Class, Culture and Meritocracy is an optional undergraduate module run by LSE Sociology. The course investigates the intersections between these three key concepts and is organised into three parts: class, class and culture, and class-culture-meritocracy. We will begin by introducing traditional and contemporary theories of social class and stratification. We then turn to the interrelation of class and culture (and gender and ethnicity) in Britain, the US, and other countries throughout the world. We will engage especially with the seminal work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his supposition that class boundaries are most clearly discernible from examining people’s cultural taste, with dominant classes using their preferences for legitimate culture as a means of signalling their superior social position. We will also look specifically at elites, and how they are implicated in how some forms of culture are assigned higher value in society. We will also examine the role of culture in staging forms of class resistance, particularly through the lens of politicised subcultures. And finally, the module will engage with the question of how class and classed cultures are implicated in contemporary debates about meritocracy. Here we will look at how the cultural dimensions of a person’s class background affects their ability to get ahead, and how this intersects with inequalities of gender and ethnicity. We will then look at how meritocracy is deployed to understand the burgeoning middle class in a number of Global South countries, particularly China, South African and India and how this is problematised by the lived experience of those experiencing this upward mobility. We will end by interrogating the ways in which ‘social mobility’ is increasingly used by politicians as a means of providing meritocratic legitimacy for the maintenance of inequality.