Intersecting Inequalities

University of Vienna, 20-21 June 2024

The Vienna Global History Group dedicates the academic year 2023/24 to the topic of intersecting inequalities. Discussions on social, economic and cultural inequality have become a major and pressing issue in society and the media as well as in social sciences and the humanities. Since the end of the Cold War, inequalities seem more and more globally connected and intertwined within and across societies in the Global North as well as in the Global South, in the West as much as in the East. A historical perspective on the intersecting factors for inequalities and their long-term transformation over time as well as their specific configurations across space seems thus particularly promising in order to situate current trends in time. 

In order to explore these tensions, the Vienna Global History Group will hold a 2-day workshop at the University of Vienna on 20-21 June 2024. In cooperation with the Viennese research group “Figurations of Inequality”, we call for papers addressing the intersecting factors for the increase or decrease of social, economic and cultural inequalities in its widest sense: inequalities in property relations, in urban-rural relations, in gender orders, in work regimes, and in conditions for migration and mobility etc. 

The Vienna Global History Group welcomes contributions from the humanities as well as from social science and economics. Papers can address any world region and deal with current trends or earlier periods. They will feature a global historical approach, however defined.

All papers should address at least one of the three following questions: 

1.     When and how are/were differences in a specific context turned into inequalities? 

2.     Which intersections can be identified as key factors for a specific configuration of power and inequality? 

3.     How does “the global” matter in a specific context of intersecting inequalities? 

MA students, PhD students and postdoc researchers from the University of Vienna are especially encouraged to submit a proposal.  

Please send your paper proposal of max. 1,000 words with a short biography to Christian De Vito (christian.giuseppe.de.vito@univie.ac.at) by 15 March 2024. 

We are looking forward to reading your proposal!