2026-2027 Fall 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:

Myra Marx Ferree (Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies)

“Changing the Terrain of Gendered Partisanship"

Abstract: In the time of democratic backsliding that appears to characterize the early 21st century, the discursive opportunity structure seems to have suddenly shifted to simultaneously support more claims for both anti-elite populism and anti-democratic autocracy. Many assume that the “losers of globalization” economically or geographically located in hard-hit places form the core of this political shift.  But this has also been a type of politics disproportionately embraced by men, and strongly associated with attacks on gender equality and on women. How do gendered discourses of parties shape the use of such misogynistic frames and what is the role of  the politics of reproduction (sexuality, biological reproduction, marriage, migration, national and ecological survival concerns) in gendering the reception of such appeals?

Rouven Symank (Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies)

Title and Abstract TBD

Mari Sanchez (Harvard University, Department of Sociology)

Title and Abstract TBD