Grazia had spent five years in Birmingham when we met, in late 2016. She was reflecting on her work experiences in England, as a waitress and now events coordinator in a hotel, when she mentioned England's meritocratic ethos, which, she explains, rewards “hard work and competence”, “interest and sense of responsibility”. This contrasts with her perception of Italians, who she expects to favour nepotism (“who you know”) and to discriminate on the basis of “background”, school choice, “marks” and gendered manifestations of identity, like physical appearance and dress code. Grazia never worked for Italians in England, nor in Italy, as she moved abroad right after high school. Her discussion tells us something about meritocracy as an imaginary, and about the practical, embodied dimension of social imaginaries. Meritocracy, here, is both a common-sense assumption – a doxa that reproduces hierarchies of European coloniality (Chapter 1) – and a category of practice, which resonates with lived experience, potentially in contradictory ways. Indeed, Grazia's reference to school marks is at odds with the tenets of meritocratic ideology, which ‘discriminates’ against individuals precisely on the basis of educational achievement (Littler, 2017). Yet, as Bourdieu (1990: 103) reminds us, practical logic has little to do with the conceptual clarity of ‘academicism’. The former depends on pre-reflexive, fuzzy schemes of perception that social actors develop (and adjust) through their experience of different social fields. As I discuss later, Grazia here is adapting imaginaries of British meritocracy to past experiences of class and regional inequality in Italy.