GEXcel Symposium:"Specifying and Contextualizing the Orders of Distinction and the Recognition of Authority"

By Katherine Harrison on 30 Jun | 0 comments

A two-day symposium on"Distinctions and Authority: Specifying and Contextualizing the Orders of Distinction and the Recognition of Authority" will be held on October 8-9 2009, at T Building, Linköping University. The event is organized as part of GEXcel Theme 3: Disinctions and Authorization (click here for more details on Theme 3).

The emerging new global division of labor is both gendered and based on ethnic divisions. It is also creating new class structures which are complicated by regional difference and educational stratification, as well as the gender division of labor and migration. This development coincides with the tertiarization of work and new employment arrangements that could be connected with the shift in power relations between socioeconomic groups.

This development calls for a more intensive discussion of the new distinctions or social categories of various kinds and how to study them simultaneously. The analytical value of the gender concept has increasingly been problematized in gender research and debate. Today this relativizing may be said to have reached new depths in the call for systematic analysis of intersectionalities and of contextualities. Do we need a new understanding of the class concept adapted to today's multicultural, gendered and service dominated information society? Have life styles and consumption become so important as to affect our evaluation of social groups and strata - more or as much as the occupational position and economic possibilities of a person or a group? What is the role of equality policies in the interconnections between different power orders/inequality regimes?

Confirmed speakers so far include Professors Joan Acker and Sylvia Walby, with the finalised program to be announced in August.

To participate, please register by September 1 by email to: coordinator@genderexcel.org