COM 209
Defining social class in the United States has been a puzzle for over two hundred years, and class has always had complex interactions with political power. This is all the more true in 2024; the presidential election results are expected to show significant reconfiguration of the relationship between certain core constituents of social class—economic wealth and race—and partisan politics.
Elsewhere in our culture, we have seen the steadily growing politicization of a wide range of consumer preferences, from clothing to automobiles to entertainment, not to mention proliferating partisan media and social media. How can we understand social class, the consumer practices that help to constitute it, and political media in 2024?
This presentation will discuss work in progress from a project that takes intellectual inspiration from sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Savage and aims to provide a typology of American social class based on individuals’ levels of economic and cultural capital (in particular, tastes for particular consumer objects); and relate those social classes to political and media preferences.
This lecture is presented by Chris Wells, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Faculty Development; Associate Professor, Emerging Media Studies.