Culture & Inequality Podcast

About Culture & Inequality Podcast

How does culture feed into inequality? And the other way around? In Culture and Inequality, cultural sociologists from universities across the world explore these topics in-depth from various perspectives on the basis of academic readings. While this podcast is primarily intended as a course module for advanced students in sociology, it certainly offers interesting insights to a more general audience too.

Publisher

Culture & Inequality Podcast

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Sept 2020

Latest episode

6 Oct 2025

Latest episodes

32 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2025

   Beauty, Botox, Boundaries: Aesthetic Medical Procedures and Social Inequality

   Why should social scientists and cultural scholars pay attention to aesthetic medical procedures? In this episode, Alka Menon (Yale University) and Anne-Mette Hermans (Tilburg University) take us beneath the surface of Botox, rhinoplasties, and Brazilian Butt Lifts to reveal what these increasingly normalised procedures can tell us about social inequality today. With host Sanne Pieters, they explore how doctors and surgeons shape more than just faces. By deciding which appearances are acceptable, these practitioners navigate the boundaries between medicine and aesthetics, morality and beauty, economics and ethics, and in doing so play a key role in (re)defining racial categories and hierarchal beauty ideals. Our guests tackle some seemingly contradictory puzzles with no easy answers. Why do practitioners insist that “true beauty comes from within”? And how should we understand the normalisation of aesthetic procedures when those who undergo them still face persistent stigma? This episode shows that cosmetic surgery is about much more than just appearance: it holds up a mirror to the social inequalities that exist in society. Alka V. Menon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University. She studies the relationship between medicine, technology, and society, with a focus on race and racism. Her book, Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards shows how forces working at different scales stabilize the continuing use of racial categories in medicine. Anne-Mette Hermans is an Assistant Professor at Tranzo, Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on (consumerist) notions of malleable bodies and cosmetic procedures in particular. Moreover, she co-established the interdisciplinary Expertisegroep Cosmetische Ingrepen, which executes several research projects related to the cosmetic surgery and beauty industry in the Netherlands. Sanne Pieters is a PhD Researcher of cultural sociology at KU Leuven in Belgium. Her research interests include the relation between physical beauty and social inequalities, hegemonic and hybrid gender identities and bodywork as pedagogical practice. Readings: Hermans, A.-M. (2021). Discourses of perfection: Representing cosmetic procedures and beauty products in UK lifestyle magazines. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003001973 Hermans, A.-M., & Nash, R. (2025). Cosmetic gatekeepers: Negotiations of beauty and (re)shaping bodies by medical aesthetic practitioners. Social Science & Medicine, 380, 118165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118165 Menon, A. V. (2023). Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (1st ed). University of California Press. Menon, A. V. (2017). Reconstructing race and gender in American cosmetic surgery. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(4), 597–616. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1206590 Bonell, S., Barlow, F. K., & Griffiths, S. (2021). The cosmetic surgery paradox: Toward a contemporary understanding of cosmetic surgery popularisation and attitudes. Body Image, 38, 230–240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.04.010 Haraway, Donna (1990). "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. Podcast editors: Luuc Brans, Sanne Pieters, Kobe De Keere & Geert Veuskens. 
This podcast is co-financed from the BINQ project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant No. 101052649. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.
This podcast is also kindly supported by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam.

2. 

   15 Jul 2025

   From Happy Meat to Eco-Types: The Cultural Politics of the Climate Crisis

   Meatscapes? Meat Paradoxes? Happy Meat? Eco-Types? In this episode, we interrogate the fraught ethical and cultural landscape of the climate crisis with three guests: prof. Josée Johnston (UToronto), prof. Shyon Baumann (UToronto) and prof. Emily Huddart (U British Columbia). We learn how and why people make and eat happy if not ecologically and ethically questionable meat, how people care for the environment in many ways and why this is often so politically divisive. We also learn why some sociologists take courses in animal butchery to answer such questions. Hosted by Luuc Brans, we do so by discussing two recent books: (1) the just-published Happy Meat by Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart and Merin Oleschuk (Stanford UP, 2025) and (2) Emily Huddart’s Eco-Types (Princeton UP, 2022). Happy Meat shows how consumers and producers make a story of ‘happy meat’ to overcome the ‘meat paradox’ while Eco-Types demonstrates how we all care in different ways for the environment and how this is linked to polarization. Finally, Emily Huddart and Josée Johnston also reveal some insights on their latest project on climate polarisation. Our guests show how a cultural sociological approach centring meaning making in the climate crisis can tell us important things about inequality, the climate crisis, and consumption, overlooked by other approaches. Readings: • Huddart, E. (2022). Eco-types: Five ways of caring about the environment. Princeton UP https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691239583/eco-types • Johnston, J., Baumann, S., Huddart, E., & Oleschuk, M. (2025). Happy Meat: The sadness and joy of a paradoxical idea. Stanford UP https://www.sup.org/books/sociology/happy-meat Emily Huddart (PhD, University of Alberta) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the motivations behind civic engagement aiming to protect the environment, and how pro-environmental practices reflect and reproduce social differences. She engages these problems in a research program centred on examining how gender, class, and political ideology contour environmental beliefs and practices and social solidarity. Josée Johnston (PhD, University of Alberta) is a Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto who aims to advance knowledge in the sociological study of food and consumer culture and understand how cultural and political forces reproduce and legitimate the inequitable and unsustainable features of capitalist economies. Her research spans the sub-fields of culture, gender, and political sociology; the subject of food is a natural way to make connections across these various sub-fields. Shyon Baumann (PhD, Harvard University) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research centres on the sociology of culture, with a focus on people's cultural evaluations, preferences and choices. He also studies the broad social influences on the status and legitimacy of cultural productions. His work aims to understand how cultural consumption and production are linked to social inequality. Luuc Brans (PhD, KU Leuven) is an FWO postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the intersection between culture, politics, and climate crisis, particularly in fashion. He currently explores how sustainability advocacy in fashion is linked to climate polarization. Podcast editors: Luuc Brans, Sanne Pieters, Kobe De Keere & Geert Veuskens
This podcast is co-financed from the BINQ project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant No. 101052649. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.
This podcast is also kindly supported by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam.

3. 

   3 Jul 2025

   Gender as Battlefield: Far-Right Movements, Femonationalism and Replacement Ideology

   In this episode, we take on big questions about gender and far-right politics with Sarah Bracke and Charléne Calderaro, two scholars who arrived at the topic of gender and the far right through distinct yet overlapping research paths: one through replacement ideology and the systematic problematization of Islam and Muslims in contemporary Europe, the other through the study of racialized street harassment in France and the UK. With host Norah Schulten, they unpack the central role of gender in far-right movements and explore how feminist ideas are co-opted and reframed to reinforce normative gender roles, entrench binaries, racialize sexism and sustain racial hierarchies. Dr. Charlène Calderaro is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Lausanne. Her PhD focused on the criminalisation of street harassment in France and the UK, and the way in which far-right activists appropriated this cause, which was initially championed by feminists. Prof. Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project EnGendering Europe's 'Muslim Question' funded by the NWO Talent scheme Vici grant (2018-2024) and a partner in the collaborate Erasmus+ funded project ReVisualize: Muslim Women's Empowerment. Dr. Norah Schulten is the host of this episode and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam's AISSR. She is part of The Politics of Diversity Group that studies real-world questions on political representation and power, struggles for equality, backlash, oppression and policies. Works discussed this episode and further reading: • Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L.M. (Eds.). (2023). The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003305927 • Bracke, S. (2024). “A Victory for White Life”: Reproduction, Replacement, and a Handmaid’s Tale. In S. Bracke, & L. M. Hernández Aguilar (Eds.), The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003305927-22 • Weinbaum, A. E. (2004). Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385820 • Calderaro, C. (2025). Beyond Instrumentalization: Far-Right Women’s Appropriation of Feminism in France. Politics & Gender, 1–29. Doi:10.1017/S1743923X2500003 • Calderaro, C. (2023). The racialisation of sexism: how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in Britain and France. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 413-438. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16832763188290 • Scrinzi, F. (2023). The Racialization of Sexism: Men, Women and Gender in the Populist Radical Right Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315112831 - Blee, K. M. (1996). BECOMING A RACIST: Women in Contemporary Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi Groups. Gender & Society, 10(6), 680-702. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124396010006002 • Blee, K. (2020). Where Do We Go from Here? Positioning Gender in Studies of the Far Right. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 21(4), 416–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2020.1851870 Podcast editors: Sanne Pieters, Luuc Brans, Kobe De Keere & Geert Veuskens This podcast is co-financed from the BINQ project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant No. 101052649. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This podcast is also kindly supported by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam.

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 20 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

28

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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