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Identities, Interactions, and Institutions across Place and Time (SPS-RE-STA-ID-25)

SPS-RE-STA-ID-25

Purpose

From the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, to the backlash against DEI initiatives and heated debates around headscarf bans and civic integration, to the unprecedented crowd at the Budapest Pride parade, many recent events make abundantly clear that identities, whether shared or contested, lie at the core of today’s social and political mobilisation. This seminar examines how social identities (such as gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality) are constructed, negotiated, claimed and transformed through everyday interactions and struggles for recognition.

Combining key sociological theories with interdisciplinary perspectives from social psychology and political science, the course explores the dynamic relationships between individual and collective identities, interpersonal interactions, boundary making between groups, and institutional structures. Particular attention is given to processes of social categorisation, socialisation, norm diffusion and sanctioning, role modelling, through which individuals internalize norms, values and social beliefs, and orient their behaviour in relation to others. We also examine how processes of evaluation, meaning making and justification are embedded within cultural frames and social expectations, which reflect and may even reproduce durable patterns of inequality and reinforce unequal power relations.

Throughout the seminar, we focus on key institutional arenas, including the family, education and leisure settings, labour markets, welfare regimes and the state, across different national, policy and historical contexts. We discuss how different types of diversity are managed in, for example, private and intimate settings (e.g. through social control), competitive environments (e.g. through stereotypes and ideal worker norms) and at the local and policy level (e.g. through assimilationist policies or bans). At various levels of analysis, we examine how gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality shape social relations, influencing the unequal distributions of roles and resources, status expectations, perceptions of deservingness, social trust, zero-sum competition, and patterns of segregation. 

The course emphasises intersectionality as a central analytical framework, examining how multiple dimensions of identity intersect to shape experiences, risks and opportunities within different institutional contexts.
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