Beauty and Inequality Physical Appearance, Symbolic Boundaries and Social Dis/advantage in Five Global Cities

How does physical beauty contribute to social inequality? This innovative, multi-disciplinary compara- tive project aims to build a comprehensive new theory that explains how evaluations of physical appear- ance work, and how they re/produce durable inequalities in today’s media-saturated, service-based, consumer societies. It hypothesizes that 1. in contemporary 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 like gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality; 3. the growing importance of appearance spawns new forms of inequality. The project investigates these hypotheses in 5 global cities on 3 continents: Accra, Brussels, Hong Kong, Milan and Tehran. An international team will employ a mixed-method design to study how aesthetic evaluations of appearance are shaped, and identify the mechanisms by which these evaluations shape social dis/advantage. This high risk/high gain project breaks new ground in our understanding of human beauty and its con- sequences. It brings together scattered insights from many disciplines in a new theoretical model, and  tests and refines this model with explorative (eg, Q-sort, fieldwork) and hypothesis-testing (lab/ field experiments) methods. It addresses central societal and scientific challenges by foregrounding the im- portance 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 mediatization has made appearance more salient: dating and job search. The project structure is designed to tackle 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.