Unequal Speakability: Class, Elitism, and Inequality in Elite Universities

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 11: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race, Culture and Politics

Abstract

In the United States, social inequality is widely framed as a divide between “elites” and “ordinary people,” with elite universities cast as insulated institutions. Students within these settings recognise their privileged position and engage in critique, but this critique rarely draws on structural language such as class. Inequality is more often discussed through the moral vocabulary of elitism, which can coexist with the persistence of social hierarchy.

Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork and multiple rounds of in-depth interviews with twenty-five Asian international students at an elite private university, supplemented by interviews with domestic students, this paper examines how inequality becomes differentially speakable in everyday interaction. During recruitment and interviews, students readily engaged in discussions of elitism but were reluctant to discuss class explicitly. Class distinctions shaped perception, friendship boundaries, and intimate relationships, yet they were rarely articulated in public contexts.

The paper develops the concept of speakability to examine the conditions under which forms of social difference can be publicly expressed, privately negotiated, or left unspoken. It shows that different inequality vocabularies carry distinct interactional risks and moral consequences. Institutional practices produce awareness of privilege and shape how it can be discussed. As a result, inequality may be widely recognised yet unevenly articulated.

By tracing which forms of critique become possible and which remain constrained, the study shows that recognition of inequality does not automatically lead to its expression. Everyday interaction shapes how social hierarchy and inequality are understood and discussed in elite higher education.

Author

• Kun Liang, University of Cambridge