About this Event
While extensive work has documented the crucial role of material resources in social mobility, in this lecture Professor Annette Lareau will draw our attention to the complex ways in which class-based cultural knowledge creates its own barriers, based on research in the USA with a racially-diverse sample of young people from different class locations.
Drawing on a variety of data sources, much of it unpublished, Lareau will present qualitative research revealing the nuanced ways in which cultural knowledge can be consequential in mobility journeys. This includes longitudinal data from her book Unequal Childhoods, which highlights how young adults’ knowledge of navigating institutional barriers, particularly in higher education, can have key consequences. Alongside, a recent book with Blair Sackett, We Thought It would be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America, illuminates how organizations routinely made errors that thwarted the paths of refugees in Philadelphia from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They show the impact of these errors, particularly in the delivery of services, and how cultural knowledge was essential to untangling the “knots” that arise.
Speaker
Professor Annette Lareau
Annette Lareau is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2024, she is a Leverhulme Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of the award-winning books Unequal Childhoods, Home Advantage, and Listening to People. With Blair Sackett, she authored We Thought It Would be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America (University of California Press). Annette is currently doing a study of the blessings and challenges of wealth for families. She is Past President of the American Sociological Association.
Chair
Professor Louise Archer
Louise Archer is the Karl Mannheim Chair in Sociology of Education at IOE. Her research seeks to understand educational identities and inequalities in relation to social class, gender and race/ethnicity across primary, secondary, higher and informal STEM learning contexts. She has authored over 100 academic publications and has directed numerous national and international research studies, including the 14 year, ESRC-funded ASPIRES study (tracking young people's trajectories, age 10-22). Louise works extensively with policy-makers and practitioners to support equity in education. The impact of her research has been recognised through prizes from the Royal Society (2022), ESRC (2020) and British Educational Research Association (2019).
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, 20 Bedford Way, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
