Property, propriety and affect : a study of class (dis)entitlement in neighbourhood spaces.

This thesis applied a relational theory of class to the empirical study of the experience and practices of ten working and six middle-class women living within the fluid networks of a specific place, a neighbourhood in a northern city that I name here as Fenton. The analysis explored the ways in which the women's subjectivities are differently constituted and constrained in their patterns of difference through their respective positioning in relation to the circulation of capital, and differing forms of ('self and externally imposed) regulation that support its movements. In doing so, it sought to understand their differing relation to processes of apparent 'individualisation' and underlined the ways such processes are reproductive of class division and inequalities.The analysis provided draws on the scholarship of feminist class analysis and in particular the work of Beverley Skeggs. By exploring her theorisation of class within an empirical frame this thesis concerns itself with understanding the ways in which identities and class relationships can be said to be produced and regulated through 'an economy of personhood' based upon principles of property, propriety and entitlement (Skeggs: 2011).The methodology and methods used to produce this thesis were ethnographic, based upon participation, observation, and the deployment of qualitative mixed methods during the period of September 2009 to August 2011.The women in this thesis do not passively reproduce at the local level the constraints of class, gender, and capital. The working-class women, in particular, are embattled within complex and often desperate circumstances within which they actively intervene and seek to modify the forces that work in and through their lives. Those processes are reflected, and in some sense re-enacted, within the analysis that follows. A particular contribution of this thesis, here, is in providing research in relation to the lives and experiences of working-class persons who are rarely heard from within academic spaces.