Mapping Class and its Political Possibilities

The resurgence of interest in class that has been associated with the US-based working class studies agenda is very exciting. Scholars are finding new ways to explore the significance of class, and they are doing it as part of various political projects to celebrate working class lives and organisation (Russo and Linkon 2005). It is significant that these scholar-activists are finding ways to avoid hostilities between the “old” left and post-structuralism, consciously putting aside the battles that pit class against other forms of socio-cultural oppression. And perhaps most exciting from a geographical point of view, much of this new scholarship and activism has an acute sense of the importance of place. Unlike sociology, cultural studies or social history, class never was one of the core issues or concerns of the geographical discipline. The discipline has never prioritised the question of class, and even though it came to prominence with the development of Marxist political economy from the 1970s onwards, class was largely taken for granted. Marxist geographers asserted the importance of class in the capitalist economy, and the working class as a political agent of change, but there was very little attention to the mechanics of class culture and organisation itself. The work developed by a number of geographers and sociologists working in the UK during the 1980s and known as the “localities projects” was an important corrective to this as it sought to ground studies of class in local economy, culture and politics (Bagguley et al 1990; Cooke 1986, 1989; Massey 1991). However, despite some excellent empirical and theoretical work, this approach largely ran out of steam. It was not until the 1990s that a number of geographers began