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Project

Beauty and Inequality: Physical Appearance, Symbolic Boundaries

How does physical beauty contribute to social inequality? This innovative, multidisciplinary, compar-ative project aims to build a comprehensive new theory that explains how evaluations of physical ap-pearance work, and how they re/produce durable inequalities in today’s media-saturated, service-based, globalized consumer societies. It hypothesizes that 1. in 21st century societies beauty has be-come 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 like gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality; 3. the growing importance of appearance spawns new forms of inequality. These hypotheses are investigated in 5 global cities on 4 continents: Accra, Buenos Aires, Brussels, Hong Kong and Tehran. An international team will employ a mixed-method design to study how aes-thetic evaluations of appearance are shaped, and to identify the mechanisms by which these evalua-tions shape social dis/advantage. This high risk/high gain project breaks new ground in our understanding of human beauty and its so-cial consequences. It brings together scattered insights from many disciplines in a new theoretical model, and tests and refines this model with explorative (Q-sort, survey, ethnography) and hypothesis-testing (lab/field experiments) methods. It addresses central societal and scientific challenges by fore-grounding the importance of a “soft” cultural factor in shaping social divides, and the growing role of media in shaping social dis/advantage and exclusion. All subprojects study two domains where media-tization has made appearance more salient: dating and job search. The project structure is designed to deal with its high risks: its global scope, multidisciplinarity and its ambition to simultaneously develop novel methods and a new theory. The project is led by a cultural sociologist with a strong track record in interdisciplinary and comparative research, and in analyzing the serious consequences of frivolous topics.

Date:15 Feb 2023 →  Today
Keywords:cultural sociology, beauty, inequality
Disciplines:Cultural sociology, Comparative and historical sociology, Sociology of gender and gender relations
Project type:PhD project