2025-2026 Spring 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:

Luuc Brans (KU Leuven)

“Keeping Fashion’s Sustainable Transition Exclusive: Uncovering the Cultural Roots of Climate Polarization”

Abstract: In this talk, I present my international postdoctoral project on the cultural roots of affective climate polarization. Taking the environmentally destructive case of fashion, I uncover if and how climate advocates in cultural industries, which I call sustainable-cultural entrepreneurs, contribute to climate polarization. As cultural sociology demonstrates that cultural industries are dominated by white upper-middle classes with substantial cultural capital (Brook et al. 2025), and critical climate sociology warns their approach to sustainability is often moralizing (Anantharaman, 2024; Malier, 2024), my project investigates how influential sustainable-cultural entrepreneurs in fashion with substantial cultural and symbolic capital inadvertently exclude and moralize citizens with less capital and different approaches to sustainability. Bridging perspectives from cultural sociology (Baumann et al. 2025; Brook et al. 2025; Flemmen, 2025; Lamont et al. 2014; Scoville, 2025), climate sociology (Anantharaman, 2024; Huddart et al. 2025; Holgersen, 2025; Malier, 2024), and political science (Torcal and Harteveld, 2024), this project investigates (1) who, in terms of social, cultural and economic capital, set the frame of sustainability in fashion, (2) to what extent and how they exclude citizens with less capital and other views, (3) and how this may lead to affective horizontal polarization even beyond fashion. Combining content analysis, ethnographic observations, interviews and surveys, this project answers these questions in three key European fashion countries (Belgium, Sweden, and Italy) and the US with an emphasis on social media, a key site for the discursive construction of sustainability in fashion and beyond. Taken together, the project shows how the inequalities of cultural production exacerbate affective climate polarization.
 

Anna Skarpelis (CUNY Queens College)

“Racial Science on Trial: Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Objectivity, and the Politics of Nazi Science”

Abstract: What could possibly compel the Nazi Party to put one of its main ideological architects on trial? This paper considers the case of the phenomenologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss – Edmund Husserl’s student, and a man so dedicated to ethnographic research that he lived in Jordan under the assumed identity of a sheik, fully “going native” in brownface – who saw his illustrious career collapse when his estranged wife accused him of being too friendly with his Jewish collaborator Margarete Landé. Not only was the rampant antisemite and one of the main architects behind the Nazi idea of Nordic supremacy found to have possibly violated the Nuremberg Race Laws, but also to have developed his theories in collaboration with the Jewish philosopher Landé. This article studies the ensuing NSDAP (Nazi party) exclusion trial. Drawing for the first time on a previously “lost” file at the German Federal Archive, containing 446 pages of records on the trial, including a transcript of his interrogation by the party that tries to establish what was “good” and what was “bad” racial science, I show how bureaucrats and scientists constructed what they thought constituted “legitimate” forms of racial science. Although Clauss eventually was excluded from the party in 1943 for engaging in research practices considered non-objective, the party begs for his return in 1944, and he joins a group of scientists and journalists as part of the SS propaganda group “Kurt Eggers,” where he is tasked with studying “the enemy” from within. The paper takes how far right ideas about racial hierarchies clash with extant rules of appropriate research protocol, and how the contradictory push and pull of these impulses develop under conditions of total war.
 

Jane Choi (Harvard University, Department of Sociology)

"Classed Notions of Ethnic Authenticity in the Korean American Second Generation"

Abstract: How and why do individuals set certain criteria for “authentic” membership to an ethnoracial group, and how does the notion of “ethnic authenticity” compromise groupness? Taking the case of second-generation Korean Americans, this paper examines how class inequality complicates intragroup solidarity and sense of group position in the US. Drawing on 52 interviews with “persistently privileged” Korean Americans (upper-middle class individuals from upper-middle class backgrounds), Korean Americans who are “stuck at the bottom” (working-class individuals from working-class backgrounds), and upwardly mobile Korean Americans (upper-middle class individuals from working-class backgrounds), I find that respondents mobilize class resources to defend their “authentic Koreanness,” definitions of which diverge by class background. Persistently privileged Korean Americans invest economic capital into cultivating “authentic Koreanness” via transnational cultural capital: assets enabling mobility across the national contexts of Korea and the US. In contrast, working-class Korean Americans, who see themselves as “stuck at the bottom” of the US socioeconomic ladder and “stuck in place” in the US national context, define “authentic Koreanness” as constituted by bonds and obligations to local coethnic communities and other minoritized groups in the US. Upwardly mobile Korean Americans, who depart working-class backgrounds for elite colleges and workplaces, negotiate between these conflicting notions of “authentic Koreanness.” These classed differences in the understanding of what it means to be an “(in)authentic ethnic” in the second generation implicate the political groupness of Korean Americans and possibly other Asian Americans, illustrating how ethnoracial boundaries interact with class status to shape solidarity.