Transitions – Class and its Changing Impacts
Call for Papers of the Innovation Network on Cultures of Class
One-day Symposium
Peel Park Campus, University of Salford
Thursday 1st April 2027, 10:00-18:00
Keynote speaker: Prof Tim Strangleman
The Innovation Network on Cultures of Class calls for proposals for its inaugural symposium Transitions: Class and its Changing Impacts on 1 April, 2027. The symposium addresses class related topics concerning the arts, humanities and social science. Because the remit of the network is to support and connect members across social boundaries, we invite proposals from academics, the GLAM sector, practitioners, representatives of municipal governments, trade unions, community groups, and members of the public.
We will discuss the fluctuating and transient nature of class as a socio-economic concept, and the changing social, cultural and political landscapes by which class and its representations, are subjected. The symposium will also consider the trends and changes in disciplines dedicated to the examination of class, including but not limited to, ideologies of social mobility, class identity, class consciousness, and methodological approaches to the study of class. Sessions therefore address representations of class in the media, classed experiences as expressed in creative writing, educational inequalities, social housing, and responses to working-class identities in the arts.
To apply, please send a 250-300-word proposal to [email protected] by 15 January 2027. Proposals should name the presenter, any co-presenters, include a title, affiliation (if applicable) and should not be AI generated. We will inform of the outcome in early February 2027.
When composing a proposal, either respond to one of the session-calls below or submit a proposal for a ‘free’ session.
Media Culture and Class
The Media, Culture and Class group of the Innovation Network invites proposals for papers exploring how class is made, remade, and contested across contemporary media and cultural forms. Taking up the symposium’s theme of transitions, we are interested in the moments at which class identities, cultures, and institutions shift in the passage from one form of work to another, from one generation to the next, from analogue to platform cultures, or from the margins of representation to its centre.
Radio Receiver, unknown date. Salford Local History Library, Reference Number: LB00310
Class remains among the most persistent and, until recently, least examined structures of the UK’s creative and cultural industries. It shapes who makes media, whose stories are told, how audiences are imagined and addressed, and which cultural forms are accorded value. Yet the category itself is in transition. Precarious work, the decline and reinvention of public service media, and the rise of new modes of production and circulation have all unsettled inherited accounts of what class is and how it is experienced and represented.
We welcome contributions from across media, film, television, cultural and communication studies, sociology, history and adjacent fields, as well as from practitioners. Topics might include, though are not limited to:
International, national or regional approaches to class
Historical transitions in understandings of class
Representations of working-class life and labour across screen, sound and digital media
Class, authorship and access in the creative industries
Young people, class and cultural participation
Regional and post-industrial cultures and their mediation
Class and the platform economy
Methodological approaches to studying class in and through media
Nostalgia, memory and the mediation of industrial pasts
We particularly encourage collaborative papers that bring together members of the network working on related questions, and papers that combine scholarly and creative or industry perspectives.
For additional information and questions, please email: Laura Minor [email protected]
Co-creation and Creative Writing
How can creative writing illuminate experiences of class that may be overlooked by conventional academic approaches? What opportunities and challenges arise when researchers, writers, community organisations and participants work together to produce knowledge about class cultures and histories? We welcome proposals that explore the role of creative writing in its broadest sense as a way of exploring, documenting, performing and/or reimagining class. We are particularly interested in contributions that consider creative writing as (but not limited to) storytelling, oral history, visual or concrete text, place-based or virtual, performance, participatory arts, and/or community publishing.
Contributions may address contemporary or historical perspectives and can include reflections on creative projects, practice-based research, collaborative methodologies, interdisciplinary approaches and/ or work developed with communities, archives, museums, libraries and galleries. We encourage submissions that move beyond conventional academic papers, demonstrating how creative and participatory writing can foster new understandings of class across different social, cultural and institutional contexts.
For additional information and questions, please email: Ursula Hurley [email protected]
Education, Social Mobility and the Language of Class
We invite papers that critically examine how educational inequality, social mobility and class are conceptualised and debated across research, policy and public discourse. We are particularly interested in the language used to explain educational success and failure, and the significance of social class as an explanatory framework for understanding educational outcomes.
Contributions may explore:
Drivers of educational outcomes and social mobility
Debates surrounding meritocracy
University access and widening participation
Private and selective schooling
Working-class identity and educational experiences
The effects of the cost-of-living crisis on education
This is not an exhaustive list, and we welcome considerations of how class intersects with race, gender, disability and sexuality, as well as those which engage with decolonising agendas. Papers may be theoretical, empirical, historical or methodological. Interdisciplinary contributions and insights from practitioners and policymakers are especially welcome.
For additional information and questions, please email: Helene Snee [email protected]
From Welfare State to Neoliberalism: Changing Attitudes towards Social Housing
Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, neoliberalism transformed the British welfare state.
Perhaps no sector reflects changes more visibly than social and public housing. It transitioned from being regarded as universal right and main element of the welfare state to being driven by markets and private enterprises.
Housing was a tool to facilitate social progress. Shortsighted political objectives, with a range of faults in the fast-paced building programmes and poor estate management led in many cases to built ruins, alienation amongst tenants, loneliness and crime. In response, the neoliberal transition since the 1980s to the present day, addresses such challenges with mixed-income developments, infill housing and regeneration. The results of this change were also marred with challenges and have let to a drastically reduced public housing stock, increase of social stigmatisation in social housing estates, considerable lack of housing security among others.
This session invites practitioners and researchers in the arts, architecture, humanities to critically examine the complex transformations of social housing between political ideologies that drove the welfare state and those that responded to it with neoliberal solutions. We welcome presentations discussing architectural designs, urban planning, activism, as well as theoretical, and comparative analyses that problematise these shifts and their lasting consequences.
Papers are invited that address but are not limited to these topics:
Notions of ‘class’ that informed architectural designs and build environments related to social housing
Urban working-class areas and ‘slum clearance’
Reactions to overspill housing
Working-class homes as expressions of civic pride
(De)-stigmatisation
The roles of housing in social engineering
Alienation and marginalisation in housing estates
Tenant and activists’ responses to privatisation
For additional information and questions, please email Tanja Poppelreuter [email protected]
Creative Arts and Class
Over the last few years, there have been increasing calls from artists to consider the central role of social class, and specifically working-class identities, in the arts and cultural sectors. Ranging from the establishment of platforms to share opportunities for working class artists (Working Class Creatives Database), to spaces for exchanging experiences of navigating the arts and offering support to others, such as the Working Arts Club, there is a renewed interest in highlighting the contributions of, and barriers to, working-class people in these sectors. Exploring the arts in the broadest sense, The Creative Arts and Class group aims to interrogate the complex, and often contradictory, relationships between ‘art’ and ‘class’, ranging from the experiences of artists and creatives, to debates in disciplines from critical theory and art history to media studies and theatre. We are open to all and welcome anyone with any interest in sharing their experiences, ideas and ambitions for improving the visibility of class in the creative arts.
For additional information and questions, please email Rebecca Starr [email protected]
Class, Memory & Commemoration: Transitions
With the decline of class as a political factor from the 1990s many in our societies are able to act as though class no longer matters or impacts them. Contributors to this strand are invited to consider the meaning of class in the twenty-first century and how commemoration of class based events have helped to alter its meaning or maintain the memory of earlier forms of class.
The Class & Memory interest group of the Innovation Network on Cultures of Class seeks paper proposals on this year’s theme of Transitions. Contributions may focus on class in transition and may be linked to community, place, conflict, or struggle among other ideas. We welcome contributions from non-academics as well as academics and hope that people interested in how class and memory can be seen in multiple fields will engage with the group. These fields might include but are not limited to Fine arts, art history, sculpture, architecture, film, literature, and games as well as those interested in memory studies and history.
Presentations might consider:
How has the commemoration of class changed over time?
How have methods of remembering working lives or communities changed?
Or they might focus on specific memories at transition points including but not limited to.
Transitions into industrial society, deindustrialisation or the Age of AI.
Class memory as working class identity transitions.
Memory of transitions between class
Memory of class in transit between places
We hope to use the symposium to engage with those interested in Class, Memory and Commemoration leading to future research projects and events.
For additional information and questions, please email Nicholas Barnett [email protected]