success efforts through an overview of (1) academic advising, (2) data analytics, (3) social class, and (4) theories and frameworks related to the identity intersections of Latinx students.

Although Spanish-speaking lands are often imagined as lands of sexual intolerance, Buenos Aires is better characterized by ineffectual repression and by its recent celebration of sexual diversity. In this chapter we analyze sexuality in Buenos Aires against the backdrop of economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and political transformations that often undermined the regulations of authorities. The decades between 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital, and the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955 were crucial for the formation of modern Argentina and constitute its focus. We begin with some preceding historical trends in the colonial and early independent era, and end with a succinct analysis of a few salient trends after 1955, especially those leading to Buenos Aires becoming a leader of LGBTQ+ rights in the twenty-first century. We discuss immigration, class differences in sexual behaviours, commercialized sex, sexual diversity with marica and homosexual identities, the rise of family sociability, and the push for sexual ‘normalcy’.

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

Most people in most societies do not fall into the four problematic categories of populists, extremists, deniers, and authoritarians. It is important to consider deliberation involving everybody else in these diabolical times. We could then get a deliberative democracy and a citizenry that are robust in the face of the threats to democracy and that can join in with deliberation against these threats. Equally important in light of the specific concerns we have raised in the previous four chapters, truly inclusive and effective public deliberation should reduce the proportion of people who, out of despair at the democratic alternatives, find themselves attracted to the four problematic positions. This includes allegiant citizens satisfied with existing democratic institutions, dissatisfied citizens, and critical citizens who want to participate more. We then turn to categories of people whose voice ought to be facilitated more effectively in public deliberation, including the working class, women, and marginalized cultural groups. Different deliberative forms are likely to attract different kinds of citizens, which suggests a variety of differentiated practices ranging from contestatory deliberation to more constructive and respectful deliberation oriented to the common good, all of which can join active resistance to anti-democratic transgressions and contribute to democratic renewal.

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 focuses on the cantonment of Rawalpindi and its associated hill station of Murree, where we see working-class and elite ideas about family, respectability, sexuality, and race collide. Across British India, men, women, and children of different classes and races were thrown together in army cantonments. Military policy coded the physical spaces that comprised the cantonment – the Army barracks and civil lines, mess halls and married soldiers’ quarters, bazaars, and red-light districts – as sites of potential dissolution, destructive to British prestige. Thousands of soldiers, officers, camp followers, and army wives passed through these installations. As they did so, they created domestic worlds within militarized spaces. Domestication of military space did not, however, assuage official fears about the destructive potential of a population of non-elite whites, but rather expanded those fears to encompass not only single men but also families and children.

In most democracies, politicians tend to be vastly better off than the citizens they represent: They are wealthier, more educated, and less likely to come from working-class jobs (e.g., Best 2007; Best and Cotta 2000; Carnes and Lupu 2015; Matthews 1985). Scholars have recently taken a renewed interest in this longstanding phenomenon. Some have studied the symbolic or normative implications of the shortage of politicians from the working class (e.g., Arnesen and Peters 2018; Barnes and Saxton 2019; Mansbridge 2015). Others have focused on policy: Just as the shortage of female and racial minority politicians can affect policies related to gender and race (e.g., Bratton and Ray 2002; Franck and Rainer 2012; Pande 2003; Swers 2002), the shortage of working-class politicians – who tend to be more leftist on economic issues – seems to bias taxing and spending policies towards the more conservative positions affluent citizens tend to favor (Carnes and Lupu 2015; Kirkland 2018; Kraus and Callaghan 2014; Micozzi 2018; O’Grady 2019; Rosset 2016; Szakonyi 2016; 2019; but see Lloren, Rosset, and Wüest 2015).

This chapter examines the relationship between Mexican American literature and the strand of Chicano activism focused on the needs of the working class. By offering literary case studies, including Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel Heart of Aztlan (1976), Arellano identifies how literary activism has diverged from these needs. Although literature could aid the plight of workers by enabling a group to recognize its solidarity, Arellano argues, the identity that Chicano literature consolidates is ultimately distinct from the working class as such. So even as Chicano literary activism tends to be presented as the cultural arm of a labor movement, such activism has instead operated as the psychic support for a growing Mexican American middle class. While it may seem as if the interests of this growing class are unified with the needs of Mexican American workers, a shared Chicano culture has not been able to address the economic problems that each class faces. It remains necessary to identify continually the difference between literary activism benefiting the middle class and a labor movement benefiting workers.

Chapter 16 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of their own majority populations during the industrial Urban Planetary acceleration of the nineteenth century. Millions of new urban industrial workers and colonial subjects profoundly shaped cities by means of their own massive, often very-long-distance migrations; their grueling, often indentured and semi-servile labor; their construction and habitation of new housing; and their multifarious forms of political activism. The chapter examines the built structures and the associated political contests required for movement, changes in home life, factory work, associational life, and street protest. Urban political institutions also changed amidst a radicalization of revolutionary movements exemplified by the Paris Commune of 1871 and massive strike waves that followed everywhere on the Urban Planet at the turn of the twentieth century.

The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.

The chapter looks at the relationship between workers and democracy over time, discussing how different workers (skilled and unskilled) relate to three different concepts of democracy (political, egalitarian, and formal-institutional, or Democracy I, II, and III). I argue that while there is a strong link between workers and Democracy I, the association frays with respect to full inclusion of all citizens and the autonomy of institutions. I then reflect on the alternative trajectory of Poland’s Solidarity union: an energetic proponent of Democracy II and III during state socialism, which after the state’s embrace of neoliberalism became a chief supporter of current right-wing efforts to undermine those aspects of democracy. In the end, capitalist societies give many workers “rational” reasons to oppose Democracy II and not care about Democracy III.

This was part of a speech delivered by E Phelan, a British civil servant in the Ministry of Labour and later the director of the International Labour Organization (ILO) (1941–1948), in support of the creation of the ILO. For Mr Phelan, inserting ‘labour’ in the Treaty of Versailles was a success so wonderful that it could only be fathomed through the realm of the mystical and the fantastic. For the first time, and through the ILO, workers would be represented as voting members of an international institution through the innovation of tripartism. Almost like the anthropomorphic characters of Alice in Wonderland, the working class, at least theoretically, came to have a voice in the machineries of international labour policy.

This chapter provides an historical perspective on the emergence of the African American middle class and the role of language in its development, as well as theories about the origins and development of African American English. Operational definitions are provided for several key concepts, including terms relating to socioeconomic status and language.