Project description
Mirror, mirror on the wall…
Beauty may be only skin deep, but it’s enough to play a big role in today’s societies. Concern about one’s appearance is high and linked to feelings of social inclusion and privilege. In this context, the ERC project BINQ will address the ‘soft’ factors by taking a scientific approach grounded in multidisciplinary and comparative research. It will investigate how physical appearance can actually contribute to social inequality. The project will build a new comprehensive theoretical model employing explorative and experimental methods to study and compare results in five global cities (Accra, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tehran) to understand how evaluations of physical appearance work and result in durable inequalities.
Objective
How does physical beauty contribute to social inequality? This innovative multi-disciplinary comparative project aims to build a comprehensive new theory that explains how evaluations of physical appearance work, and how they re/produce durable inequalities in todays media-saturated, service-based consumer societies. It hypothesizes that 1. in contemporary societies beauty is an important form of capital for all genders over the life-course; 2. beauty as a form of capital intersects with existing axes of inequality like gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality; 3. the growing importance of appearance spawns new forms of inequality. The project investigates these hypotheses in 5 global cities on 4 continents: Accra, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tehran. An international team will employ a mixed-method design to study how aesthetic evaluations of appearance are shaped, and identify the mechanisms by which these evaluations shape social dis/advantage. This high risk/high gain project breaks new ground in our understanding of human beauty and its consequences. It brings together scattered insights from many disciplines in a new theoretical model, and tests and refines this model with explorative (Q-sort, survey, ethnography) and hypothesis-testing (lab/ field experiments) methods. It addresses central societal and scientific challenges by foregrounding the importance of a soft cultural factor in shaping social divides, and the growing role of media in shaping social dis/advantage and exclusion. All subprojects study two domains where mediatization has made appearance more salient: dating and job search. The project structure is designed to tackle its high risks: its global scope, multidisciplinarity and its ambition to simultaneously develop novel methods and a new theory. The project is led by a cultural sociologist with a strong track record in interdisciplinary and comparative research, and in analyzing the serious consequences of frivolous topics.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
3000 Leuven
Belgium