#  2026-2027 Fall Seminar II 

 



    ![Seminar graphic](/sites/g/files/omnuum8346/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-11/CII%20Website%20Seminar%20Master%20Graphic%20%281%29_0.png?itok=_vnZNpU7) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 6, 2026** 

 04:00PM - 06:00PM EST 

 



 

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:**

### [**Joseph Kaplan Weinger**](https://inequality.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/joseph-kaplan-weigner) **(Harvard Academy)**

**“We Are the Law”: The Reign of the Petty Sovereign in the Palestinian Hinterlands”**

**Abstract:** *This paper, drawn from my book manuscript, examines the emergence of the settler outpost as a mechanism for producing and institutionalizing unequal access to land, mobility, security, and political membership in the contemporary occupied West Bank. Situating outposts within the longer arc of the Israeli settler–state compact, I trace how settlers adapted earlier repertoires of frontier settlement to exploit jurisdictional ambiguities and fragmented authority within the military occupation’s hybrid administrative system. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and ethnographic observation among settlers, soldiers, Civil Administration officials, and Palestinian residents, I identify two overlapping practices through which territorial inequality is produced. Territorial violence restricts Palestinian access to land through surveillance, patrols, movement constraints, threats, and physical coercion; vigilante violence targets the material conditions of everyday life through property destruction, agricultural sabotage, theft, assault, and sustained intimidation. These practices permit outpost settlers to act as “petty sovereigns,” exercising localized prerogative power while selectively drawing upon the coercive, legal, and infrastructural capacities of the state. The paper further examines how settlers render this unequal territorial order morally legitimate. Their accounts combine messianic expectation, biblical literalism, ethnonationalist exclusivism, a redemptive theology of land, and a Manichean political imaginary that casts Palestinians as existential outsiders. These commitments intersect with a frontier ethos of pioneering and sacrifice, claims to constitute Zionism’s contemporary vanguard, a securitarian rationale that frames expansion as preemptive defense, and narratives of settlement as the rectification of exilic dispossession. By showing how organizational arrangements and sacred narratives converge, the paper explains how territorial inclusion for one population is produced through the dispossession, insecurity, and exclusion of another.*

### [**Senthil Nathan (Weatherhead Scholars Program)**](https://inequality.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/senthil-nathan)

**“Dignity at Work: From Theory to Practice”**

**Abstract:** *Senthil will present the new venture that puts into practice the scale he developed over the spring to measure experienced dignity at work.*

### [**Dijana Mujkanović (Weatherhead Scholars Program)**](https://inequality.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/dijana-mujkanovic)

**“The Felt Order of Ethnic Division: Avoidance in Weak and Safety in Strong Cross-Ethnic Ties”**

**Abstract:** *How is ethnic division experienced by those who live within it, and how does it shape their relations with ethnic others? Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Israel, the paper traces both the visible and invisible orders of ethnic separation. Beyond physical and institutional distance, it identifies the felt order of ethnic division, a diffuse sense of separation that endures even when forming cross-ethnic ties is structurally possible. These conditions make cross-ethnic ties scarce and give them heightened significance, which motivates ordinary people to protect them once formed. Whereas weak ties are protected by avoiding sensitive topics, strong ties provide a safe space where difficult conversations can be openly broached. These protective strategies, albeit unochestrated, constitute small acts of everyday peace that defy elite and group-level divisions.*



 

 



 

 

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