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We're Still Here

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History, Politics
Unabridged   9 hour(s)
Publication date: 10/15/2019

We're Still Here

Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781684575275
Digital Download ISBN:9781684575268

Summary

We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

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Product Description

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people.

We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

Reviews/Praise

"Anyone interested in the lives and motivations of blue-collar workers and their participation in the electoral process should read this insightful work."—Library Journal Starred Review

"Silva demonstrates how the personal feeds into the political, how people project their frustrations--as well as their pain, disappointment, and anger--onto political candidates and onto each other." —Publisher's Weekly

"Silva's thoughtful, compelling study illustrates the complexities of work, race, and hope as the promise of the American Dream, for many, appears dim." —Booklist

Author Bio

Jennifer M. Silva is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University. Her first book, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, examined the transition to adulthood for working-class Millennials.