Description du projet
Miroir, ô mon miroir…
La beauté n’est peut-être que superficielle, mais elle joue un rôle important dans les sociétés modernes. Le souci de l’apparence est puissant et lié aux sentiments d’inclusion sociale et de privilège. Dans ce contexte, le projet BINQ du CER abordera les facteurs «superficiels» en adoptant une approche scientifique fondée sur la recherche pluridisciplinaire et comparative. Il étudiera comment l’apparence physique peut réellement contribuer à l’inégalité sociale. Le projet construira un nouveau modèle théorique complet en utilisant des méthodes exploratoires et expérimentales pour étudier et comparer les résultats dans cinq villes (Accra, Bruxelles, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong et Téhéran) afin de comprendre le mécanisme des évaluations de l’apparence physique et leurs conséquences en termes d’inégalités durables.
Objectif
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.
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Appel à propositions
(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) ERC-2021-ADG
Voir d’autres projets de cet appelRégime de financement
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitution d’accueil
3000 Leuven
Belgique