"Elites in Democratic Societies": In-Person Badger Talk in Madison, WI

Name: "Elites in Democratic Societies": In-Person Badger Talk in Madison, WI
Start: 2025-11-02T10:00:00-06:00
Location: Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society

Schedule

Sun, 02 Nov, 2025 at 10:00 am

UTC-06:00

Location

Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society | Madison, WI

This is a free, in-person talk hosted on November 2, 2025 at 10:00 AM by the Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society as a part of their Sunday service. No registration is required. The service can also be viewed via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86387565125
This talks makes the case for conceptualizing elites as upper status groups – that is, as groups whom others perceive as having superior value in one respect or another – and it shows how elites thus conceived are at odds with the principles of a democratic society.
Presenter Fabien Accominotti is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work studies status hierarchies and how they sustain inequality in society: he explores how we come to view different people as unequally valuable, and how this affects their outcomes. Accominotti has written on the emergence of cultural hierarchy as a dimension of social class in the United States, the construction of value beliefs in the art world, and processes of consecration that entrench faith in hierarchies of worthiness. In recent research he shows how, in a variety of social settings, the quantification of merit through ratings and scores fuels inequality in the rewards received by the winners and losers of meritocratic contests. Prior to joining UW-Madison, Accominotti received his PhD from Columbia University and taught at the London School of Economics.