This essay rasies three concerns about popular contemporary ethnographies that focus on the rural and white “working class.” First, these ethnographies are not treated as partial accounts of cultural experience but are instead taken as straightforward political and economic analyses. Second, these ethnographies amplify an “empathy mandate,” which demands that our political actions center on trying to understand misunderstood populations—in this case, the so-called “white working class.” Third, by disarticulating the cultural markers of “working classness” from the material conditions of class, these ethnographies obscure the political significance of “working class.” Ethnographies of “white working class” experience may be useful only if we treat them as small openings that lead to bigger and broader stories, rather than as complete and transparent explanations of what is going on.
Articles by Megan Wood
Megan M. Wood is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Her research engages a number of issues from within Cultural Studies and feminism: corporate sovereignty, crises of care, forms and uses of surveillance, the construction of "working classness" in the US, and the political economy of authenticity. Her current project examines the figure of the transnational corporation and its role in shaping popular imaginations and feelings about “the state,” “the market,” and the relationship between them as a way to better understand the paradoxical positions and ambivalent affects that characterize contemporary politics. Her work has appeared in journals including Communication Studies, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, Lateral: A Cultural Studies Journal, Review of Communication, Sexuality & Culture, and the Duke anthology Feminist Surveillance Studies.