News

Bologna, Italy, June 2018

‘Inequality’ is on the rise, not only in real terms from the local to the global level, but also as a scholarly notion and a category of societal self-description (e.g. in politics, the media or in literature). From the 1950s until some years ago inequality had gradually been removed from the centre of inner debates in Europe and North America. While the term was still lavishly applied to societies in the past and in the rest of the world, a growing emphasis on horizontal ‘plurality’ (e.g. of world-views, lifestyles) promised to take the moral sting out of whatever differences could be observed at home. More recently, however, this development has been reversed. Nowadays, the concept of inequality seems to offer a common key to understanding (and tackling) a wide range of symptoms of crisis, which are conventionally dealt with in separate branches of academia.

Does this also suggest ‘inequality’ as a fertile ground for interdisciplinary work? This is precisely the question that inspires this workshop. Indeed, if, on the one side, the analysis of inequality can be enriched by the interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation of ideas, on the other side, it is possible to find perspectives unknown to the single disciplines that can furnish fresh evidence on the causes and consequences of inequality and explain how it affects the social and legal system. Come and tell us what you are doing on this topic!