300053 Transnationalization and Social Inequalities (S) (SoSe 2012)

Classically, theories of social inequality operate within the nation-state. International mobility, cross-border ties of people and the global travelling of information, money and ideas increasingly challenge this conception. The emergences of new transnational social formations and spaces contribute to the changing nature of comparative horizons against which inequalities are measured while the transnational production of social inequalities involves various processes in often distant places. Hence, key questions in the study of social inequality such as what to understand as inequality and how to describe its production need to be reconceptualized and complemented by paying attention to the question ‘unequal as compared to whom’ and where, as well as to the interrelated dynamics occurring at different places and within various social spaces affecting people, social structures and their perception.
It is the aim of the seminar to introduce into the current debate on the transnationalization of social inequality. Throughout the course the relationship of crucial categories such as class, status, gender, ethnicity, territory and space and the here employed key concept transnationality will be discussed for the meaning and production of social inequalities.

Preliminary schedule
1. Dimensions of inequality
2. The mechanisms of inequality production
3. The space of inequality
4. Transnational social spaces and the notion of transnationality
5. International migration, immigrant integration and social inequality
6. “Poor here, rich there“ – status and power in transnational social spaces
7. Shuttling migrants, settled families and the flexible use of citizenship
8. Transnational classes
9. Intersectionality in transnational perspective
10. The global care chain
11. Transnational regimes of social rights and citizenship
12. Remittances – new hopes for combating inequality?
13. Measuring social inequalities in transnational perspective
14. Cosmopolitanism – the end of inequality?