2025-2026 Spring Seminar IV

The Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion draws on expertise from across disciplines to gain international and comparative perspectives on how to extend cultural membership to the greatest number in society, to gain a better understanding of the social and cultural processes behind recognition gaps, and to determine how social scientists and policy makers can better respond to help make societies more inclusive. 

Advanced industrial societies have become increasingly characterized by two trends: growing inequality and an increasing recognition gap. As the distribution of wealth and income have grown more unequal, a growing number of groups are making claims for recognition as the poor, workers, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and various ethnoracial and religious minority groups experience stigmatization. This double tension will serve as a fruitful point of entry for future multidisciplinary inquiries into the conditions for collective well-being.

A major challenge for contemporary societies is to extend cultural membership to the greatest number. Thus we need to gain a better understanding of the social and cultural processes behind recognition gaps, and determine how social scientists and policy makers can better respond to help make societies more inclusive. 

This seminar brings together cluster affiliates and colleagues across departments to share their published and in-progress work in an effort to find responses to the timely questions related to inequality and the recognition gap. For more information, please check the seminar’s upcoming events. 

Presenters:

Galen Watts (University of Waterloo)

“From Outer to Inner: Cultural Capital, Moral Selfhood, and the Diploma Divide”

Abstract: What constitutes cultural capital is changing. While neo-Bourdieusian scholars have documented a shift from “what” to “how” in cultural consumption, few have adequately explained the cultural underpinnings of this transformation. Integrating scholarship on “emerging cultural capital” with the scholarships on therapeutic culture, governmentality studies, and the world polity this article argues that the inward turn of cultural capital reflects the post-1960s institutionalization of a romantic liberal model of moral selfhood. This moral ideal consecrates a self that is autonomous (self-directed), agentic (self-developing), and authentic (self-expressive). Drawing on 173 in-depth interviews with university-educated professionals and working-class adults without four-year degrees, I show that this moral ideal is widely shared across Canada’s diploma divide, however, its encoding and enactment varies by class position. Professionals narrate growth-oriented projects of self-realization, performing autonomy as self-reflexivity, agency as continual self-improvement, and authenticity as emotionally calibrated positivity. By contrast, most working-class participants narrate repair-oriented projects of self-realization defined by struggles with mental illness, pathological family dynamics, and economic insecurity. In turn, they present autonomy as self-repair, agency as precarious stability, and authenticity as unvarnished emotional or intellectual honesty. While both classes endorse the same moral ideal, unequal access to material and symbolic resources renders professionals far more likely to successfully enact it. The result is a diploma divide in moral recognition, demonstrating how shared liberal values can engender social stratification.
 

Semi Purhonen (Tampere University, Finland)

“Working-Class Cultures in the 2020s: Finnish Observations and Comparative Groundwork”

Abstract: The first part of the presentation introduces the project “Cultures of the Working Classes in the 2020s: Fragmentation, Reproduction, Boundaries, Politics.” Starting from the argument that Bourdieu-inspired cultural stratification research suffers from a middle-class bias—treating working-class cultures as residual to high-status cultures—the project examines working-class cultures in contemporary Finland through a multi-method approach, paying attention to internal variations and potential areas of autonomy. The project includes: (a) analysis of population surveys, notably Statistics Finland’s cultural practices dataset (1981–2017), to explore fragmentation and the (non)political nature of working-class culture; (b) ethnographic research on everyday practices and attitudes in working-class families; and (c) an online study using data scraping to examine how “working class” and “working-class culture” are discussed, highlighting boundaries and classification struggles over classed identities and stereotypes. In the second part of the presentation, I provide some groundwork for considering working-class cultures in Finland from an international comparative perspective. I begin with the historical characteristics of the Finnish class structure and then use available cross-national sources to shed light on how Finland compares with other countries regarding working-class identification and its relationship with perceptions of vertical social conflicts (understood as “class opposition”). Further, I reflect on the extent to which the contemporary political division within the working class—into left-leaning, right-wing populist, and politically indifferent factions—also represents a cultural divide. By way of conclusion, I argue that as a small country with relatively low economic inequality, cultural differentiation in Finland may be overall rather weak in international comparison, but the prevailing cultural differences are highly hierarchical and universal.

Linus Westheuser (Max Planck Institute for Social Sciences, Gottingen) &

Koen Damhuis (Utrecht University, School of Governance)

“Understanding Working Class Politics in the 21st Century”

Abstract: The talk outlines a research agenda on workers’ engagement with and disengagement from politics in contemporary societies. We look at workers’ support for the radical right, as well as the internal heterogeneity of the working class and its growing political demobilization in advanced capitalism. Bridging political science and cultural sociology, our approach centers on the way in which workers make sense of politics “in their own words” and through the lens of broader worldviews. We discuss how political divides interact with morality (e.g. questions of fairness and deservingness); group identities demarcated against groups above and below; and a sense of linked fate.

We present a work-in-progress review article on working class politics (with Michèle Lamont and Stephanie Ternullo) and draw connections to two recently published papers: one on the political consciousness and moral grammar that workers develop in the context of the ‘demobilized class societies’ (Westheuser and Beck 2025); and one on workers’ common sense reasoning in the context of shifting political cleavages (Damhuis and Westheuser 2024).