2025-2026 Spring Seminar I

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:

Leela Khanna (Weatherhead Scholars Program)

“The Pursuit of Merit: Why Young Men are Joining the Hindu Nationalist Movement”

Abstract: The decade-long success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi has infused India’s polity with a novel authoritarian populist spirit. Indications of this populism are evident in the rapidly transforming membership base of the right-wing organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS). For example, RSS’s student wing in Pune city, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), has transformed from a small, urban upper caste group into the largest, most caste diverse organization in the state. This diversity is attributed to the increasing participation of rural lower caste male students in the ABVP. According to my interlocutors – university faculty, local activists, and students – the logics of this emerging demographic of men was puzzling. The ABVP has a reputation of posturing against affirmative action, the very policy contributing to lower caste men accessing Pune’s universities. Why would the very students this state project of inclusion was intended for, join an organization that questioned these policies? By centering the curious theoretical and methodological challenges that arose as I attempted to ethnographically study this question, I explicate why rural lower caste men are so keen to become the students of Hindu nationalism.

Livio Silva-Muller (Harvard Academy)

“Who deserves which redistribution? Merits, Taxes and Transfers among the Brazilian and South African Elite”

Livio Silva-Muller ( Harvard University),

Graziella Moraes Silva (Geneva Graduate Institute),

Matias López (Diego Portales).

Abstract: Scholars have argued that elites mobilize meritocratic ideals to highlight their own deservingness as well as the undeservingness of the poor, thus ultimately justifying inequalities and opposing redistribution. This study revisits the idea that these two notions of merit necessarily go together. Instead, we argue that thinking about self-worth and thinking about the worth of others constitute different themes in elites’ views about meritocracy, with varied implications for redistributive policies such as taxation or direct transfers. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa, we examine whose merit matters for which types of redistribution. We find that although elites in both countries are more likely to congratulate themselves for hard work than to disqualify the poor, it is the latter that explains their attitudes toward transferring income to the poor. The two countries diverge in their support for taxation: in Brazil, ideas about elite merit are associated with rejecting taxation policies, though these ideas are confounded with ideology; in South Africa, only race explains support for taxation policies. We discuss this divergence in light of Brazil’s and South Africa’s political cultures and conclude that the relationship between meritocracy and support for redistribution among elites is contingent on whose merit is considered (that of the poor or that of the rich) as well as on national repertoires.

Clayton Covington (Harvard University, Department of Sociology)

“The Afterlives of Crisis: Narrative, Coloniality, and LGBTQ Advocacy in Jamaica”

Abstract: In 2006, Time magazine declared Jamaica “the most homophobic place on earth.” In the years since, numerous journalists, advocates, and foreign officials have reproduced this claim, citing colonial-era sodomy laws and popular homophobic discourse as evidence of Jamaica’s exceptional hostility toward LGBTQ people. But was this “crisis” framing helpful to LGBTQ Jamaicans and the organizations that serve their interests? Drawing on archival research in Jamaican newspapers and LGBTQ organizational publications, in addition to in-depth interviews with local advocates, I find that this “crisis” framing powerfully shaped the strategies and sustainability of LGBTQ advocacy in Jamaica. LGBTQ advocacy organizations largely reject the global narrative of “exceptional homophobia” because it created backlash that threatened their local legitimacy, and they mobilize data to publicly refute and reframe the claim. Yet publicly rejecting this narrative is not always possible or advantageous, particularly given organizational reliance on international donors. As a result, a crisis narrative that once mobilized global attention and aid could become a durable barrier to continued support. These dynamics demonstrate how naming any phenomenon a crisis can entrench the inequality of colonial hierarchies long after the “crisis” moment has passed. By theorizing the afterlives of crisis, this study extends feminist and sociological accounts of crisis and social movements to show how external narratives of suffering become enduring constraints on local organizing.