Between Bread and Roses: An Exploration of Aesthetics Among Low-Income Women in Scotland.

This project will address how working-class women engage with the arts and cultural institutions in Scotland. Focused on women from low-income backgrounds in Glasgow, I will explore how working- class identity can be understood through personal relationships to art, nature, and landscape. This approach represents a shift away from mainstream studies of class which reduce working-class life to economic circumstance and the quest for social mobility.
To do this, I begin with the understanding that a relationship to art, nature and landscape can manifest in multiple ways. In traditional engagements with cultural institutions, in how women dress and adorn their homes, in how they relate to their built and natural environment and in how they tell their life histories. Juxtaposing the domestic and the mundane with an exploration of working-class women's intuition, philosophy, and interiority, the ultimate goal is to open-up artistic and cultural domains to more working-class women while contributing to academic debates on gender, class, and aesthetics.
The project will engage women who are often on the peripherals of society. Older women in low- income circumstance, connecting to broader feminist discussion of how women become 'invisible' or ignored within society as they age. Together with single mothers in low-income circumstance where, due to time pressures and poverty, creativity may be construed as a luxury or self-indulgent. This project will avoid further isolating these women by treating them seriously as collaborators and co- creators. As such, this PhD will utilise methods from social anthropology, collaborative social science, fine art, and digital media.