ABSTRACT
This chapter features people in various cities expressing their views of their communities, jobs, their shifting positionalities in the economy and society, and the world at large. Some of the issues I raise with the participants include asking them how they perceive their lived experiences in surrounding material spaces embodying societal relations and functions, the ways in which their jobs shape their daily lives, what they think of capitalism, if they are happy with it and this world, and how they might imagine alternative realities. Thus, my discourse analytic approach addresses the participants’ dialogical utterances and heteroglossic echoes of both hegemonic consensual (aka “common-sense”) and counter-hegemonic (“good sense”) discourses that index their various positionings and identifications in the social and cultural relations of the economy. Their views highlight the Gramscian “common-sense” and “good sense” beliefs of the worlds which they inhabit and see.
