January 20, 2020 in Berlin
John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin
Deadline: December 15, 2019

Organizers: Sönke Kunkel, Wolfgang Strehl, and JFKI MA Class of 2019

Canvassing past, present, and future manifestations of global inequalities, this conference seeks to examine global inequalities from an interdisciplinary perspective. Inequality is an important theme of the 21st century extending from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to social protest movements, transnational activism relating to human rights, calls for climate justice, or global policies addressing poverty and processes of social marginalization and exclusion. Newer research has increasingly addressed such issues over the last years, but, we argue, may benefit from an interdisciplinary dialogue that connects current approaches in the social sciences with a longer historical perspective: How can we conceptualize global inequality today and in historical hindsight? What can be done about global inequalities today – and what did historical actors do about them in the past? How, when, why, and in what shape did global inequalities emerge in the course of history and what do historical studies add to understanding inequalities today? What, in turn, do newer approaches in the social sciences offer for the historical study of global inequalities?

Inviting for interdisciplinary conversations, we are looking for contributions from scholars as well as MA and PhD students of Social Science, History, Economics, Political Science, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Area Studies, and related fields. Conference participants are asked to submit papers that study inequality on a local, regional, global, or comparative scale. Possible presentation topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Inequalities in and across: social groups, resources, food, health, population, energy, violence, media and human rights
• Interdependencies of climate change, environmental challenges, and global inequality
• Interferences between economic and non-economic inequality
• The role of education in global inequality
• The history of global development
• The policies and politics of global inequality

Proposals should include an abstract of 200-300 words and a short CV, preferably in one PDF-file.

Proposals should be sent in until December 15, 2019 to Wolfgang Strehl (w.strehl@fu-berlin.de) and Sönke Kunkel (soenke.kunkel@fu-berlin.de).

Conference speakers will be partly reimbursed for costs of travel and accommodation during the conference. Participants who have an interest in the topic and would like to attend the conference without delivering a paper are welcome and should contact the organizers.