Theorizing Capitalist Crisis & Middle-Class Politics

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

The middle class has emerged as a pivotal site for examining capitalist crises during the past decades of global neoliberal restructuring. From the foreclosure crisis in the United States, to austerity in Europe, and sovereign debt traps across the Global South, middle classes once considered stabilizing forces are increasingly destabilized. Yet, even amidst heightened disillusionment, broad segments of the middle class seem to retain emotional attachments and subjective investments in fraying ‘good life’ promises under capitalism (Berlant, 2011) . Scholars have indeed pointed to the ambivalent and contradictory class locations occupied by the middle classes (Wright, 1979). States have clear stakes in promoting middle classes—in the interest of capital, profits, and political stability—even as they simultaneously delegitimize, and, when necessary, suppress, class-based politics (Heiman et al. 2012). In this panel we ask: what forms does middle class politics take within contemporary global capitalist relations? And how are middle-class subjectivities remade in the ruins of financial capitalism? More broadly, how can we theorize class transformation and politics in relation to the dialectics of conflict and stability under capitalism, while remaining attentive to the multiple modes of agency through which people constantly renegotiate shifting class identities in the contemporary crisis-ridden global landscape?

Sub Unit

• Theory Section / Theorizing Capitalist Crisis & Middle-Class Politics

Presider

• Mona Khneisser, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Individual Presentations

• Between Autonomy and Constraint: Habitus, Field Structure, and the Limits of Political Articulation in India - Hera Shakil, University of Chicago

• Crises in the Midst of Welfare: State-Capital-Labor Relations in the Indian Apparel Industry - Aabid Firdausi, Johns Hopkins University

• Hollow Bargains: How Middle-Class Professionals Sign a One-Sided Contract with American Elites - Taylor Laemmli, Baylor University

• Leaving, but Not Escaping: Corporate Residue and the Limits of Exit - Ruiling Li, Cornell University

• Public Education: The Making and Unmaking of Middle Class Subjectivities - Hakan Yilmaz, CUNY-Graduate Center

Session Organizers

• Mona Khneisser, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Matt Dawson, University of Glasgow