2025-2026 Fall Seminar III

The Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion draws on expertise from across disciplines to gain international and comparative perspectives on how to extend cultural membership to the greatest number in society, to gain a better understanding of the social and cultural processes behind recognition gaps, and to determine how social scientists and policy makers can better respond to help make societies more inclusive. 

Advanced industrial societies have become increasingly characterized by two trends: growing inequality and an increasing recognition gap. As the distribution of wealth and income have grown more unequal, a growing number of groups are making claims for recognition as the poor, workers, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and various ethnoracial and religious minority groups experience stigmatization. This double tension will serve as a fruitful point of entry for future multidisciplinary inquiries into the conditions for collective well-being.

A major challenge for contemporary societies is to extend cultural membership to the greatest number. Thus we need to gain a better understanding of the social and cultural processes behind recognition gaps, and determine how social scientists and policy makers can better respond to help make societies more inclusive. 

This seminar brings together cluster affiliates and colleagues across departments to share their published and in-progress work in an effort to find responses to the timely questions related to inequality and the recognition gap. For more information, please check the seminar’s upcoming events. 

Presenters:

Guy Priver (Harvard University)

“Urban Planning and the Erasure of Difference: Religion, Law, and Expertise in a Contested City”

Abstract: In recent decades, Jerusalem has undergone radical state-led and privately coordinated “urban renewal” aimed at Judaizing the city, provoking recurrent legal objections from religious minority communities seeking to preserve their heritage and sacred spaces. Drawing on court materials including archival records and expert submissions, and our own engagement and interviews with communities contesting development projects, we examine three emblematic cases: opposition to the construction of a museum on top of an old Muslim cemetery; the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s effort to block transfers of properties to a Jewish National Fund subsidiary; and the Karaite community’s objection to a gondola route over its cemetery. Focusing on the role of court-admitted expertise on religion, culture, and urban planning, we trace how religious claims are translated into technocratic and legal-rational frameworks that produce fungibility, flattening minority cultural values and creating distorted equivalences between incommensurable commitments. We argue that this process systematically disadvantages minority communities and reveals the limits of legal recourse, which promises recognition, under a planning regime that privileges state and nationalist objectives while presenting itself as guided by neutral and dispassionate expertise. This paper forms part of a larger work in progress with Prof. Erica Lynn Weiss.  

Nicolas Duvoux (University Paris 8)

“Time and Subjective Inequality: Bridging the Gap between Economy and Sociology”

Abstract: Subjective inequality often refers to self-perceptions shaped by reference groups. Economists and sociologists have shown that such perceptions frequently diverge from objective socio-economic realities, sometimes providing a distorted picture of society and individuals’ positions within it. In this presentation, I take a different route by challenging the common assumption in social science that incorporating subjectivity conflicts with approaches grounded in the material conditions of existence. I argue instead that subjective perceptions of one’s future can illuminate class and inequality, revealing how material conditions—such as wealth, income, and power—are expressed through subjective indicators.

To grasp the full extent of social inequality, we must consider how economic opportunities feel. Subjectivity, understood as temporally situated and intertwined with material life conditions, becomes a key lens for apprehending social constraints. In the post-Piketty era of inequality research, this perspective allows us to approach inequality multidimensionally, redefining economic structures through the prism of subjective anticipations and future orientations. Drawing on three empirical case studies that combine qualitative and quantitative methods, the presentation revisits and expands upon arguments in Bourdieu’s early, lesser-known works. It demonstrates how feelings of security and insecurity function as critical markers of class inequality.