Projekt

Daten zum Projekt

WealthTalks: The (re-)production of wealth inequality in everyday talk

Initiative: Perspektiven auf Reichtum: (Aus-)Wirkungen von Reichtum
Bewilligung: 03.04.2023
Laufzeit: 4 Jahre

Projektinformationen

The project offers a novel perspective on the production and reproduction of wealth by examining how ordinary citizens discuss wealth and inequality in everyday conversations. The project is based on the assumption that everyday talk reproduces grand narratives of meritocracy and is, thus, prone to make the accumulation of wealth seem desirable and wealth inequality unavoidable. The project describes the prevalence, topics, frames, and sequences of arguments of wealth and inequality in online and offline conversations in five countries: Botswana, Brazil, South Africa, Germany and the US. Subsequently, the project examines how the form and content of these conversations vary across individuals, situations, and the larger social context. The countries under study allow it to study how conversations on wealth and inequality differ between the Global South and Global North, and vary with the salience of race in the national discourse on wealth inequality. In the final step, the project tests how the nature, form, and sequence of conversations influence people's perceptions of inequality and their attitudes toward wealth redistribution. WealthTalks answers its research questions through two empirical lanes. First, the project will produce a large corpus of transcripts of everyday conversations on wealth and inequality in the five countries. This corpus will comprise data from social media debates, deliberative focus groups, and moderated dialogues that will be run in public places. These data will allow it to study everyday talk as it occurs in natural settings and as it is conditioned by the situational context. Drawing on the research insights so generated, iterative rounds of online experiments will subsequently test how varying frames and argument sequences affect people's beliefs and attitudes about wealth inequality and redistribution.

Projektbeteiligte