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Bourdieu in a Digitalised and Financialised World
Steven Threadgold (University of Newcastle)

BSA Bourdieu Study Group
Mid Term International Conference
Rising Complexities in Education: Opportunities and Inequalities
3-5 September 2025, Vienna

Bourdieusian sociology has analysed the importance of cultural production and consumption practices in everyday life and its relations and resistances to the functions of late capitalism. But what if cultural practices and tastes are now embedded in digital social inequalities that extend beyond how cultural capital can theorises symbolic hierarchies? Datafication and financialisation have changed the world a great deal since Bourdieu’s death in 2002. Rentier capitalism and the asset economy have further entrenched the economic capital aspects of class domination. Cultural capitals still lubricate successful education transitions, but these need to be buttressed even more today by financial support for gap years and internships and social capital to access the right networks. The culture and creative industries are particularly exclusionary with obvious ramifications for who gets to make the world in their own image via art, media, design, and popular culture. This presentation will draw upon recent research to speculate what the digitalisation and financialisation of everyday life means for Bourdieusian inspired sociological analysis. For instance, if music tastes are enrolled as data points for predictive AI to make judgements about financial, insurance and housing access, our tastes and affinities become automated inequalities that include or exclude in ways that we will not even feel while it is happening and only know about once it is too late. This has ramifications for understanding the dissemination of symbolic violence where it happens virtually via the digital, as much as emotionally via how we currently understand the transmission of affects. Bourdieu showed us how ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’, but what if the classifier is a machine that uses vaguely homologous data proxies for humans that can only make speculative predictions and dehumanise everyday relations?