Socializing inequality. The childhood development of status stereotypes in four European countries

Objective

Few subjects have proven more stimulating to the sociological imagination than that of “social inequality”. Few concepts are more central to sociology’s sense of disciplinary identity than that of “socialization”. This makes it all the more curious that sociologists have thus fair paid remarkably little attention to the process whereby social actors gradually learn to perceive and judge the world around them as inherently “unequal”. The research project “Socializing inequality” aims to uncover when and how young children develop the cognitive ability to perceive and judge inequality in social status. Using a specifically designed visual methodology, this project aims to uncover the classificatory logic that children deploy to situate themselves and others in social space.