Culture & Inequality Podcast

Why should social scientists and cultural scholars pay attention to aesthetic medical procedures? In this episode, Alka Menon (Yale University) and Anne-Mette Hermans (Tilburg University) take us beneath the surface of Botox, rhinoplasties, and Brazilian Butt Lifts to reveal what these increasingly normalised procedures can tell us about social inequality today. With host Sanne Pieters, they explo...

Meatscapes? Meat Paradoxes? Happy Meat? Eco-Types? In this episode, we interrogate the fraught ethical and cultural landscape of the climate crisis with three guests: prof. Josée Johnston (UToronto), prof. Shyon Baumann (UToronto) and prof. Emily Huddart (U British Columbia). We learn how and why people make and eat happy if not ecologically and ethically questionable meat, how people care for the...

In this episode, we take on big questions about gender and far-right politics with Sarah Bracke and Charléne Calderaro, two scholars who arrived at the topic of gender and the far right through distinct yet overlapping research paths: one through replacement ideology and the systematic problematization of Islam and Muslims in contemporary Europe, the other through the study of racialized street ha...

We’re speaking at a time of historic economic inequality, with current debates marked by a surge in public attention to elite power, influence, and visibility. As wealth gaps reach levels not seen since World War II, we ask: how are today’s elites responding? Are they expressing status and superiority in the same ways as before, or has their mindset evolved in a world that claims to be more democr...

In this episode we’ll be discussing the climate crisis through the lens of risk, loss and the role of sociology. For a long time, environmental issues sat on the margins of the discipline, rarely appearing in core journals or debates. That’s starting to change, with climate change gaining more attention in recent sociological research—but given the urgency of the crisis, we might still ask: are so...

We’re back with a new season on anything culture and inequality! From clickbait culture and influencer marketing to content farms and algorithm-driven platforms, we kick off the 2025 season by unpacking the mechanics behind our increasingly digital economic lives. How has the digital realm evolved into a powerful economic force that's reshaping the way we live, work, and consume? We examine the sp...

In this episode, we host a special guest: Michèle Lamont (professor of Sociology at Harvard). We discuss her new book Seeing Others: How Recognition Works--And How It Can Heal a Divided World, which centers on the role of recognition and dignity in countering inequality after decades of neoliberalism. Based on interviews with cultural change agents in the American cultural industries and Gen Z col...

***This is a rerecording, updated, and better version of our very first episode, which we originally recorded in 2020. We hope you will enjoy this new version! *** In this first pilot episode, we discuss the core themes of the course: how do culture and inequality relate? This meeting will discuss why and how this has become such a central theme in sociology and other disciplines (notably cultural...

This episode is about conspiracy theories and their relation to inequality. We talk about this with Elisa Sobo and Jaron Harambam, two scholars who have studied contemporary conspiracy theories in a range of domains, from vaccines, Covid-19 and Big Pharma, to theories that claim the moon is an abandoned spaceship brought here by reptilians who control our world leaders. Both, moreover, have argued...

Migration has been a characteristic of societies for centuries. Humans have always migrated to either escape harsh lives, search for better ones, or both. Continuing immigration flows and increasing diversity in many societies have led to more complex processes of belonging and integration, as well as the emergence of cross-border engagements of migrants, organizations and institutions. In this ep...

Migration special 2: Football, Race and Racism by Culture & Inequality Podcast

In this first episode of the special Culture & Inequality x IMISCOE The Migration Podcast trilogy, we discuss the linkages between migration and music. For centuries, music has been a powerful source of individual and social well-being, something which studies from psychology to sociology to medicine continue to demonstrate. As people migrated, music migrated with them – causing the rapid and cont...

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we will be hosting a series of special episodes on the cultural aspects of war. New events like war crequire meaning making, new icons, symbols, ideas to make sense of what is going on in life. But war also suppresse culture as some things cannot be said anymore or have dangerous consequences. We dive into these and related topics over the next weeks with sc...

Race is a pervasive and omnipresent dimension of inequality, both within societies and at a global scale. Yet it is the one dimension that is most difficult to talk about. Even the word itself, race, is fraught. How to use the concept of race? How is race done in practice? And how does it create and perpetuate social inequalities? We talk about this with our guests Amade M’Charek, professor in ant...

In this episode, we are joined by Hartmut Rosa, one of today’s ‘big thinkers’ in sociology, to talk about his work on the concept of resonance and how it relates to inequalities. After becoming popular in Germany, his work is now gaining ground in anglophone sociology too. But what does resonance mean? What is a sociology of the good life? And how does resonance theory affect how we think about an...

In this episode, we talk with prof. dr. Ashley Mears (Boston University) and dr. Anne Monier (ESSEC Paris) about gender and the body in contemporary elites. Both sociologists have done extensive ethnographic research on elites – respectively the global VIP party circuit, and the Philantropic scene of the 'American friends' of French cultural institutions. Their ethnographic work sheds light on the...

It’s all wealth, social mobility and class ceilings in this week’s episode as we ask ourselves: How does social mobility work, and why does it matter for culture and inequality? Dave O’Brien talks with Maren Toft (Uni Oslo) and Sam Friedman (LSE) about parental wealth, cultural matching, the class ceiling and labour market outcomes. How does the bank of mum and dad contribute to a class ceiling in...

Welcome back to our new season! It is Oscar season, and we thus watch last year's Best Picture winner Parasite, together with Ricky Changwook Kim (Handong Global University) and Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University). What does this movie tells us about the link between culture and inequalities? Are these links and inequalities culturally specific? Or does the film's global success reveal a unive...

In the final episode for this semester, we look back and ahead and ask, where do we go from here? We approach this in two ways: where does the study of culture and inequality go from here? Based on our podcast, what is the direction for fruitful research? And what have been the missing links? Secondly, this is for a small part also a meta-podcast, a podcasts about podcasts: we discuss where do we...

This week, we turn the table and look at how non-sociologists, i.e. normal people believe about inequality. Giselinde speaks with dr. Jonathan Mijs (EUR/Harvard) and prof. dr. Magne Flemmen to dive deeper in the relation between rising inequalities, meritocratic beliefs, and egalitarianism. Inequalities are rising yet people seem to care increasingly less about it. Why do people display meritocrat...

In this episode, Giselinde interviews dr. Predrag Cveticanin (University of Niš, Serbia) & dr. Yang Gao (Furman University, US) as we go beyond the bubble of Western-European, North-American cultural sociology. How does cultural distinction and social capital work in Serbia? Why do Chinese tv consumers love GossipGirl? How are post-socialist Serbia and not-so-socialist-anymore China different and...

In this episode, dr. Julian Schaap (Erasmus University Rotterdam) talks to prof.dr. Jeroen van der Waal (EUR) and dr. Joost Oude Groeniger (EUR) about the relation between health inequalities and social and cultural inequalities. Negative health outcomes such as low life expectancy and disease prevalence are often linked to lower classes, usually followed by an explanation that looks at socio-econ...

In this episode, Giselinde speaks with Bruno Cousin (assistant professor at SciencesPo Paris) and Sébastien Chauvin (associate prof at University of Lausanne) about the elite culture of what is popularly called 'the top 1 percent'. Based on their research on the French Caribbean luxury destination of St Barths, social clubs in Milan, and Ashley Mears' ethnographic work on 'party girls' and promote...

While ‘canons’ of culture were dismantled decades ago by postmodern, postcolonial and feminist critics, evaluative judgements about ‘the best’ and ‘best ever’ continue unabated in the cultural field and in everyday life. We find examples of these judgements in the prizes and awards bestowed by powerful institutions but also in the relentless to and fro of internet forum discussions among individua...

Classed bodies: Weight, appearance and class distinction by Culture & Inequality Podcast