Riff capital: Towards a new theory of value among popular music learners

This article introduces and develops the theoretical concept of riff capital. It posits riff capital as a specific form of cultural capital that circulates among children and young people learning popular music, transmitted within educational spaces but largely separate from adult educators and formal and non-formal pedagogical processes. Grounded in an ethnographic case study of a private-sector popular music education organization in Dublin, Ireland, this article defines riff capital vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s cultural capital – an influential sociological concept that describes the largely invisible accumulation of cultural skills and knowledge, which is enabled by access to economic capital (i.e. money), but whose links to economic capital are often obscured. This article argues that riff capital is classed, gendered and racialized, examining the ways in which inequalities in class, gender, race, ethnicity and migrant background – and their complex intersections – interact with and shape the workings of riff capital accumulation, circulation and deployment.