Description
Book SynopsisWe have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts people’s lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice? This book considers what provokes everyday ‘views’ or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘racial’ or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.
Trade ReviewWendy Bottero has done something astonishing: brought new insights into a field that is saturated with scholarly work. Bottero convincingly shows us that in order to both understand and address inequalities, we must pay far more attention to the affective experiences of inequalities. This book contains essential insights for scholars working on the range of social inequalities, insights which must be engaged. -- Shamus Khan, Chair and Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA
This is a superb book. Sociologists frequently treat the facts of inequality as sufficient to elicit resistance – the `many’ against the `few’. Wendy Bottero powerfully demonstrates complex moral economies of inequality that disrupt the idea that the reproduction of inequality is essentially a problem of knowledge. Her pragmatist re-working of the field challenges both contemporary sociology and wider political discourse. -- John Holmwood, Professor of Sociology, University of Nottingham, UK
Inequality is increasing, but how do people experience and understand social inequalities? Based on a broad grasp of the field, Bottero moves beyond customary approaches to subjective experiences and provides new answers to urgent questions in our time. -- Marianne Nordli Hansen, Professor of Sociology, University of Oslo, Norway
From a classic pragmatist approach, Bottero’s book examines perspectives on social inequality and the multitude of layers in relations of domination. It demonstrates very convincingly how conditions that shape practices in people’s everyday lives are of the greatest importance for understanding how social inequality is reproduced and resisted. It is an outstanding contribution to the literature on social inequality. -- Ann Nilsen, Professor of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Restricted Visions? Chapter 2: Attitudes to Inequality Chapter 3: Misrecognising Inequality Chapter 4: Affective Inequality Chapter 5: Protesting Inequality Chapter 6: Resisting Inequality Chapter 7: Making Sense of Inequality Chapter 8: Conclusion —Analysing Inequality Bibliography
