This PhD project analyses how upwardly mobile individuals, specifically within Catalan elites, deal with the complexities of inviting members of their new social group to one of the most intimate and identity-revealing places—their homes. Drawing from food studies and the sociology of elites, I seek to explore the limitations and ambiguities of social mobility, which have primarily been focused on social interactions occurring in public settings such as the workplace or the educational sphere. Although discomfort or anxiety might emerge in these contexts, these still leave some room for upwardly mobile individuals to soften their class status-markers. Food and drink play an especially significant role in these performative practices, acting as signifiers of distinction within the rich grammar of Catalan gastronomic culture. My project thus interrogates the sociological value of ‘upward’ class mobility through the lens of elite hosting, applying theoretically innovative models of status and distinction to the empirical investigation of elite-formation and identity in the representative microcosm of a global city like Barcelona.

The concept of social mobility is often praised in our current politico-intellectual landscape, and its pursuit stands as a central goal for governments across Europe and the U.S (Littler, 2018). Nonetheless, it has been thoroughly criticised for failing to address the problem of inequality (e.g.: Therborn, 2013). Recently, scholars such as Reay (2013, 2018) and Friedman (2014, 2016) have built on earlier studies on the ‘dissociative’ effect of social mobility (Sorokin 1959; Stacey, 1967) to challenge the hegemonic narrative (see: Goldthorpe, 1980, 2007; Chan, 2017) in yet another away. Building on Bourdieu’s (1978) notion of ‘habitus’—a conceptual tool used to describe the strong association between the cultural components of a person’s socio-economic background, their sense of self, and how others perceive them— they have explored the often negative and contested experiences of upwardly mobile individuals. My research proposal picks up where these critiques have left off, providing a thickly descriptive investigation of the complex and varied ways in which such ‘social dislocation’ plays out in a powerful cotemporary context.