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Project

4 PhD positions: “Beauty and Inequality: Physical Appearance, Symbolic Boundaries and Social Dis/advantage in Accra/ Brussels/ Buenos Aires/ Hong Kong"

How does physical beauty contribute to social inequality? This innovative, multidisciplinary, comparative project builds a new theory that explains how assessments of physical appearance work, and how they re/produce enduring inequalities in contemporary media-saturated, service-based, globalized consumer societies. The hypothesis is that 1. in 21st century societies, beauty has become an important form of capital, for all genders across the life course; 2. beauty as a form of capital intersects with existing axes of inequality such as gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality; 3. the growing importance of appearance generates new forms of inequality. These hypotheses are examined in 5 world cities on 4 continents: Accra, Buenos Aires, Brussels, Hong Kong and Tehran. An international team will use a mixed-method design to study how aesthetic evaluations of appearance are formed, and to identify the mechanisms by which these evaluations shape social inequality/deprivation. This high-risk, high-profit project is a breakthrough in our understanding of human beauty and its social consequences. It brings together disparate insights from many disciplines into a new theoretical model, and tests and refines this model with explorative (Q-sort, survey, ethnography) methods. It addresses important societal and scientific challenges by emphasizing the importance of a 'soft' cultural factor in shaping social divisions and the growing role of the media in shaping social deprivation and exclusion.

Date:1 Mar 2023 →  Today
Keywords:Beauty, Inequality, Symbolic Boundaries, Social Distinction, Evaluation of Beauty, Mixed urban areas
Disciplines:Cultural sociology
Project type:PhD project