300550 Status attainment and social mobility: What do we know and what we still do not know (S) (SoSe 2022)

Status and educational attainment and social mobility research nourished generations of social researchers over decades. This research was and still is a driver of theory development as well as the development of advanced methodology. Nevertheless, the exact emachnisms of status attainment and social mobility may be still misconceived in important ways, because central concepts are flawed and suffer from unobserved heterogeneity. There is increasing evidence that we should include concepts and processes of individual development, genetic variation, and biological processes to understand fully how life chances in contemporary societies are distributed. The seminar aims to demonstrate the remarkable contributions of sociological research in this field as well as the important ways how interdiciplinary perspectives can substantively enrich our knowledge about the distribution of life chances, and finally how we can make sense of these novel insights in the light of social justice and fairness.