Tag social inequality

From Access to Belonging: Rethinking Widening Participation Metrics in UK Higher Education

Students on campus sit and talk while, beside them, a large dashboard of widening participation data highlights targets and inequalities.

Widening participation policy is often judged through dashboards of access, continuation and attainment. Yet focusing on who gets in – and who stays – can mask how universities continue to privilege particular histories, dispositions and futures. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and institutional habitus, this article argues that belonging should sit at the centre of how we interpret student data, and explores what a more “belonging-sensitive” approach to WP metrics might look like in UK higher education.

Trading Places and the Myth of Meritocracy: A Sociological Analysis of Class, Race, and Capital

Trading Places Meritocracy

Watching Trading Places as a Christmas comfort film, it is hard not to see a ready-made sociological case study. The Dukes’ “experiment” looks like a simple nature-versus-nurture wager, but the life swap really turns on class, race and access to capital. This article uses Bourdieu’s framework to show how the film exposes—and then neatly smooths over—the myth of meritocracy.

Beyond Weber, Marx, and Orwell: The Rise of Digital Neofeudalism

Digital Feudalism

Has the modern world outgrown Weber’s iron cage, Marx’s alienation, and Orwell’s surveillance state—only to enter a new form of control? In an era where tech monopolies act as digital landlords, individuals no longer own but rent, their lives dictated by algorithmic oversight and data extraction. Is this progress, or have we simply traded one system of domination for another?