Culture, Class, Connection: Bridging Debates on Contemporary Inequality in the UK and Japan

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This proposal will build a network of scholarship between the UK and Japan with a long-term focus on the development of a shared understanding of social class and how it might best be used as a tool to address one of the greatest challenges to sustainable development the world faces today: rising social and economic inequality. We are aware of the role of geography here, for whilst north-south income inequalities may be easing at the global scale due to the rapid growth of economies like those of China and India, [F1], within both countries it is clear that such uplifts are highly uneven [F2;F3]. Likewise, in advanced economies like the UK, USA and Japan, we have long been aware of socio-economic inequalities between regions, but only now are we being faced with the profound political consequences of them. In the first instance the proposal provides the means to bring together academics working on these issues in the UK and Japan in the Core team of PI (Cunningham) and CO-Is (Majima, Miles, Savage and Slater). It will then provide the resources for a programme of meetings in different parts of Japan and the UK that will allow the opportunity for us to engage a much wider body of scholars to exchange knowledge on different aspects of class structure and identity today. We will hold five exchange workshops across two periods in early-2019 and early-2020. Each will provide the opportunity for the involvement of one prominent keynote of international stature from a third country and five national thematic specialists, in addition to a wider open audience of participants. Our themes and leaders are: (i) Class, inequality and the lifecourse (Slater); (ii) Consumption and histories of class formation - (Majima); (iii) Cultural value, cultural practice, class and inequality - (Miles); (iv) Class and spatial divisions of inequality - (Cunningham); (v) Globalising debates on class and inequality - (Savage). Bringing together leading scholars of social class and inequality around these themes will provide the basis for the development of a robust and extensive research network between the two countries. This network will act to bridge the current divide identified by the ESRC between academics working in these fields, leading to dynamic new research collaborations. A specific goal is to use this connectivity funding as a launchpad for a large-scale comparative investigation of social class in Japan and the UK today, using survey, interview and ethnographic methods, that follows on from the GBCS project and its best-selling monograph, 'Social Class in the 21st Century'. The success of the GBCS project model as a starting framework for this collaboration indicates that there is very strong potential to produce new research findings that will be of keen interest not only to the academic community but also to the general public, think tanks, policymakers and the private sector. The findings will also be relevant to those working in the charitable and third sectors, dealing with issues of everyday social exclusion. We have assembled a team with a diverse skillset and experience base, ranging from Co-Is in both the UK and Japan with global reputations in the field of culture, stratification and identity to a PI who is an ECR with a developing international profile in contemporary and historic inequality. This is a truly inter-disciplinary group, spanning geography, sociology, history and anthropology. Its members have expertise in working with and across a range of methodologies, from geographical information systems and statistics to archival, interview and ethnographic methods. In addition to the network we intend to build in this proposal, we can also draw on professional webs which span all continents, with the potential to push the reach of this proposal well beyond the Japan-UK axis.