Benjamin Brundu-Gonzalez

Benjamin Brundu-Gonzalez is a Visiting Fellow in Sociology at the London School of Economics and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Durham University, where he is a member of the Higher Education and Social Inequalities research group.

Key expertise: Inequality, Education, Evaluation, Mixed Methods.

Benjamin researches how higher education produces inequalities, as well as how those inequalities are lived and understood by students themselves. He works with both quantitative and qualitative methods, in a tradition shaped by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

His doctoral thesis focused on undergraduate students at an elite French university. Drawing on original surveys and administrative data, the study traced who gains access to this prestigious institution, who succeeds within it, and how students come to see themselves and others as deserving or not. The analyses uncovered persistent class and gender gaps in grades and progression as well as in relationships with peers and faculty. They also found that students recognised the unfairness of educational competition while still treating achievement as a legitimate measure of worth. Together these findings contribute to debates on how elite education generates inequalities, and to scholarship on how such inequalities are legitimised.

Benjamin is an award-winning educator with seven years of teaching experience at undergraduate and postgraduate level across five universities. Two principles organise his teaching. The first is explicit pedagogy: making the expectations of university study visible rather than assuming students already share them. The second is relational pedagogy, which treats teaching as a partnership and works to make students comfortable asking for help. He gives particular thought to making sociology vivid, teaching with film and with examples drawn from everyday life, and to showing students what it lets them do in their own lives, as citizens and as future professionals.

Benjamin works to create welcoming and productive academic spaces, and to bring research to bear on how universities operate. In 2022 he co-organised the Bourdieu, Work and Inequalities conference, a free and hybrid event that drew participants from every continent. He has also contributed to projects with the LSE Eden Centre for Education Enhancement and the Teaching Quality Assurance and Review Office aimed at better understanding the learning experience at LSE, including commissioned reports on teaching and studying during the pandemic and on the working conditions of graduate teaching assistants.