[Linganth] AAA CFP: Classes of ‘25: Changing formations of socioeconomic class in the US

[Gunderson, Ariana]

Hello!

Passing along a CFP for a panel that Michael Angland is putting together for AAA. Please submit your abstract to Michael at michaelangland2026 at u.northwestern.edu<mailto:michaelangland2026 at u.northwestern.edu> by March 31st for consideration in the panel. Thanks!

Ariana Gunderson




Classes of ‘25: Changing formations of socioeconomic class in the US

>From W.E.B. Du Bois to Mike Davis, American interlocutors of Marx have observed that most Americans do not  speak about their relations to labor and ownership using the Marxist categories of proletariat or bourgeoisie. Yet, the ways Americans live, socialize, identify, and mobilize collectively have always been entangled with how they understand their and others’ relationships to labor and ownership. Recent developments, such as the turn of more low-income Americans to the Republican Party and high-income Americans to the Democratic Party, have highlighted the necessity of improving scholarly understandings of how different Americans conceive of their socioeconomic position and mobilize politically based on class. These developments have also highlighted the insufficiency of limited available class terminology, like “working-class” or “middle-class”, to describe the multiplicity of different ways American experience social class.

This panel invites ethnographic papers describing how specific localized groups of Americans experience class in everyday life, and how these conceptions inform political action. Papers will describe ethnographically how different conceptions of socioeconomic class emerge in different economic contexts and become socially legible and meaningful through speech and habitus. Papers will consider 1) the vernacular categories Americans use to speak about class status e.g. “blue collar”, “white trash”, “bougie”, "corporate gays"  2) the different relationships to labor, e.g. manual, white-collar, or care work,  or capital ownership, e.g. home, business, or asset ownership, shaping local configurations of class, 3) links between local class configurations and other social positions including race, gender, migration status, sexuality, or geographical location, 4) how local class formations become visible and meaningful through collective forms of habitus including food, fashion, architecture, and speech, and 5) how local class formations inform political action. The panel invites  both papers describing  emerging class formations, like crypto-feminism, and papers describing how older class formations, like white blue-collar masculinities, are experienced in the current period.

The panel will collectively reflect on the following question: can we reconcile Americans’ everyday experiences of class with Marxist ideas of working-class and bourgeoisie, and speak meaningfully of an American working-class and bourgeoisie? Or does the fractured picture of American classes demand a new language of labor and political action that departs fundamentally from Marxist terms?



Ariana Gunderson
any pronouns
PhD Student | Anthropology
Indiana University
www.arianagunderson.com
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