
Professor Will Atkinson
BA(Nott.Trent), MSc (Bristol), PhD(Bristol)
Expertise
I specialise in social class and its impact on culture, politics, education and family life. I'm also an advocate of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu.
Current positions
Professor of Sociology
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
I have broad interests in class inequalities and differences, whether in relation to education, work, culture, politics or self-perception, as part of a larger general concern with systems of power and domination and how they interplay to shape who we are. I work closely with the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu in this regard, though I try to take it in new directions.
I'm the author/editor of Class, Individualization and Late Modernity: In Search of the Reflexive Worker (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Class Inequality in Austerity Britain (with Steven Roberts and Mike Savage, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Class (Polity, 2015, 2nd ed. 2024), Beyond Bourdieu: From Genetic Structuralism to Relational Phenomenology (Polity, 2016), Class in the New Millennium: The Structure, Homologies and Experience of the British Social Space (Routledge, 2017) and Bourdieu and After: A Guide to Relational Phenomenology (Routledge, 2020).
I'm currently working on a comparative analysis of class structures, or 'social spaces', across capitalist nations, with a particular focus on the US, Germany and Sweden. The results are to be published in a four-volume work on The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies, the first two volumes of which were published in 2020 and 2022 by Routledge. The third, focussing on themes of intersectionality and work-life balance, was published in 2024, and the final volume, documenting singular experiences of class, is in preparation.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
CASSPIN: Comparative Analysis of Social Spaces in Post-Industrial Nations
Principal Investigator
Description
This research has two aims. The first is to see if it is possible to think about socio-economic inequalities differently from how they are usually portrayed. We tend to think…Managing organisational unit
School of Sociology, Politics and International StudiesDates
01/05/2016 to 30/04/2021
The British Social Space
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Sociology, Politics and International StudiesDates
01/01/2012 to 01/01/2015
Ordinary Lives: Class, Reproduction and Everyday Practice in Contemporary Britain
Role
Co-Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Sociology, Politics and International StudiesDates
01/07/2010 to 01/07/2012
Thesis supervisions
Cultural Capital and the Choir
Supervisors
Social reproduction and higher education
Supervisors
Distinction in Poland. Testing elements of the Bourdieusian theory of class.
Supervisors
Ethics in the British Army
Supervisors
Precarious choices
Supervisors
Publications
Recent publications
25/02/2025Critical Notes on Racial Domination
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Field Theory, Role Theory and Role Conflict
Journal of Classical Sociology
Who Feels Looked Down Upon?
Sociological Inquiry
Multiplicity and Educational Reproduction
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Bourdieu and Educational Research
Bourdieu on Love
The Sociological Review