FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Lecture
Exploring contemporary class formation through everyday tenant struggles
Thursday 3 April, 13:15 - 15:00
Orkanen, C231, Nordenskiöldsgatan 10
Lecture with Kirsteen Paton
In her talk, Kirsteen will connect the project set out in her new book ‘Class and Everyday Life’ with her ongoing research around housing inequality, focusing specifically in how a class lens on the contemporary tenant movement, housing struggles and resistance can help develop more expansive understandings of class.
Housing and the class political subject
The renewed attention on the role of housing in class formation has been an important intervention which recognises the processes global capital and housing financialisaton. But the focus has tended towards stratification-based understanding of class based on asset distribution. ‘Class and Everyday Life’ makes the case for approaches to class which recognise the political and radical tendencies of class, over the growing dominance of analytical and descriptive approaches, and which examine how the class political subject is formed. Kirsteen will use the everyday lens to understand class formation within the current political conjuncture and in everyday housing struggles, in which we have a prime example of contemporary working-class mobilisations and political subject formation in relation to the resurgent tenant movement. This focus provides an expansive view of class, inclusive of multiethnic coalition building and social reproduction.
Biography
Kirsteen Paton is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Class at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores the complex relationship between urban restructuring and class restructuring, with a focus on housing accumulation, dispossession and resistance. This includes analyses of the changing urban political economy and class and everyday life in neighbourhoods and cities. Her research offers conjunctural analyses of gentrification, evictions, and large-scale sporting events and their impacts on working-class communities, with a strong focus on local community resistance and counter-hegemonic movements.
She is the author of the books ‘Class and Everyday Life’ (2024, Routledge) and
‘Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective’ (2014, Routledge).
About
This lecture is part of the series Open Urban Seminars, organised by the Department of Urban Studies and the Institute for studies in Malmö’s History, Malmö University.
Most welcome!
