Morality matters : class relations in the ex-mining villages of County Durham

Abstract

This research explores the classed nature of moral experience. Morality is central to the structuring and maintenance of class divisions. The symbolic economy which controls and regulates value exchange is constantly working to position and reinforce the very core of working-class people as valueless; moral distinctions which execute the boundaries of class categorisation and classification. I use a critical phenomenological lens to analyse how people who are denied value through the dominant system of capitalist exchange still understand and live their lives through a framework of value. Utilising narrative interviews combined with ‘learning walks,’ a walking methodology I adapted from the education sector, I explore how working-class people residing in the ex-mining villages of County Durham make sense of the way morality structures their experiences. Critically engaging with the class dynamics and classificatory processes which misrecognise their value, I show how morality operates as both a deeply orientating value structure and as a source of devaluation for the working-class participants within this research sample. I evidence how class dynamics are woven into the interdependent mechanisms through which the concept of value is lived out; embodied, contested, produced through conflict as well as cohesion, and made through dynamic, shifting and sometimes competing modes of use and exchange. This thesis contributes to knowledge about the relations of value that construct personhood. I argue that moral experience manifests through social interactions and local value practices which are not subject to the logic of capitalism, even as they are forged through the power relations that situate this experience.