# 2024 Alumni Conference June 06, 2024 A vibrant and engaged intellectual community is the foundation for collaboration. Active engagement of alumni and current affiliates in the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion, now in its fifth year, has proven to be the backbone of this community. From near and far, alumni across multiple cohorts continually attend seminars and special events, a testament to the lasting effect that the cluster has. On Saturday, February 10, 2024, current and past affiliates gathered on the fifteenth floor of William James Hall and on Zoom for the 2024 Alumni Conference. Cluster Chair Michèle Lamont invited over a dozen alumni to present recent papers on the topics of inequality and inclusion. Demonstrating their dedication to the cluster, alumni dialed in from all over, even staying up until midnight in their local time zones to interact with others in the community. The conference was organized around four major themes: taming unpredictability, meritocracy and inequality, classifying outsiders–immigrants and others, and boundary management. As experts in the study of social and cultural processes driving inequality and exclusion, recognition gaps, migration, and many other subfields of social science inquiry, the presenters offered recent and forthcoming works that seek to understand widespread marginalization of outsiders. Papers ranged from the precarity of platform work to asylum seekers under the Trump presidency to the interaction between collective memory and recognition. We want to extend our gratitude to all the participants of the Alumni Conference for their respective contributions. This includes panel chairs [Luuc Brans ](https://www.luucbrans.eu/)(KU Leuven), ​​[Luca Carbone](https://www.lucacarbone.com/) (KU Leuven), [Riva Kastoryano](https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/en/users/rivakastoryano) (National Center for Scientific Research and Sciences Po, Paris) [Lorenza Antonucci ](https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/social-policy/antonucci-lorenza.aspx)(University of Birmingham), and [Maha Shehade Switat](https://wcfia.harvard.edu/maha-shehade-switat) (Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard) and presenters [Elena Ayala-Hurtado](https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/elena-ayala-hurtado) (Harvard University), [Yuval Feinstein](https://sites.google.com/hevra.haifa.ac.il/feinstein/home) (University of Haifa) and coauthor [Ameer Fakhoury](https://polonsky.vanleer.org.il/dr-ameer-fakhoury/) (Polonsky Academy, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), [Yossi Harpaz](https://www.yossiharpaz.org/) (Tel-Aviv University), [Matias López](https://matiaslopezuy.wixsite.com/matiaslopez) (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva), [Jonathan Mijs](https://www.jonathanmijs.com/about) (Boston University), [Derek Robey](https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/derek-j-robey) (Harvard University), [Ioana Sendroiu](https://www.ioanasendroiu.com/) (University of Hong Kong), [Talia Shiff](https://taliashiff.com/) (Tel-Aviv University), [Anna Skarpelis](https://www.skarpelis.com/) (CUNY, Queens College), [Elke Winter](https://elkewinter.com/) (University of Ottawa), and [Gökce Yurdakul](https://sites.google.com/view/gokceyurdakul/home?authuser=0) (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). We look forward to following their work in the years ahead and to their future contributions to the cluster. Photo: Cluster alumnus Derek Robey presenting his paper. See also:- [ Announcements ](/news/announcements) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)