Dear Hot Politics Lab followers,
After some holidays and conferences, we are finally back with another Hot Politics Lab meeting this Friday (June 9th) from 15:00-16:00. During this session, Jeroen van der Waal (Erasmus University) will give
a talk titled “Measuring non-declarative cultural capital and exploring its social situatedness: a population-based IAT-survey combination”.
See the abstract here below.
Abstract
Cultural capital is a central concept in various sociological subfields, particularly the sociology of stratification. Crucial to the Bourdieusian habitus, it is assumed to be ingrained via socialization in the upper
strata, is resultingly stratified, and helps individuals to navigate educational institutions. Cultural capital is regarded as partly ‘non-declarative’, i.e., ‘hard wired’ in cognitive structures, with Bourdieu characterizing it as an aspect of so-called ‘class
unconsciousness’. Accordingly, the habitus has largely escaped empirical scrutiny. Arguments about its importance, therefore, are typically post-hoc interpretations of associations between the standard measure of declarative cultural capital (survey items
on highbrow cultural consumption) and the particular variables of interest. We have developed a tool for empirically capturing non-declarative cultural capital: two Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring 1) the appreciation of elite culture and 2) self-identification
with it, embedded within a survey conducted among a high-quality panel representative of the Dutch population (n=2,398). The results indicate that these IATs are valid measures of non-declarative cultural capital, and their scores are positively associated
with the socio-economic positions of the respondents and their parents/caregivers. We discuss our findings’ relevance to past and future research on cultural reproduction and future research on non-declarative cultural capital’s corollaries.
The talks will be followed by a Q&A, and everybody is welcome to join in the Common Room (REC-B9.22) or online. For those who want to join online, note that
we switched to Teams, so we will now use
this link.
You can check out the full program of this semester on our
website. You can also watch any of the previous online hot politics lab meetings via the labs
archive.
Hope to see many of you this Friday!
Best,
Maaike
Maaike Homan
PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research
University of Amsterdam
Room B10.01
