Improving Living Conditions, Deepening Class Divisions: Hungarian Class Structure in International Comparison, 2002–2018

This article investigates the changing relationship of class and the living conditions of individuals in Hungary in comparison with other European countries. Our central question is to what extent class position determines the material living conditions of individuals in Hungary, how this relationship has changed, and how significant it is compared to other European countries. Our analysis is a direct test of the death-of-class thesis in one of the core fields of class analysis. Our results show that there has been a rapid and large-scale restructuring of Hungarian society after 2010, with two notable tendencies. The first is an overall improvement of material living conditions at all levels of the class structure, the other is the gradual solidification and polarisation of class structure.

‘Turf is nu eenmaal een vruchtbaar terrein voor de fantasie’

‘After all peat is a fertile soil for the imagination’. The literary representation of bog and peat cutting in Dutch literature, 1909-1940 Novels about peat lands and turf-cutting were immensely popular in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. This article traces recurring narratives and tropes in four such novels written by H.H.J.Maas, Antoon Coolen, Anne de Vries, and Theun de Vries, illustrating the ambivalent role that peat lands play in these texts. They function as sites of communality, future opportunity, and disorder on the one hand, and as places of exploitation and alienation on the other. These four novels do not downright reject the introduction of industrial innovations, but some among them are critical of the class divisions that may result. Others seem to acknowledge the hard labour that turf production involves, but do not criticize the social status of the peat-cutters.

How does parental time relate to social class in a Nordic welfare state?

Time intensive parenting has spread in Western countries. This study contributes to the literature on parental time use, aiming to deepen our understanding of the relationship between parental childcare time and social class. Based on time-diary data (2010–2011) from Norway, and a concept of social class that links parents’ amount and composition of economic and cultural capital, we examine the time spent by parents on childcare activities. The analysis shows that class and gender intersect: intensive motherhood, as measured by time spent on active childcare, including developmental childcare activities thought to stimulate children's skills, is practised by all mothers. A small group of mothers in the economic upper-middle class fraction spend even more time on childcare than the other mothers. The time fathers spend on active childcare is less than mothers’, and intra-class divisions are notable. Not only lower-middle class fathers, but also cultural/balanced upper-middle class fathers spend the most time on intensive fathering. Economic upper-middle and working-class fathers spend the least time on childcare. This new insight into class patterns in parents’ childcare time challenges the widespread notion of different cultural childcare logics in the middle class, compared to the working class.

A Decolonial (Re)turn to Class in South African Biblical Scholarship

South African Black Theology of the 1960-1980s characterised its primary site of struggle as the racial capitalism of apartheid. Intersecting race and/as class has been a distinctively South African contribution to African biblical scholarship. Less common, but equally significant, is the intersection of culture and/as class. This article analyses this trajectory, reflecting on how three South African biblical scholars (Gunther Wittenberg, Makhosazana Nzimande and Hulisani Ramantswana) have discerned the need for the African decolonial project to recognise and recover the class divisions within a culture. A recurring cultural trope across the three scholars is their use of proverbs to discern class distinctions within culture. The works of each of these three scholars and their dialogue partners in South African Contextual Theology and South African Black Theology are interrogated for how they intersect notions of class and culture.

Implementation of the Wahdah Method in Improving Students' Ability to Memorize the Qur'an

This article aims to analyze and explain: Planning, implementing, and evaluating the wahdah method in improving the ability to memorize the Qur'an in junior high school students based on the Amanatul Ummah Islamic Boarding School. This article uses a qualitative approach with the type of case study research. Data was collected by using field observation, interview, and documentation techniques. Data analysis techniques include data collection, data presentation, and data verification. From the analysis of research data, the results of this article are as follows: (1) the planning of the wahdah method in the Amanatul Ummah Islamic Boarding School-Based Junior High School is the division of groups or class divisions according to their abilities. (2) implementation of the wahdah method helps make it easier for students to memorize by reading verses of the Qur'an with tartil repeatedly, memorizing verse by verse and tarqiq. (3) The evaluation is that if students memorize one juz, they will be tested with an ustadz/ustadzah other than their class supervisor. The next research recommendation is about the strategy of implementing the wahdah method with a comparison of taqrir, murojaah will result in better memorizing the Qur'an.

Harvest

The second event of the book—a paddy harvest—is presented in Chapter 4. Such an event encapsulates within it a number of dynamics, between landowners and workers, between members of the agricultural unions and others, and between the Comrade and the rest of the village. The examination of the minutiae of one particular harvest lays bare these dynamics and the importance of the legacy of a violent land reform movement in the 1980s that effected radical change. Such an analysis of the division of labor during a harvest allows for some new conclusions to be gained about cooperation and solidarity that emerge despite deep caste and class divisions. The account also shows how prayer meetings in the evenings for the holy month of Ramzan that happened to coincide with the harvest one year allowed for public and social expression of these newly forged solidarities.

The Rise of Populism and the Reconfiguration of the German Political Space

The paper explores the notion of a reconfiguration of political space in the context of the rise of populism and its effects on the political system. We focus on Germany and the appearance of the new right wing party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). The idea of a political space is closely connected to the ubiquitous use of spatial metaphors in political talk. In particular the idea of a “distance” between “political positions” would suggest that political actors are situated in a metric space. Using the electoral manifestos from the Manifesto project database we investigate to which extent the spatial metaphors so common in political talk can be brought to mathematical rigor. Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the United States with respect to a new political cleavage related to globalization, which is assumed to mainly affect the cultural dimension of the political space. As such, it might replace the older economic cleavage based on class divisions in defining the dominant dimension of political conflict. An explanation along these lines suggests a reconfiguration of the political space in the sense that 1) the main cleavage within the political space changes its direction from the economic axis towards the cultural axis, but 2) also the semantics of the cultural axis itself is changing towards globalization related topics. In this paper, we empirically address this reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political goals. We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the AfD appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we employ a novel technique, inter-issue consistency networks (IICN) that allow to analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new “cultural right” issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.

Curriculum Models from Educational Theory

This chapter presents a range of models from educational theory. Some are thoughtless habits that protect the status quo of practices for transmission of past knowledge, while others are more productive of transformation of schools, students, and society. First discussed is basic studies/essentialism, the dysfunctional default setting of many schools and educators. Especially problematic for music educators is perennialism, a commitment to the supposed “Great Works” and “great ideas” of Western civilization. More helpfully, progressivism is then addressed as based in Dewey’s pragmatic theory of “learning by doing.” Finally, reconstructionism and critical theory share an emphasis on overcoming social status quo class divisions that the traditional approaches to schooling were transmitting.