2025-2026 Fall Seminar IV

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:

Gianluca Busilacchi (Weatherhead Scholars Program)

“Conditionality, Stigma, and Non-Take-Up: Rethinking Social Assistance Through a Mechanism-Based Lens”

Abstract: In recent years, minimum income schemes across Europe have increasingly incorporated activation requirements and conditionality. While designed to strengthen incentives and align benefits with labour market participation, these developments have also altered the social protection mechanism itself. This paper examines how conditionality reshapes the interplay between public responsibility, public capacity, and individual conversion factors. We argue that more stringent obligations, when misaligned with actual opportunities and institutional capacity, foster stigma and erode beneficiaries’ perception of entitlement. This not only contracts social rights at the normative level but also contributes to behavioural outcomes such as non-take-up of benefits. The article proposes an empirical strategy to trace these mechanisms, showing how the macro-level design of social assistance interacts with micro-level experiences and ultimately shapes realised protection. By linking conditionality, stigma, and non-take-up, we seek to clarify under what conditions social assistance risks moving from a protective to an exclusionary trajectory, and how this dynamic can inform the broader debate on the future of social investment and social protection paradigms.

Jarmo Kallunki (Visiting Scholar, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies)

“Experiences of Political Recognition among Working-Class Youth in Finland”

Abstract: Drawing from sociology of recognition, this paper analyzes how Finnish working-class youth construct their identities and articulate their political concerns, and how they experience themselves and their political concerns being recognized by Finnish politicians and political structures more broadly. This paper comes from the project in Tampere, Finland, that has adapted the Recognition through Politics project, led by Professor Michèle Lamont, to the Finnish context. Data comprises 40 semi-structured interviews, collected in Spring 2025, with 18–30-years-old, non-university educated individuals working in blue-collar or low-level white-collar occupations who live in Tampere region, Finland. The interviewee selection and interview schedule were matched with those of the Recognition through Politics project. This manuscript lays grounds for the first article based on this Finnish data, and the manuscript will present preliminary findings to be discussed at the seminar.

Laura Tanguay (Weatherhead Scholars Program)

"Extractivism, Consent, and the Politics of Nuclear Waste in Canada"

Abstract: This working paper critically examines the political and social processes through which consent is negotiated, and how these processes shape the framing of risk as something that can be knowable and governable. Drawing on empirical data from my dissertation, I focus on the intersection of extractivism and nuclear waste, exploring how these issues are situated within broader sociopolitical and economic systems. The analysis engages Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power and Michèle Lamont’s notion of symbolic boundaries to reveal how certain actors and institutions acquire and embody the authority to define legitimate knowledge, acceptable risk, and appropriate forms of participation. In doing so, it interrogates how policies aimed at obtaining consent or facilitating consultation may fragment neighbouring communities by constructing boundaries around who is recognized as a legitimate participant in decision-making processes. Central to this examination are First Nation rights, Indigenous knowledge systems, and Anishinaabe legal frameworks that challenge dominant Western epistemologies of both risk and consent. By situating these dynamics within the frameworks of extractivism and environmental justice, this paper reveals how symbolic power and boundary-making practices naturalize particular forms of governance while marginalizing contestation through process, and how Indigenous and community-based knowledge practices work to unsettle these hierarchies.