The first section provides a very condensed history of how we get to contemporary understandings of class. I make this detour because the perspective one takes determines what one sees: as Cannadine notes, “the history of class is as much about the history of ideas about society as it is about society itself”. The perspective taken here is that class is always a category produced through a dynamic relationship between classes: one class’s advantage is another’s loss. Advantage often works through exclusion, which is highly apparent in issues like education and housing (see Chapter 3 by Diane Reay and Chapter 7 by Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor in this collection) but is much more difficult to detect when it comes to matters of culture and subjectivity. The second section draws on empirical evidence to show how class relations structure even the most intimate areas of people’s lives: how they feel about themselves and others. It draws on three different research projects.

No full text available online. Further details at Research Online (Goldsmiths).