Global Inequality and Local Conceptions of the Future

Summer Semester 2021

Aims of the Course

In the social sciences, with few exceptions, empirical research either focusses on patterns of social inequality within a country or on patterns of social inequality between countries, with the exception of historical sociology, global sociology and international migration research which have increasingly started to focus on intersectionality and the entanglements of social inequality and migration between countries. Regardless, most of this research still focusses on a few countries of the Global North (e.g. the US, Western Europe and China) and the perspective of these entanglements from the receiving country, i.e. typical research questions would be how a country of immigration like the US or Germany would perceive which types of immigrants and how they would be integrated into the receiving society. Recently, research has called for delinking and decentering the debates on social and global inequality. This course follows this call by turning the logic around and focusing on the perspective on people living in the emigration countries and specifically asks:

How does both a person’s positioning within their own society and the positioning of the society within the world system influence a person’s perception of social inequality, social justice, their aspirations and conceptions of the future? How do these the local conceptions of the future reproduce/express historically grown global inequalities?

 

People & Topics