***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 studies, anthropology), how this relation this been theorized in various theoretical traditions (notable Bourdieu's field theory, British cultural studies inspired by Stuart Hall , and American cultural sociology in the vein of Michele Lamont); and how has this been empirically analyzed? Moreover, we will offer a first exploration of the continued relevance of these insights on culture and inequality for contemporary societies, and for the everyday life of (young) people today.

--- This week's readings:
Bourdieu, P. (1994). Social space and symbolic space. In Calhoun, Craig et al. (eds.) Contemporary Sociologi-cal Theory, 345-358.

Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241-258. New York: Greenwood.

Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, pp. 128–38. London: Hutchinson. Link: https://we.riseup.net/as-sets/102142/appadurai.pdf#page=202

Lamont, M. (1992). Implications, contributions and unanswered questions. In Money, Morals and Manners, 174-192. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kuipers, G. (2006). Television and taste hierarchy: The case of Dutch television comedy. Media, Culture & Society 28(3): 359-378.

Additional materials

Video: Carle, Pierre (2002). La sociologie est un sport de combat. Pierre Bourdieu. Documentary.

https://vimeo.com/92709274

Video: Hall, Stuart (1997). Representation and media. Open University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGh64E_XiVM

Video: Lamont, Michele (2016). Doing sociology. American Sociological Association. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIR1mYsy510


Presentation: Giselinde Kuipers & Luuc Brans
Audio production edit: Luuc Brans
Theme music by Timothy Dowd
We are grateful for the generous support from European Centre for the Study of Culture and Inequality