The understandings and responses to inequality of white working- class men in the UK

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This research proposes to examine the strategies white working class-men use to navigate"senses of inequality" (Bottero 2019)., examining how white working-class men understandand respond to inequalities - but also relative advantage - in relation to their racial, genderedand classed position.This question is of particular relevance in a political landscape that includes the aftermath ofBrexit and the Trump presidency, the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matters movement,and a middle-class discourse surrounding white working-class men which frames them as arepository for racism and misogyny and the enemy of equality and progress (Webb 2019).The research proposal does not deny that white working-class men can be mobilized by right-wing rhetoric regarding nation, race and hegemonic masculinity, but also acknowledges thatthis mobilization is contested (Virdee 2014). Such mobilization is impacted by the attitudes,understandings and narratives surrounding inequality and redistribution, and "are notstraightforwardly related to 'objective' levels of inequality" (Bottero 2019: 40). This raises an important under-researched question: how do white working-class member understand theirrelative class, gender and race advantage/disadvantage, and how does this shape their broaderunderstandings of inequality?The project aims to examine how contemporary white British working-class men interpretand contest cultural representations of their classed, gendered and racialised positions;explore how they contest processes of inequality legitimisation, and will examine how race,gender and class intersect in their construction of attitudes and narratives around socialinequality.