Field analysis, boundary drawing and socio-cultural inequality

Academic organisers: Mike Savage (University of York) and Elizabeth Silva (The Open University).

Funded by SCUD network (Aalborg, Denmark) and the University of York

As a result of the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking, field analysis has attracted increasing interest as offering a fluid and complex way of exploring social and cultural relationships. This workshop will involve leading cultural sociologists from the UK, Denmark, France, Norway, Finland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States to explore the relationship between cultural boundaries and the organisation of fields. The speakers will use both quantitative and qualitative analyses and will cover the following themes : 

1. How far do field analytic methods assume that fields are organised on a national scale. Can field analysis be used to explore household, local, urban, and transnational processes?   
2. Studies of how different social groups (e.g. elites; professionals; migrant workers) might be organised at different spatial scales, and how field analytic methods can deal with this. 
3. Studies of how different fields inter-relate - discussion of how 'boundary drawing' processes can be interpreted within field analysis. 
4. Studies about the criteria and processes of judgement that create boundaries within and between fields: reflexive processes, negotiations and 'internal conversations' at personal and collective levels that inform practice.

Speakers include: Michele Lamont, Harvard; Roger Burrows, York; Johs Hjelbrekke, Bergen; Frederic LeBaron, Picardie Jules Verne