Jo Littler

Jo Littler is a sociologist of culture, media and politics whose work explains inequalities and social change. She is known in particular for her work on meritocracy, being the author of Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (2018).

Recent work has focused on DEI wars, class, social mobility, gender and care, including via a Leverhulme research grant for a project on ‘Ideologies of Inequality’.

She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Trustee of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, incoming President of the Association for Cultural Studies and one of the judges of the Stuart Hall Foundation Essay Prize.

She has given over 100 invited talks and keynotes and regularly speaks at a wide range of public events. Besides academic conferences, these have included, for example, an APPG group on social mobility in Parliament, The Equality Trust, the Canadian Worldviews Annual Lecture, the national UCU conference, gallery talks (South London, Whitworth), podcast appearances and talks to cultural practitioners at the Barbican and the Young Vic.

Her work has received media coverage across a range of outlets including ABC Radio Australia, US National Public Radio, The Guardian, Il Manifesto and El País.

Her books include The Moralising Corporation: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Carewashing (co-edited with Joel Bakan and Andreas Chatzidakis, 2026); Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and the Political (2023); The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (2020) with The Care Collective; Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (2018); Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism, with Sam Binkley (2011); Radical Consumption? Shopping For Change in Contemporary Culture (2008); and The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’, with Roshi Naidoo (2005).

She was a co-editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies for ten years and is part of the editorial collective of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture.