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'We're Still Here' provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics. Drawing on years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain and politics that will endure long after Trump and the elections of 2016.

Preface -- Coming of age in the risk society -- Prisoners of the present : obstacles on the road to adulthood -- Insecure intimacies : love, marriage, and family in the risk society -- Hardened selves : the remaking of the American working class -- Inhabiting the mood economy -- Conclusion: the hidden injuries of risk -- Appendix -- References

AbstractThis paper examines how working-class young adults construct their political identities in the wake of the decline of mediating institutions such as stable work, unions, nuclear family structures, and religion. The transition to adulthood has become deinstitutionalized as leaving home, finishing school, finding a good job, and getting married and having children seem increasingly out of reach for contemporary young adults. In the absence of institutionalized rites of passage, respondents must create, within their constraints, the story or narrative in terms of which their lives make sense. Through in-depth interviews with young working-class residents of a declining coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania, I trace how young adults construct narratives that make connections between economic decline, emotional despair, and political realignment. While working-class young adults may inherit political beliefs from their parents, growing up in a time of economic precarity and social division has the potential to disrupt older allegiances and prompt the creation of new identities and social solidarities. I demonstrate how individual strategies for managing suffering organize the young working-class self in ways that justify disengagement from conventional politics and a turn toward self-help and conspiracy theories. I also explore differences within the sample by racial identity and gender identity, tracing how different histories of oppression and differing expectations of moral self-worth possibly contribute to the political realm.

AbstractCurrent scholarship on the transition to adulthood focuses on the declining importance of role transitions, such as school completion or marriage, in subjective definitions of adulthood. Recent research finds that in place of traditional markers, young adults emphasize individualistic or psychological attributes as indicators of achieving adulthood. Some scholars and popular writers have interpreted this shift toward personal markers of growth as a sign of narcissism, self‐absorption, and lack of a collective sense of responsibility. Drawing on 100 interviews with working‐class young men and women, I argue that these characterizations of young adults fail to take into account the larger cultural and social context of declining job security, rising inequality, and falling institutional trust. By situating young adults' individualistic, self‐focused accounts of adulthood within the framework of declining loyalty in work, distrust in institutions, and diminishing social support, I demonstrate that working‐class Millennials' use of individualistic criteria of adulthood can be better understood as a strategy for coming to terms with the impossibility of traditional sources of meaning and self‐worth such as work or family.

Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva examines how working-class men and women navigate the transition to adulthood amid economic insecurity and social isolation. She finds that young adults experience fear of intimate relationships, low expectations of work, and widespread distrust of institutions as they come of age.

Past research in both the transitions to adulthood literature and cultural sociology more broadly suggests that the working class relies on traditional cultural models in their construction of identity. In the contemporary post-industrial world, however, traditional life pathways are now much less available to working-class men and women. I draw on 93 interviews with black and white working-class young people in their 20s to 30s and ask, in an era of increasing uncertainty, where traditional markers of adulthood have become tenuous, what kinds of cultural models do working-class young people employ to validate their adult identities? In contrast to previous studies of working-class identity, I found that respondents embraced a model of therapeutic selfhood—that is, an inwardly directed self preoccupied with its own psychic development. I demonstrate that the therapeutic narrative allows working-class men and women to redefine competent adulthood in terms of overcoming a painful family past. Respondents required a witness to validate their performances of adulthood, however, and the inability to find one left many lost in transition.

A great deal of scholarship investigates the effects of parenting on adults who parent. While existing literature has identified the ways in which parenting affects parents adversely, we argue that more attention needs to be paid to how having children may enhance parents' lives. Thus, we draw upon twenty‐four in‐depth interviews with young parents in order to investigate this process. First, we identify five ways in which parents say caregiving has changed their worldviews, relationships, and expectations, leading them to 1) erect barriers, 2) aspire for more, 3) view parenthood as a second chance, 4) hew a new path, and 5) make connections. Second, we uncover two central metaphors that parents rely on to explain the effect that having responsibility for children has had on their lives: the child as witness and the child as tether. We also point to future areas of investigation, arguing that only with an adequate understanding of what parenting does to parents can we understand what changing trends in families and inequality hold for ourselves and our futures.

Participation in extracurricular activities is associated with positive youth outcomes such as higher education attainment and greater future earnings. We present new analyses of four national longitudinal surveys of American high school students that reveal a sharp increase in the class gap in extracurricular involvement. Since the 1970s, upper-middle-class students have become increasingly active in school clubs and sport teams, while participation among working-class students has veered in the opposite direction. These growing gaps have emerged in the wake of rising income inequality, the introduction of 'pay to play' programs, and increasing time and money investments by upper-middle-class parents in children's development. These trends need to be taken into account in any new initiative to monitor mobility. They also present a challenge to the American ideal of equal opportunity insofar as participation in organized activities shapes patterns of social mobility. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

Participation in extracurricular activities is associated with positive youth outcomes such as higher education attainment and greater future earnings. We present new analyses of four national longitudinal surveys of American high school students that reveal a sharp increase in the class gap in extracurricular involvement. Since the 1970s, upper-middle-class students have become increasingly active in school clubs and sport teams, while participation among working-class students has veered in the opposite direction. These growing gaps have emerged in the wake of rising income inequality, the introduction of "pay to play" programs, and increasing time and money investments by upper-middle-class parents in children's development. These trends need to be taken into account in any new initiative to monitor mobility. They also present a challenge to the American ideal of equal opportunity insofar as participation in organized activities shapes patterns of social mobility.

Abstract
This study examines middle-class consumption and lifestyle during the transition to adulthood in the United States. Based on analysis of qualitative data from interviews with emerging adults between adolescence and settled adulthood, we argue that middle-class emerging adulthood is marked by a focus on exploratory experience consumption: the consumption of novel experiences with cultural capital potential. This tacit, embodied orientation is rooted in a habitus developed during entitled childhoods but is also shaped by an anticipated shortage of opportunities for exploration after they marry and have children. Accordingly, middle-class emerging adults voraciously consume exploratory experiences in the present with their imagined future selves in mind. The class basis for this orientation is examined through our analysis of interviews with working-class emerging adults whose lifestyles are characterized not by exploratory experience consumption but by a desire for the familiar, a fear of the unknown, and a longing for stability. The discussion focuses on how the middle-class consumer orientation toward exploratory experiences reinforces class (dis)advantage, life trajectories, and inequality.

State government, university, and local health department (LHD) partners collaborated to build the geographic information system (GIS) capacity of 5 LHDs in North Carolina. Project elements included procuring hardware and software, conducting individualized and group training, developing data layers, guiding the project development process, coordinating participation in technical conferences, providing ongoing project consultation, and evaluating project milestones. The project provided health department personnel with the skills and resources required to use sophisticated information management systems, particularly those that address spatial dimensions of public health practice.