Event Details

End: March 1, 2019
Contact: quirkec@oldwestbury.edu

University of Michigan Press Class/Culture Series Eds. Joseph Varga (University of Indiana) and Carol Quirke (SUNY Old Westbury) 

This volume seeks papers that take the concept of white working class seriously, as both category and thing-in-itself, while focusing a critical gaze on its deployment, use, and misuse.  While a majority of the United States working class did not support the Trump bid for the presidency, research indicates that in key states (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania), white voters identified as working class formed a key part of the electoral victory for Trump. White working class voters who had voted for Obama in 2008 had, by 2016, crossed party lines in just enough numbers to affect the outcome. This has brought the use of the term white working class into the public eye, though in a blurred focus. This volume seeks to bring together scholars and activists from a wide variety of disciplines to examine and assess the terms used to describe the white working class, explore the contours of the new populism, and debate their relationship.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to jjvarga@indiana.edu by March 1, 2019.

Final essays will be due in September of 2019.