2025-2026 Spring Seminar VI

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:

Meera Choi (Weatherhead Scholars Program)

“When Gender Politics Reorganizes Intimacy: The Case of Heterosexual Refusal in South Korea”

Abstract: Why do people collectively withdraw from dominant forms of intimate life, and how does such withdrawal become durable without formal movement organization? This paper examines heterosexual refusal in South Korea—women’s growing withdrawal from dating, sex, marriage, and childbearing—to argue that family change cannot be understood through economic precarity, gender-role mismatch, or demographic “preference drift” alone. Drawing on 130 life-history interviews with South Korean women in their twenties and thirties, I show that heterosexual refusal is not merely an aggregation of private choices but a collectively produced political formation. Findings show that heterosexual refusal becomes durable through three linked processes: women encounter and circulate feminist discourse on gender and sexuality through digital infrastructures; they turn these ideas into action through personal networks and relational support; and they stabilize refusal by building alternative forms of intimacy and care beyond marriage. The paper contributes to the sociology of sexuality by treating heterosexuality as a contested institution, to the study of gender politics by reconceptualizing it as a multi-level struggle over the organization and legitimacy of gendered relations beyond formal politics, and to social movement scholarship by showing how collective transformations in intimate life emerge through dispersed, non-movement forms of action.
 

Dominik Bartmański (Weatherhead Scholars Program)

“What Was Blocked and Unlocked Due to Lockdown Copresence in Space and the Unlocking of the Spatial Subconscious”

Abstract: Sociology has long underestimated the role of spatiality in shaping and understanding human sociality and togetherness. Michele Lamont suggests that the field has yet to fully address both the epistemological problem of how human togetherness can be studied, and the ontological one of what social togetherness consists of. This paper argues that both gaps are related to the fortgetfulness of space in social theory and can be addressed through phenomenologically informed, spatially-focused ethnographies. Specifically, studying cases in which interaction ritual chains were radically broken, limited or reconfigured by closure of shared physical settings can reveal some crucial existential functions of human co-presence in space that are otherwise taken for granted. Insofar as such a closure throws into relief the importance of spatial co-presence for human mental health and triggers public critiques, one can provisionally refer to resulting debates as “unlocking” of the spatial subconscious. The focus on ‘lockdown’ rather than on the ‘pandemic’ serves as a paradigmatic critical case for this paper, reframed literally as ‘spatial distancing’ rather than more abstract 'social distancing.' The hard closure of public spaces disrupted interactional orders, altered temporal structures and subjective experience thereof, and exacerbated effects of many inter-related forms of social inequality. Jointly, these disruptions meant what I call ‘spatio-cultural deprivation’. At the same time, lockdowns in European countries such as Germany were exercises of what James Scott called “seeing like a state” that explicitly prioritized what is ‘relevant for the system’ over the practice and experiential values of the ‘lifeworld’ and which further disclosed a host of fateful blind spots regarding space.

Miriam Gleckman-Krut (Harvard University)

“The Rainbow Nation and the Gays it Excludes”