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Abstract
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The analysis of social inequality may well be our discipline’s most distinguishing—as well as its most distinguished—hallmark. But, surprisingly, few MSS meetings have explicitly named inequality as their theme. Now that time has come! I invite you to engage this topic for our 2011 meetings with new efforts to both broaden and deepen our analyses. When the Call for Organizers goes out in June, please send me your ideas and suggestions for sessions, workshops and other ways we can explore the many pathways and nuances of this most fundamental element of social life.
Those of us who entered Sociology in the 1960s and 1970s were able to formulate and launch our sociological understandings in the context of a great societal awakening to the multiple and intersecting inequalities of race and class and, finally, gender and sexualities. Some of our teachers failed to grasp the significance of these times, holding fast to seductive notions of “value free” scholarship, but others drew upon lived experiences during the Great Depression, World War II, and Holocaust as a connecting point to the chaotic and sometimes violent intersections of politics and scholarship during those years. At that time, many in our discipline were concerned with exploring and understanding the meanings and patterns of inequalities “on the street,” in personal, interpersonal and community terms. We produced wonderful and poignant scholarship. Yet, our macro analyses remained removed. Policies and policy regimes, rather being conceptualized theoretically as systems of stratification, were viewed as the pedestrian stuff of “applied” fields such as social work and public administration—beyond acceptable boundaries for enlightened graduate students and young sociology scholars. True, activists such as Stokely Carmichael had helped us understand “institutional racism,” but the “woman-friendly state” and “intersectionality theory,” along with “global South and North” and the Washington Consensus were light-years away.
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