Class, Culture and Childhood

This book examines the cultural and symbolic practices of class, and their role in the making of class cultures within the social lives of rural children. It explores how such practices inform the social labour of children to navigate economic difference and insecurity within a rural Australian community of scarce and unequal resources. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, it focuses on the role of morality in the classed lives of children, and shows how children draw on broader classed discourses of moral worth within their everyday negotiation of economic life, which they claim, contest and put to work in ways which afford feelings of self-worth, dignity and belonging.