The project tackles important scientific and societal challenges. If successful, it will yield new insights and theoretical and methodological innovations that will help scholars in many fields, policy makers, stakeholders and wider publics to understand and alleviate the possible negative impact of the global beauty regime.
The project breaks new ground in our understanding of human beauty and its social consequences. It transcends disciplinary barriers to develop a new approach to study beauty, and implements and refines this multidisciplinary perspective in a comparative study. Combining the cultural sociology of symbolic boundaries with insights from the sociology of inequality, social psychology, economy, gender and media studies, it develops and tests a new theory that explains how evaluations of beauty produce social dis/advantage. This theory will include insights on beauty standards and intersecting inequalities from “peripheral hubs” around the world: diverse global cities where global beauty trends meet local beauty standards and regimes.
The project will advance both scholarly and societal understandings of inequality. It looks at beauty, a neglected source of inequality, and studies research sites rarely included in comparative projects or theoretical syntheses. Thus, it highlights the role of “soft” cultural factors in shaping “hard” socio-economic facts – social segregation, precarity, exclusion, privilege, discrimination – on both local and global levels.
The project studies the impact of new media on the shaping of cultural standards and social inequalities. While the burgeoning field of social media studies has shown how online beauty culture negatively affects individuals. I shift the focus to societal consequences. The project devotes specific attention to two central social sorting processes –mate search and job search– that are increasingly mediated and based on physical appearance. This will yield important new insights in how new forms of mediated, algorithmic evaluation impact people’s lives, by reshaping life chances and dis/advantages across contexts.
The project develops an innovative cross-national mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative social scientific, psychological and digital methods in an unusually wide range of research sites. We will attract an international research team that brings together methodological and substantive ex-pertise from various disciplines and countries.
The project addresses important societal challenges. It foregrounds appearance and beauty as an increasingly important asset across many domains of life and throughout the life course. So far, the growing salience of beauty has been conceptualized as a challenge related to health and well-being. This project argues that it dovetails with another major challenge: the global increase of social inequality. The growing importance of appearance manifests itself in another challenge: the emer-gence of possibly disruptive forms of mediation and datafication, which often make use of (beautified or beautiful) visual representations of people. For instance, platforms like Tinder, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok put (good) looks center stage, and transform both intimate and professional relationships. The COVID-19 pandemic gave an additional boost to both inequality and precarity and mediatization, and may have aggravated their negative impacts).
Finally, the project pioneers new forms of collaboration and outreach. Beauty is a strategic field to transcend boundaries between academics, stakeholders and publics: it touches on important societal challenges and provides an attractive hook for people not usually interested in “science”. For instance, it speaks to younger people’s rising concerns about “everyday” racism or unrealistic beauty standards. The project offers a unique opportunity to reach new audiences, and to develop new forms of co-creation, e.g. with NGOs or app designers.
