School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Consumption, Catholicism, Secularisation, Elites, Culture and society in Latin America, Sociology of reading and writing, Books

My work in cultural sociology explores how cultural resources are mobilised in the search for justification and self-worth. I look at how individuals and groups draw upon (and also transform) cultural codes when constructing their life stories, how they produce meaningful accounts of their situation for themselves and others, and how these accounts are located within historical moments and wider cultural structures.

My first exploration of these themes was a study in the sociology of religion. In the monograph Wealth and Piety. The Catholicism of Chile’s business elite (2007, Santiago: Debate) (Riqueza y piedad. El catolicismo de la elite económica chilena) and several articles and book chapters, I examine the ethos of Chile’s economic elite. Critiquing simplistic versions of secularisation theory, this work traces the economic elite’s conservative reappropriation of Catholicism through discourse and ritual practice in the context of modernisation and pluralisation. (Cited in the press as one of the key texts for understanding the country's elite.) Later on, I turned the cultural conceptual lens upon a different phenomenon: the normative justifications for the consumption -and the refusal to consume- security products such as CCTV in England (in collaboration with Ian Loader and Ben Goold at the University of Oxford). The articles resulting from this research reveal how competing cultural representations of community, civil life and personal safety shape the individual and institutional choices between state and market provision of security as well as the justifications of these choices. The tensions between political ideals and market logics emerge also in a more recent cultural analysis of Chile’s civil sphere (in The Civil Sphere in Latin America, Cambridge University Press , 2018). In this research-based book chapter I explore the applicability of Alexander’s civil sphere theory to the case of the public’s reaction to a series of collusion scandals in the retail industry. The cultural codes mobilised in support of a range of protests, boycotts and legal actions indicate the situated instantiaton of some of the republican ideals at the core of the civil sphere.

I have also worked as a consultant for the World Bank on the cultural and normative basis of gendered relations within households and labour markets. On Norms and Agency. Conversations about Gender Equality with Women and Men in 20 Countries.

The Cultural Sociology of reading, writing and books

The Cultural Sociology of Reading. The Meanings of Reading and Books Across the World

In recent years I have been interested in the role of reading and books in the formation and expression of accounts of self and the justification of action. I explore the personal and political significance of reading and books in Latin America and the UK. This work is divided into three streams:

1. The aesthetic, ethical and existential dimensions of reading for pleasure (fiction and non-fiction)
2. The links between reading and critical capacity, utopian thought and political awakening and radicalisation
3. The process of self-justification in autobiographical writing among elites

Edinburgh Research Explorer

PhD students

Angelos Theocharis "Reading, talking and playing literature: Community literary practices of the UK Russian-speaking diaspora" (completed 2021) (with Lara Ryazanova-Clark)

David Anderson "Care, Stigma and the Creative Everyday of Urban Social Space in Soacha, Colombia" (completed 2020) (with Lilli Riga)

Damianos Tzoupis "Reading the classics. Reception and readers’ discourse: university students reading Plato's Cave" (with Liz Stanley)

Sicheng Long "The invention of talent: human capital valuation in talent assessment" (with Isabelle Darmon)

Carla Quiroz "Chilean autonomous feminists and their quest for radical change" (with Mary Holmes)

Janet Handley "“Sharpening the Moral Imagination”: Political Violence and the Ethics of Reading" (with Cassandra Falke, UiT)

Linjie Zhang "Bookstores in China.The Dawn and Decline of Public Space" (with Liz Stanley)

Topics interested in supervising

I would welcome proposals from research students with interests in the sociology of culture broadly understood, culture and society in Latin America, elites, religion, and the sociology of literature, books, reading and writing.

If you are interested in being supervised by M. Angélica Thumala Olave, please see the links below for more information:

• PhD in Sociology (opens in a new window)