This chapter, in presenting adapted extracts from a book length project, revisits Richard Hoggart's "The Uses of Literacy" (1957) and argues for a theoretical, sociomaterial reclaiming of "media" literacy, a now established strand of the new literacies, through a return to Hoggart's concerns and his connecting of literacy to…

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have…

How do young graduates view the role of immediate families in influencing/supporting them as they start their working lives and how do those reflections affect how they think of themselves as graduates? Social, political and economic changes have led to many young people being dependent on family for longer, but how does this play out in their…

While the literature on the experiences of working-class Students of Color at selective, historically White institutions has grown significantly over the past twenty-five years, how this student population is making sense of their social class identity as they gain access to dominant cultural and social capital at their institutions remains…

Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separate apparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples are categories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with such transgressions related to the evolution of class consciousness transgressive critical thinking.…

In 1960s Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian white middle class embraced the samba music written by working-class blacks as a source of authentic national culture. Cultural mediators, or individuals that bridged sociocultural spheres and negotiated the terms in which work was produced and circulated, were essential to samba's mainstream acceptance. This…

The population of children in schools is rapidly becoming more ethnically and culturally diverse. However, there is a mismatch between the cultures in children's homes and the cultures in their schools. The funds of knowledge approach emerged in Tucson (Arizona, USA) in order to counter the deficit perspectives common in depictions of…

The neoliberal agenda promotes education as a route toward success in university and career. However, a neoliberal economy requires large numbers of workers willing to accept low-paying, dead-end jobs. The students most likely to take these jobs are those who have struggled with literacy and so schools must, in Bourdieu's terms, re/produce,…

This paper examines how flows of people, media, money, technology, and ideologies move through the world, with attention to how these scapes (Appadurai 1990, 1996, 2013) shape identity construction among language learners, both in and out of classrooms. After illustrating intersecting scapes in sociolinguistic terms, I explore the relevance of…

During the early catalanization of schooling in the Barcelona area in the 1980s, Castilian-speaking teenagers of working-class immigrant descent often struggled against Catalan language and identity. This longitudinal study followed a group of high-school classmates and found that as young adults, some but not all of the resistant working-class…

Despite the impoverishment of prospects for those employed in the industrial and agricultural sectors in post-Soviet Russia, young people in vocational education colleges continue to be trained for "poor work" in traditional large-scale enterprises. This article draws upon qualitative, case-study research in exploring young people's…

This article illustrates the application of critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Gutierrez, 2008; Morrell, 2007) pedagogies that draw from young people's funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to actively nurture personally, authentically, and culturally caring relationships (Howard, 2002; Noddings, 1992;…

With reference to an ESRC/TLRP project conducted across two academic years with working-class students in higher education (HE), this paper explores the relationship between geographies of home and those of university at two UK HE institutions. It addresses how social relations inflected by class influence the experience of students as they adapt…

This paper examines linguistic diversity among minority ethnic undergraduate students categorised as from widening participation backgrounds in a new university in London. All students are British born and educated and from working-class families. The paper considers how the students negotiate multilingual and bidialectal identities within the…

This article contributes to the theory of institutional habitus by exploring the differing ways in which the institutional habitus of two schools in Belfast, Northern Ireland mediates the local habitus of working-class boys. All of the boys in this qualitative case study live in the same disadvantaged working-class community but attend two…