Abstract/Summary

This thesis explores the lives of six working class women in an urban area in the Southeast of England. Blurring boundaries of theory and practice throughout, working in (feminist) standpoint, framed narratively, and employing oral life stories, this thesis shifts the centre from the outset by addressing historical (and sociological) lines of fault rooted in epistemic positionings of class and gender exclusion and oppression. Exploring material realities and subjective theorisations of the lives of working class women, this thesis gives emphasis to knowledge production as process. Recognising narrative as the form by which (storied) lives are communicated, this thesis extends this to narrative as constituting lives as lived and understood. Exploring tension in hierarchies of narrative standpoint, this thesis argues that it is precisely by leaning into these tensions that we can make visible and recover the social relations in which working class women are constituted and live their lives. Calling for a dynamic conceptualisation of class and gender as fluidly and relationally lived, it also identifies the need to (re)claim ‘working class’ and ‘women’ as positions, actively countering the view from ‘nowhere’ in everyday lives and in research. Overall, this thesis calls for narrative justice (as redistributive and in value recognition) and centres storytelling as a radical praxis from which to make visible, and challenge, inequality and oppression, in both the material and discursive lives of working class women. As a framework for social change, I suggest however, that the power of storytelling can be employed beyond the framing of this research, and as a wider praxis in working towards social justice.