We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

· Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Teri Schnaubelt
Audiobook
8 hr 31 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people.



We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

About the author

Jennifer M. Silva is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University. Her first book, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, examined the transition to adulthood for working-class Millennials. Teri Schnaubelt is a Chicago-based stage, on-camera, and voice actor as well as oil painter and photographer. She has voiced over 100 books for New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, in addition to helping independent authors get their stories heard.

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