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It's Not Where You Live, It's How You Live: Class and Gender Struggles in a Dublin Estate

Online ISBN:
9781447368250
Print ISBN:
9781447368212
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

It's Not Where You Live, It's How You Live: Class and Gender Struggles in a Dublin Estate

Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
5 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9781447368250
Print ISBN:
9781447368212
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

It’s Not Where You Live It’s How You Live is an ethnographic study of the lives of the residents of a public housing estate in Dublin. The phrase comes from the residents themselves, who used it on a number of occasions to assert that they were as good as anyone else. The book is a deep, complex and prolonged exploration of the lives of the working-class people of the Bridgetown Estate. The difficulty that residents face, however, is that their lives are shaped and conditioned by mechanisms and structures that place them in particular locations both in the social world and in the physical landscape. The study focuses on residents’ positioning and limitations within a changing field of public housing, the types of work that they do, how they make ends meet financially, how their lives are affected by austerity and longer-term changes in capitalism. In this book the emphasis is placed on the importance of class relations and processes and how they shape and mould lives and lock people into positions of subordination and suffering. There is also a strong focus on the importance of gender, especially for the women of the estate and the importance of solidary relations of love, care and solidarity for them. This book uses a critical realist theoretical framework to understand and make sense of how public housing estates are constituted in that, as well as what we see and what happens, we also need a causal criterion to understand them.

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