This study utilizes qualitative narrative inquiry methods to explore the cultural experiences in higher education of rural students from poor and working-class backgrounds. These explorations occurred through individually interviewing seven rural, poor and working-class student participants, conducting focus group interviews with all participants, and reading through journal entries written by each participant, all centered around their journeys to and through college. Drawing upon cumulative disadvantage theory and definitions of and theory around culture across psychology, sociology, and anthropology, this study engaged a cumulative disadvantage, culture-based framework – intertwining cultural flexibility, cultural integration, and cultural capital and wealth – to explicate the higher education experiences of students who held the dual and compounding identities of being both rural and poor or working-class. Through doing so, this study addresses: 1) how rural, poor and working-class students culturally experience – both uniquely and collectively – higher education; 2) how, if at all, rural, poor and working-class students transition into and navigate higher education institutional cultures; and 3) how, if at all, such cultural experiences, transitions, and navigations play a role in those students’ higher education attainment. This study’s findings included two components. First, a narrative was written about each student’s experience coming from their rural, poor and working-class family and community into and through higher education. These narratives offered unique stories about the students’ personal experiences in higher education, including their academic, co-curricular, social, and professional experiences. Second, paradigmatic analysis was conducted, highlighting shared themes across the narratives. Through explicating the narratives and themes through a cumulative disadvantage, culture-based framework, this study suggests that: 1) rural, poor and working-class students hold two disadvantaged identities and background factors of being both rural and poor or working-class, which are minoritized and marginalized by higher education institutions; 2) as students with these dual rural and poor and working-class identities and background factors experience, transition into, and navigate higher education, they traverse campus cultural contexts that feel different from and at odds with their rural, poor and working-class upbringings; 2) the cultural experiences for rural, poor and working-class students in college are complex, as these students engage in cultural flexibility and cultural integration, while also gaining cultural capital and utilizing cultural wealth; 3) such cultural processes can play a role in higher education attainment for rural, poor and working-class students, given that they utilize various cultural tools to find success in higher education all the way to completion of their degrees. This study concludes with implications for theory, research, and practice and policy. In particular, this study contributes to cumulative disadvantage and cultural theory, as well as future research ideas around how to study rural, poor and working-class students in higher education and the cultural experiences of other minoritized and marginalized student populations. Regarding practice and policy, I note the importance of higher education practitioners and policymakers recognizing and valuing rurality and social class, communicating higher education norms and processes to rural students from poor and working-class backgrounds, continuing outreach and support programs for rural, poor and working-class students, creating and fostering community for this population, and acknowledging the compounding and cumulative nature of rurality, social class, and additional social identities. Keywords: higher education, culture, cumulative disadvantage, rurality, social class, college attainment

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This essay aims to study the Swedish allotment garden in the first two decades of the 20th century from an urbanization perspective with a special focus on Anna Lindhagen, one of the pioneers of the movement in Sweden. By doing an idea analysis of texts written by Anna Lindhagen, Rudolf Abelin and the allotment garden associations of Stockholm and Gothenburg the essay aims to examine what reactions of urbanization the Swedish allotment garden movement expressed. The essay furthermore aims to study how the movement relates to the English, German and French allotment garden movements with the help of previous research done by Micheline Nilsen.  By using dimensions as analytical tools the essay examines the Swedish allotment garden movement with four dimensions, urban planning, nurture, family and work. Furthermore, it shed light on the allotment garden movement's reaction to urbanization with the help of an urbanization perspective. The study has shown that the Swedish allotment garden movement can be seen as a critique of urbanization. The source material corroborates a dichotomy between the city and the countryside and attributes danger to the city while it sees the countryside as a natural place to live. Sweden's allotment garden movement could also be seen as a way to nurture the inhabitants of the city by giving them a relationship with nature and keeping them away from dangers like alcohol. The essay also shows that the Swedish movement has been influenced by both the English and the German movements. Because the French movement is younger than the other two international movements it hasn’t influenced the Swedish allotments as much. Both the Swedish and German allotments are called colonies, which shows that both of them had a similar purpose to attract people back to the countryside. Lastly, the study has shown that the Swedish allotment garden movement was influenced by the English garden city movement and can be seen as a compromise to the dichotomy of city and countryside.

This dissertation asks: what has happened to the children and grandchildren of former industrial workers, those who came of age in the shadow of industrial ruination in the Rust Belt? It draws on 105 interviews with working-class descendants who grew up in or near the Mon Valley in Pennsylvania, to explore how those descendants engage with industrial ruins. For most, the ruins recalled the breakdown of the employer-employee social contract, a sense of betrayed tradition, and the current (abysmal) state of affairs for the working class. Most advocate for the destruction of the ruins, as the loss and failure embodied by industrial ruination acts as a trap, imprisoning them in the past. Their attempts to build a new working-class identity require letting go of industrial work and the memories of the lost past. For a wider range of perspectives, two other groups of descendants were interviewed—fifteen arsonists and four cultural producers (novelists). The arsonists, who set fire to abandoned buildings, draw on regional fire symbolism and maintain their inherited association between work and identity as they struggle to resurrect industry. The novelists, who have all published in the vein of American Gothic literature, are seeking to reinterpret the past to serve the needs of the present, using supernatural figures alongside ruins in their novels in order to allow the main characters to identify, recover, and reinterpret a hidden past, which allows for mourning and the formulation of a new class identity. Each of these groups of descendants is cobbling together different versions of working-class identity, but all show that navigation of economic restructuring is a process of continual transformation. Descendants’ imaginative constructions are emblems not of solidity or permanence, but rather revision and reinvention.

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No description available.

This study attempted to address the relative merits of the Weberian and Structural Marxist perspectives for explaining changes in the distribution of wage labor. The findings of the study suggested that many of the common assumptions held by Weberians and Structural Marxists concerning the effects of technological growth, increasing bureaucratization of production, increasing concentration of capital, and growth in the ranks of white-collar workers are not supported with data on manufacturing industries in the post-war era. Moreover, this study introduced collective action as an important determinant for explaining changes in the labor process and in the distribution of wage labor. The findings indicate that workers collective action enhances our understanding of labor process development and changes in wage labor. And, the findings suggest that the struggle between workers and capitalists is vital to understanding the process of capitalist development since World War II, contrary to the popularly held beliefs of many post-industrial theorists. / Ph. D.

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished