Theorising Cultures of Equality is the first volume to be released in the GRACE Project, a cutting-edge series of books drawing upon research conducted in the Genders and Cultures of Equality in Europe Project. Previous scholarly work focuses on European gender equality policies, their social consequences and political underpinnings. The aim of this book is to investigate and theorise an under-examined aspect of those processes, namely the production of cultures of equality that underpin, enable and constrain those changing policy and legislative frameworks. The chapters adopt a critical perspective that seeks to provincialise the taken for granted assumptions of equalities discourses through which claims to Europeanness are frequently framed. In doing so they develop an approach that understands culture as neither normative frameworks nor ways of representing the world, but more fundamentally as the process through which people create and contest the social worlds they inhabit.

With European contributions from cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of Gender Studies and English, Theorising Cultures of Equality will be of use to those involved in the anthropology and sociology of gender studies.