Some have called me a Bourdieu fanatic; I suspect they simply have not yet taken Bourdieu seriously enough.
I am a fourth-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Toronto. My primary research lies at the intersection of cultural sociology, field theory, and nationalism. I study cultural stratification as a relational process, with particular attention to how national dispositions, cultural capital, and field position shape unequal trajectories within post-imperial societies.
My main empirical focus is Estonia, where I analyze how nationalism operates as a structuring principle of social space, producing hierarchies through education, language, and everyday practices rather than through explicit ideological mobilization alone.
Beyond this core agenda, I maintain several complementary research projects. These include work on crime and prosecution, examining how legal and prosecutorial fields reconfigure authority and legitimacy; historical-sociological research on policing during moments of political rupture, such as the treatment of Tsarist officials after the Russian Revolution and the policing of Algerians in France during the Algerian War; and projects in demography that connect population dynamics to cultural and institutional differentiation.
Across these domains, my approach remains consistently relational and field-theoretic, aimed at understanding how power, culture, and national belonging are produced and reproduced through structured social spaces.
Henry, Léo. 2025. “Reproducing National Distinction: How Cultural Capital Shapes Estonia’s Russian School Field”, Nations and Nationalism, 2025, **https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.70038**
Email: [email protected]