Audio (5:27)
Transcript (slighly ammended)
Hello everyone, I’m Adrian Leguina, the Principal Investigator for the British Academy Talent Development Award “A new paradigm of quantitative intersectional analysis using geometric data analysis” or GQIA. What I want to do here is to tell you what this project is about in simple words.
My background is in statistics and sociology. And in particular, my research is part of something called Bourdieusian class analysis, which is interested in the intersection of the economic cultural and social dimensions of class inequality. There we use a family of techniques called geometric data analysis (GDA) which is what we traditionally used to construct the social space, a multidimensional representation of class inequalities, which represents positions within a social structure in more general terms. So, my discomfort with this type of analysis [or to be more precise, critique] is that we rarely say something about ethnicity and gender and many other social divisions.
So, methodologically, this is a problem, because the assumption that many scholars in the field make is that the social space, cultural, economic, social and symbolic capital, are a reflection of all of our conditions of existence, including ethnicity, gender and so on. My problem is I’m not fully convinced by that because when I see or when I’ve done myself this type of analysis, we… [are not acknowledging that] many other relevant social divisions impact our social positions within social structures.
My idea is to use techniques and some of the insight from class analysis alongside intersectional analysis, in particular the big wealth of knowledge that hasn’t been necessarily translated, in my view, accurately into quantitative methods. To understand how multiple intersecting social divisions are interrelated, the project involves learning about the use of statistics for intersectional analysis and understanding the foundations of intersectionality and the connections between [intersectionality] and Bourdieusian class analysis to come up with something that should hopefully provide a more accurate and a quite rich representation of intersectionality in the UK.
What I’m doing at the moment is to explore the literature alongside existing datasets that contain rich information, not only about social class, but also about ethnicity and gender, and build this multidimensional representation of intersecting inequalities by making use of advanced techniques of geometric data analysis. For example, one is called multiple factor analysis. So the goal of the project is to provide a space for interdisciplinary dialogue, which has the ambition of becoming a new way of studying inequalities.
The award has a developmental and dissemination strategy which includes multiple strands, this blog being one of them, the production of audiovisual material targeted to students, researchers and anyone interested in these issues and the organization of a workshop alongside other academic outputs.
Welcome everyone and please do get in touch if this is something that is of your interest and please stay updated on the progress in this blog.