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

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 understand
and respond to inequalities - but also relative advantage - in relation to their racial, gendered
and classed position.
This question is of particular relevance in a political landscape that includes the aftermath of
Brexit 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 a
repository 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 that
this mobilization is contested (Virdee 2014). Such mobilization is impacted by the attitudes,
understandings and narratives surrounding inequality and redistribution, and "are not
straightforwardly related to 'objective' levels of inequality" (Bottero 2019: 40). This raises an important under-researched question: how do white working-class member understand their
relative class, gender and race advantage/disadvantage, and how does this shape their broader
understandings of inequality?
The project aims to examine how contemporary white British working-class men interpret
and 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 social
inequality.