Dr Simone Varriale

PhD (University of Warwick)

Pronouns: He/him
  • Senior Lecturer in Sociology

Before joining 天堂视频 in 2022, I was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick.

I have published extensively about class, migration, race, globalisation and cultural taste in the monographs Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations (BUP); Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction (Palgrave); and in journals like Sociology, The Sociological Review, Poetics, Current Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Cultural Sociology.

I sit on the editorial board of the journal Cultural Sociology and am Associate Editor for the journal European Societies. I was nominated Sociologist of the Month by the journal Current Sociology in 2020 and co-edited a Special Issue of the journal Poetics in 2019.

Simone has researched how class intersects with hierarchies of nation, ethnicity and race, particularly in the areas of intra-EU migration, cultural tastes and popular music consumption.

He has conducted qualitative, ethnographic and historical research on musical globalization in Italy and on post-2008 Italian emigration, developing conceptual and theoretical innovations in the fields of cultural sociology, music sociology, class analysis, race and ethnicity studies, and migration studies.

Simone is interested in a wide range of social theories. He has used Bourdieu’s class analysis, decolonial and postcolonial theory, intersectionality, actor-network theory and world-system theory (among others). He frequently ends up reading outside sociology (political economy, geography, and cultural and media studies).


Simone teaches on a range of modules at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities focused on Inequality, Globalization, Consumption, Social Theory and Research Methods.

He currently serves as a Sociology External Examiner (UG) for the University of Portsmouth.

Current Postgraduate Research Students

  • Iman Khan, "Decolonising the curriculum: Exploring anti-racist and intersectional pedagogies in higher education". Co-supervised with Dr Burçe Çelik and Dr Cristian Tileaga.
  • Elif Bas抬ak U虉rdem, 'Meritocratic Hubris and the Populist Surge: Unraveling Structural Dynamics in Liberal Democracies', Co-supervised with Dr Anthony Kevins
  • Haojie Fang, Niche digital blind date corner: finding partners with shared cultural interests in the general social media platform Douban in China, Co-supervised with Dr Katie Coveney

Monographs

  • 2023: Coloniality and Meritocracy
  • 2016: Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction: the Rise of Pop Music Criticism in Italy. Basingstoke: Palgrave
  • Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration. Bristol University Press.

Edited Volumes

  • 2019. Global Tastes: The Transnational Spread of non-Anglo-American Culture, Poetics, Vol. 57 (with Noa Lavie)

Journal Articles

  • 2023. How many intersections? Theoretical Synergy as a Rationale for Intersectional Biographical Analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 
  • 2023. The other Eurostars: lifestyle migration, class and race among vocationally trained Italians, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49(1): 332–349.
  • 2021. The coloniality of distinction: class, race and whiteness among post-crisis Italian migrants, The Sociological Review 69(2): 296–313
  • 2019. Unequal youth migrations: exploring the synchrony between social ageing and social mobility among post-crisis EU migrants, Sociology 53(6): 1160–1176
  • 2015. Cultural production and the morality of markets: popular music critics and the conversion of economic power into symbolic capital', Poetics 51, 1-16