Larry Saha Room, Haydon-Allen Building Room 2175.  Presented by Prof David Marsh and Dr Dan Woodman, School of Sociology, RSSS.

The concept if class is alive and well, at least in a sense. Class remains a central variable in much sociology. Yet how class is conceptualised for the contemporary world, and how it functions, continues to be widely debated. Many people turned to Bourdieu to rethink class towards the end of the 20th Century because he added more than just human and economic capital to his model and proposed a ‘social space of difference in which people are positioned according to their possession of various types of capital and which furnishes them with a habitus, or set of dispositions’ (Aktinson 2009: 901). In this seminar David Marsh and Dan Woodman will present separate papers exploring whether a Bourdieusian framework is the best option for conceptualising class inequality in today’s world.