2020 Events

Report of the UK Wealth Tax Commission

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute, the Department of Law and the CAGE Research Centre at the University of Warwick

Wednesday 9 December 2020, 4:00pm to 5:30pm. Online public event

The unprecedented public spending required to tackle COVID-19 has been followed by debates about how to rebuild public finances and tackle inequalities exposed by the crisis. This event launches the final report of a major new project investigating the desirability and feasibility of a ‘wealth tax’ for the UK. Building on contributions by a network of world-leading experts on tax policy, the report will make recommendations to government on how to tax wealth more effectively.

Speakers: Dr Arun Advani (Visiting Fellow, LSE III), Emma Chamberlain (Visiting Professor in Practice, LSE III) and Dr Andy Summers (Associate Member, LSE III)

Chair: Professor Sir Tim Besley (Department of Economics, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Read the final report here

Does selection matter? Immigration selectivity, skills, and class habitus

Part of the seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Tuesday 8 December 2020, 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Online public event

A key rationale for more restrictive immigration policy, with stringent educational attainment or language skill requirements, is to select immigrants who are “the brightest and the best” from their sending countries and who will be net fiscal contributors in the receiving country. It is typically assumed that those who are more highly educated will do better in the labour market, but also that those who are more educated than the majority of their compatriots, that is who are ‘selected’, will bring additional skills and characteristics associated with economic success. However, there has not yet been an empirical assessment of whether this is in fact the case. Combining information on the cognitive and non-cognitive skills, class habitus, and labour market outcomes of the foreign born in the UK with aggregate data from non-migrants in immigrant sending countries, this paper examines changes in selectivity of immigrants in the UK by time of arrival, using relative educational attainment as an indicator of economic selection. We then assess whether educational selectivity is associated with better labour market outcomes, and explore the relationship between educational selectivity and typically unobserved skills and social network characteristics. We find no positive association between educational selectivity and the posited causal mechanisms leading to superior labour market performance. Our research suggests that to the extent migration policies are successful in gaining migrants from the top of the educational distribution they facilitate class reproduction rather recruiting the brightest and the best.

Speaker: Dr Renee Reichl Luthra (Department of Sociology, University of Essex)

Chair: Professor Lucinda Platt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

COVID, Inequalities, and the Future of Cities

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Monday 7 December 2020, 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Online public event

The COVID pandemic led to the largest economic shock in living memory. Cities such as London and New York have been hit badly, reversing 25 years of urban resurgence. Stories in the media talk of affluent city dwellers leaving for the countryside to take advantage of remote work opportunities, leaving low-wage workers working in the face to face economy stranded without employment. These changes will, if they persist, have significant long-term consequences for inequality both within and between urban areas. Will it exacerbate disparities between the richest and poorest cities? Will it lead to an exodus of affluent workers, stranding less well paid workers in local services. What will the long-term implications of the pandemic be for the future of cities? This event will bring together leading experts to discuss these questions.

Speakers: Professor Michael Storper (Department of Geography, LSE), Dr Max Nathan (UCL Centre for Applied Spatial Analysis), Dr Shauna Brail (Institute for Management & Innovation, University of Toronto Mississauga), and Valentine Quinio (Centre for Cities)

Chair: Professor Neil Lee (Department of Geography, LSE; III Associate)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Censorship in Education - a panel discussion on pedagogical autonomy

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology, the International Inequalities Institute, the Argonaut and the LSE Anthropology Society

Wednesday 2 December 2020, 1:30pm to 2:30pm. Online public event

In response to the recent UK governmental guidance which defines anti-capitalism as an "extreme political stance" and insists that schools should under no circumstances use resources from organisations who have a “publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow… capitalism”, this event brings together scholars who have worked on issues of censorship in education around the world. With voices from India, Turkey, and the UK, the aim is to keep open the spaces for educational autonomy.

Speakers: Professor Esra Oyzurek (University of Cambridge), Professor Kalpana Kannabiran (Council for Social Development, Hyderabad), Dr Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam), Professor John Holmwood (University of Nottingham), Dr Desne Masie (Chief Strategist at IC Intelligence in London) and Dr Victoria Showunmi (UCL Institute of Education)

C ovid and its Impact on Domestic Workers: Continental Perspectives on Argentina, India, and the United Kingdom

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Tuesday 1 December 2020, 2:30pm to 3:45pm. Online public event

How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted on the lives of the millions of domestic workers across the world who provide essential services of care but are rarely seen as essential workers? This International Inequalities Institute seminar will compare the experiences of domestic workers in India, Argentina and the UK to address three fundamental issues. It will ask what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about the inequalities faced by domestic workers. It will explore how the impact of the pandemic on domestic care workers makes us reflect on the question of what is work. And it will investigate the implications of the pandemic on work relations between employers and domestic workers. The aim is to highlight, examine and compare the multiple crises and inequalities of care experienced by those who are essential to giving care across three continents.

Speakers: Dr Shalini Grover (Research Officer, LSE III), Professor Louise Ryan (Director of Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre, London Metropolitan University), Dr Lorena Poblete (National University of San Martin), Dr Joyce Jiang (Lecturer in Human Resource Management, University of York), and Dr Neha Wadhawan (Work in Freedom Program, ILO, Delhi)

Chair: Dr Alpa Shah (Associate Professor of Anthropology; Research Theme leader of ‘Global Economies of Care’, III, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

The Effects of Cash Transfers on Formal Labor Markets: evidence from Brazil

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 1 December 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Cash transfers have expanded widely in developing countries, and have been credited for a sizable reduction in poverty rates. Yet, the potential unintended consequences of these programs for labor markets have spurred a heated policy debate. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for both individual and aggregate effects of welfare programs in policy debates.

Speaker: Dr Joana Naritomi (Assistant Professor, Department of International Development, LSE)

Chair: Dr Armine Ishkanian (III Research Theme Convenor (Politics of Inequality), Executive Director AFSEE programme and Associate Professor at the Department of Social Policy, LSE)

The Violence of Uncertainty: how asylum waiting time undermines refugees’ health

Part of the seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Tuesday 24 November 2020, 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Online public event

Speaker: Sin Yi Cheung (Cardiff University)

Chair: Professor Lucinda Platt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Found in Translation? Language Legislation and Pro-Social Preferences

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 17 November 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Frank A. Cowell (Department of Economics, LSE)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Director International Inequalities Institute)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Classes of Labour: work and life in a central Indian steel town

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the International Inequalities Institute

Wednesday 11 November 2020, 5:00pm to 6:30pm.Online public event

Speaker: Jonathan Parry (Author and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE)

Discussants: Maxim Bolt (Associate Professor of Development Studies; Fellow of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford), Geert De Neve (Professor of Social Anthropology and South Asian Studies, University of Sussex), Nayanika Mathur (Associate Professor in the Anthropology of South Asia; Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford), Massimiliano Mollona (Anthropologist, Goldsmiths, University London), Nate Roberts (Anthropologist; lecturer in the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen) and Christian Strümpell (Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, Hamburg University).

Chair: Alpa Shah (Associate Professor of Anthropology; Research Theme leader of ‘Global Economies of Care’, III, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Migrant Day Labourers in the US and the Politics of Precarity

Part of the seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Tuesday 10 November 2020, 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Paul Apostolidis (Department of Government, LSE)

Chair: Professor Lucinda Platt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Find the PowerPoint slides here.

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Racism, Policing and Black Resistance: Babylon at 40

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Tuesday 3 November 2020, 6:00pm to 7:00pm. Online public event

Speakers: Dr Clive James Nwonka (University of York; LSE, III) and Professor Les Back (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Chair: Dr Abenaa Owusu-Bempah (LSE, Dept of Law)

Lives and Livelihoods: estimates of the global mortality and poverty effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 27 October 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Benoit Decerf (University of Namur)

Chair: Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch (Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III)

Find PowerPoint slides here

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

The Active Ingredient of Inequality

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Monday 26 October 2020, 5:00pm to 6:00pm. Online public event

Speaker: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and III Director)

Chair: Dame Minouche Shafik

Watch the livestreamed recording here

Watch the video here

Listen to the podcast here

Ethnic and Racial Harassment in Britain

Part of the seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Tuesday 20 October 2020, 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Online public event

Speakers: Dr Alita Nandi (Institute for Social and Economic Research)

Chair: Professor Lucinda Platt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Is the Economy Racist?

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Thursday 15 October 2020, 5:30pm to 7:00pm. Online public event

Speakers: Faiza Shaheen (Director, CLASS), Wilf Sullivan (Equalities Officer, TUC), Nonhlanhla Makuyana (Decolonising Economics) & Felicia Odamtten (Director, The Black Economists Network)

Chair: Dr Poornima Paidipaty (Dept of Sociology, LSE)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Culture Is Bad for You: inequality in the cultural and creative industries

Part of the III Seminar Series

Tuesday 13 October 2020, 12:30-1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Dave O'Brien (Chancellor’s Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Edinburgh)

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer, LSE III)

Find PowerPoint slides here

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Unsustainable Inequalities: social justice and the environment

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute

Thursday 8 October 2020, 5:00pm to 6:00pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Lucas Chancel (World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics)

Discussant: Dr Alina Averchenkova (Distinguished Policy Fellow, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (III Director designate)

Listen to the podcast here

Watch the video here

Hidden Versus Revealed Attitudes: a list experiment on support for minorities in Ireland

Part of the seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Tuesday 6 October 2020, 1:00pm to 2:00pm. Online public event

Speakers: Dr Fran McGinnity (Economic and Social Research Institute) and Dr Mathew Creighton (University College Dublin)

Chair: Professor Lucinda Platt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Find PowerPoint slides here

Watch the video here

Listen to the podcast here

Why do people stay poor?

Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 29 September 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Professor Oriana Bandiera (Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics, Director of STICERD)

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms (Research Officer, III)

Find PowerPoint slides here

Watch the video here

Listen to the podcast here

Care-work for colonial and contemporary white families in India: A historical-anthropological study of the racialized romanticization of the Ayah

Watch the video here

Listen to the podcast here

See the chat file here

Tuesday 7th July 2020, 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Speakers: Dr Satyasikha Chakraborty (The College of New Jersey) and Dr Shalini Grover (LSE III)

Discussants: Professor Nandini Gooptu (University of Oxford) and Professor Swapna M. Banerjee (Brooklyn College of the City University of New York)

Chair: Professor Alpa Shah (LSE Anthropology Dept)

Introduced by Professor Beverley Skeggs, III theme convenor Global Economies of Care.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECare

Humankind: a hopeful history

Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute and Department of Sociology

Wednesday 1 July 2020, 5:00pm to 6:00pm. Online public event

Speaker: Rutger Bregman (historian and author)

Chair: Poornima Paidipaty (Department of Sociology)

Click here for event details

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEHumankind

Implications of the COVID-19 Crisis for Disability Policy

This event is part of LSE's public event series - COVID-19: The Policy Response.

Tuesday 23 June 2020, 3:30pm to 5:00pm. Online public event

Speakers: Jane Campbell (Baroness Campbell of Surbiton DBE, Independent Crossbench Member of the House of Lords and disability rights campaigner), Neil Crowther (Independent expert on equality, human rights and social change), Clenton Farquharson (Chair of Think Local Act Personal Programme Board) and
Liz Sayce (JRF Practitioner Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE)

Chair: Dr Armine Ishkanian (Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme at the International Inequalities Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy)

This event will have live captioning and BSL interpreters.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

How Much Tax Do The Rich Really Pay And Could They Pay More?

Monday 15 June 2020, 4:00pm to 5:00pm. Online panel discussion with a live audience Q&A.

Host: Professor Mike Savage (III Director and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics)

Speaker: Dr Arun Advani (Assistant Professor of Economics and Impact Director of the CAGE Research Centre at the University of Warwick)

Panel Chair: Ed Conway (Economics Editor of Sky News and columnist for The Times)

Panellists: Emma Agyemang (Journalist at Financial Times), Helen Miller (Deputy Director of the IFS and head of the Tax sector), Dr Andy Summers (Assistant Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and an Associate of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE)

Event registration found here.

For any queries email events@lse.ac.uk.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #LSEWealth

Strategies for Taxing Wealth: an academic and policy exchange

These online webinars are free and open to all but pre-registration is required.

Monday 15 June 2020, 10:30am - 12:30pm & 1:30pm – 3:30pm, via Zoom

Our expert speakers will deliver presentations of their cutting-edge research addressing these questions, setting the stage for further debate involving Q&A from the webinar audience.

Two webinar sessions, hosted by the LSE International Inequalities Institute, exploring the politics and policies of taxing wealth after Coronavirus, including:

- What are public attitudes towards tax and wealth?

- How does the media affect support for taxing wealth?

- What have been the drivers of major tax reform throughout history?

- Could a net wealth tax reduce wealth inequality?

- What information do tax authorities need to tax wealth effectively?

- Do the wealthy evade taxes? How, and how much?

Webinar Programme

Session 1: The politics of major tax reform

10.30am-12.30pm; chaired by Dr Nora Waitkus (LSE)

Robert Palmer (Tax Justice UK): Public Attitudes on Public Spending, Tax and Wealth

HendrikTheine (Vienna University): What About Wealth Taxation? The News Media Coverage in Germany

Julian Limberg (KCL): What Determines Taxes on the Rich in Peacetime?’

Signup link via Zoom for session 1 here.

Session 2: Wealth taxes: modelling and enforcement

1.30pm-3.30pm; chaired by Dr Luna Glucksberg (LSE)

Alejandro Esteller More (University of Barcelona): The Long-Run Redistributive Power of the Net Wealth Tax

Andres Knobel (Tax Justice Network) and Louise Russell-Prywata (LSE / OpenOwnership): Towards an Asset Register for the UK and Beyond

Daniel Reck (LSE): Tax Evasion by the Wealthy: measurement and implications

Signup link via Zoom for session 2 here.

Whose Money? Whose Power? Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity online COVID-19 conversation

Saturday 6 June 2020, 2pm to 3:30pm, via Zoom

Speaker: Liz Nelson (Director, Tax Justice and Human Rights, Tax Justice Network, and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity)

Speaker: Masana Ndinga-Kanga (Crisis Response Fund Lead, CIVICUS, and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity)

Speaker: Professor Mike Savage (III Director and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics)

Chair: Patricio Espinoza (Research Analyst, Chambers and Partners, and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity) and Priyanka Kotamraju (Gates Cambridge Scholar, University of Cambridge, and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity)

Long before coronavirus, we were already in crisis. But in time when billionaires' bank balances are growing even as millions of people face unemployment, destitution and even starvation, COVID-19 has turned a spotlight on the staggering concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity from South Africa, the UK and Chile, in conversation with Professor Mike Savage, look at power and wealth, tax and inequality, and post-pandemic possibilities for rewriting the social contract.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #WhoseMoneyWhosePower

This online public event is free and open to all but pre-registration is required.

Sign up for this event

Re-Centring the Margins: Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity online COVID-19 conversation

Saturday 23 May 2020, 3pm to 4:30pm, via Zoom

Speaker: Asha Kowtal (Dalit rights activist and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity)

Speaker: Fredrick Ouko Alucheli (Program Officer, Disability Rights, Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity)

Speaker: Maureen Sigauke (Labour activist and change management and sustainability consultant, and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity)

Is coronavirus really the great equaliser? Are all of us facing it in the same way, with the same resources? Are we really all in this crisis together? Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity from India, Kenya and Zimbabwe offer intersectional perspectives on the pandemic and its impacts from the standpoint of groups who are too often invisible and driven to the “margins” of society.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #ReCentringtheMargins

Sign up for this event

Migrant Day Labourers and the Politics of Precarity
Seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

CANCELLED

Wednesday 25 March 2020, 1 to 2pm, CBG 11.13

Speaker: Dr Paul Apostolidis (Associate Professorial Lecturer and Deputy Head of Department for Education, Department of Government)

In today’s precarious world, working people’s experiences are paradoxically becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. This project develops a critique of social precarity by setting Latino day labourers’ commentaries in dialogue with critical social theory, thereby showing how migrant labour on society’s jagged edges relates to encompassing syndromes of precarity as both exception and synecdoche. Subjected to especially harsh treatment as unauthorised migrants, these workers also epitomise struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day labourers’ accounts of their desperate circumstances, dangerous jobs, and informal job-seeking, gathered through fieldwork in the US Northwest, with theoretical accounts of the forces fuelling precaritisation, I illuminate a schema of precarity defined by temporal contradiction. This “critical-popular” approach, informed by Paulo Freire’s popular-education theory, elicits resonances and dissonances between day labourers’ themes and scholars’ analyses of neoliberal crisis, the postindustrial work ethic, affective and digital labour, the racial governance of public spaces, occupational safety and health hazards, and self-undermining patterns of desire and personal responsibility among precaritised subjects. Day labourers offer language redolent with potential to catalyse social critique among migrant workers. They also clarify the terms of mass-scale opposition to precarity. Such a politics would demand restoration of workers’ stolen time, engage a fight for the city, challenge the conversion of capital risk into workers’ bodily vulnerability, and foment the refusal of work. Day labourers’ convivial politics through self-organised worker centres, furthermore, offers a powerful basis for renewing radical-democratic theory and imagining a key practical innovation: worker centres for all working people.

Dr. Paul Apostolidis is the author of The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity (Oxford University Press 2019), Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Duke University Press, 2000), as well as co-editor of Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals (Duke University Press, 2004). He serves on the Executive Editorial Board for the journal Political Theory and specializes in integrating empirical field research with migrant workers into political and critical theory. Prior to joining LSE’s Government Department in June 2019 he taught for twenty-two years at Whitman College in Washington State, USA, where he held the T. Paul Chair of Political Science, founded a nationally recognized public impact undergraduate research programme, and directed Whitman’s undergraduate first-year liberal arts programme. Dr. Apostolidis received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Cornell University and his A.B. from Princeton University.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #LSEMigration

Intersectionality and Property: an Ethnographic study of “class” and “identity”

Inequalities Seminar Series

CANCELLED

Tuesday 24 March 2020, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Dr Erica Lagalisse (Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute)

The intersectionality concept was originally inspired by black feminist militants, who articulated the necessity of approaching projects of both gender and racial liberation based on the experiences and analyses of racialized women. Since the 1980s, academic articulations of intersectionality continue to develop, as do activist methodologies of intersectionality.

This lecture explores how and why North American anarchist activist mobilizations of intersectionality are not those originally proposed by black feminist activists and theorists, and instead partially pre-empt its liberatory challenge by recuperating its praxis within the logic of neoliberal self-making projects and property relations: The activists in my study operationalize intersectionality to rationalize class entitlements by propertising the self with (rights-bearing) identities, and do so in ways that presume a symmetry of ontology and mathematics, including the modern governing logics of statistics and calculus.

The study will be of particular interest to people involved in social movements or related research, yet also has relevance beyond insofar as we may consider anarchist activity as a sort of limit case: Even among anarchists, who aim to operate entirely autonomously from the logics of state and capital, performances of the possessive individual and statistical thinking associated with modern state government prevail in everyday applications of intersectionality.

As such, the study is positioned to inspire future researchers to consider the extent to which social science writing on intersectionality is likewise influenced by culturally-specific mathematical impulses and imperatives of the propertising self: By studying “intersectionality” as an ethnographic object, we gain insight into long-standing impasses regarding the status of “class” vs. “identity” as categories in social science debates.

Dr Erica Michelle Lagalisse is a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) International Inequalities Institute, under the supervision of Dr. Beverley Skeggs, and with the support of a fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture. She is engaged in multi-sited ethnographic research on the social dynamics surrounding “conspiracy theory” in social movement spaces. The research seeks to contribute constructive pedagogy around “conspiracy theory” as both a theoretical object and practical political problematic.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #LSECare

Social Reproduction and 'Well Being': self and other care

Hosted by LSE's Shape the World Series

CANCELLED

Wednesday 18 March 2020, 6:30pm to 8:00, Auditorium, Basement, Centre Building

Speakers: Jo Littler (@littler_jo) is Reader in Culture and Creative Industries, Department of Sociology, City University of London; Lynne Segal (@lynne_segal) is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies, Birkbeck University of London; Isabel Shutes is Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy, LSE.

Chair: Beverley Skeggs (@bevskeggs) is Distinguished Professor in the Sociology Department, Lancaster University and research theme leader at III.

LSE Shape the World Series - to celebrate the completion of LSE’s newest building, a series of public events organised by some of the academic departments who are now housed in the Centre Building will take place this term.

Tribes: how our need to belong can make or break society

Thursday 5 March 2020, 7:30pm to 8:30pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Speaker: David Lammy MP (MP for Tottenham)

Chair: Dr Armine Ishkanian (Associate Professor and Academic Lead, AFSEE programme and III Research Committee Member)

In 2007, inspired by the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and looking to explore his own African roots, David Lammy took a DNA test. Part memoir, part call-to-arms Tribes explores how David Lammy felt reading his DNA results, and how they led him to rethink what it meant to need to belong to a tribe, and the results of being part of one. How this need – genetically programmed and socially acquired – can manifest itself in positive ways, collaboratively achieving great things that individuals alone cannot. And yet how, in recent years, globalisation and digitisation have led to new, more pernicious kinds of tribalism.

David Lammy (@DavidLammy), MP for Tottenham, is most renowned for leading the fight for a referendum on the final negotiated Brexit deal. However, when David Lammy was named Politician of the Year by both GQ and the Political Studies Association, he dedicated both awards to his parents, the Windrush Generation and his friend Khadija Saye who lost her life in Grenfell Tower. David was the first to call for independent inquiry into the Grenfell Tower Fire. He has also secured a Compensation Fund for the victims of the Windrush scandal, placing pressure on the government to treat their plight as an injustice to be rectified.

Dr Armine Ishkanian is an Associate Professor in Social Policy and the Academic Lead of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme, at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE. Her research examines how civil society organisations and social movements engage in policy processes and transformative politics in a number of countries including Armenia, Egypt, Greece, the UK, etc.

This event is part of the LSE Festival: Shape the World running from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, with a series of events exploring how social science can make the world a better place.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival #ShapetheWorld

Multidimensional disadvantage among children: bringing Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children in England and Wales into focus

Seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Wednesday 4 March 2020, 1 to 2pm, CBG 11.13

Speakers: Dr Polina Obolenskaya (Research Officer at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, CASE)

Chair: Dr Susanne Wessendorf (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute)

It is well known that Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children in the UK as well as across Europe experience high levels of disadvantage. Yet no national monitoring of their living standards in the UK is taking place. This is because children from Roma, Gypsy and Traveller background are often missing or invisible in the large-scale statistical analyses of children at risk of poverty and deprivation that drive policy development and monitoring. In this paper we argue that population Censuses, and other administrative sources, many of which already record Roma ethnicity, are under-utilised as a source of robust and comparable data, allowing the scale, intensity and multi-dimensionality of the challenges facing Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children to be investigated and tracked. We illustrate this through analysis of secure microdata from the 2011 Census of England and Wales, which included a pre-coded category for ‘Gypsy or Irish Traveller’ for the first time, and to which we add children identified as Roma. Disadvantage in each of four dimensions - housing, household economic activity, education and health - are examined in turn before computing a multiple deprivation count. The conclusions we draw from the analysis is that deprivation among RGT children is genuinely multi-dimensional: the higher risks cannot be explained away by population composition, type of accommodation, or by any single dimension of deprivation.

Polina Obolenskaya is a Researcher at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), LSE. Part of Polina’s research focuses on child poverty and multidimensional disadvantage. More specifically, Polina has been working with colleagues on building up evidence on multidimensional poverty and disadvantage experienced by groups of children and young people in Britain that are currently missing or invisible in existing data, including young carers, children from recent migrant families, and Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children. Polina is currently working on the project “Social Policies and Distributional outcomes in a changing Britain” (SPDO) which focuses on policies, spending and outcomes across a number of policy areas such as healthcare, adult social care, and education as well as the distribution of social and economic inequalities in the UK.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #LSEMigration

Racial Capitalism, Resurgent Populism, and the Politics of Rightsfocus
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 February 2020, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Michael McCann (Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA).

Chair: Professor Mike Savage (Director, International Inequalities Institute, LSE).

Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have identified, often with some alarm, the ways that new populist forms of governance are posing challenges to the liberal rule of law that has constituted regimes in North America, Europe, and beyond in the post-WW II era. The presentation focuses on populist threats to the fundamental rights of persons – both established rights and opportunities for political advocacy of new or “novel’ egalitarian rights. McCann argues that the new populism resurrects illiberal, racist, and patriarchal social and legal norms – what we label as relations enforced by “repressive law” – that coexisted with and undercut liberal norms, institutional arrangements, policies, and elite defenders before the mid-century “racial break.” Because the new populism tens to eschew or scorn even abstract deference to liberal universalist ideals, the politics of rights advocacy, especially for the most vulnerable persons, today faces new types of challenges.

McCann is author of over sixty article-length publications and author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of eight books, including authoring the multi-award winning monographs Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994) and (with William Haltom) Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago, 2004). His newest book, with George Lovell, is Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism (Chicago 2020). McCann was the founding director of the Law, Societies, & Justice Program as well as the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center at UW; he was also one of the faculty co-founders for the UW Center for Human Rights and a two-term director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. McCann is winner of multiple teaching and mentoring awards. He also was a President of the U.S. based international Law and Society Association (2011-13).

Twitter hashtag for this event: #LSEInequalities

The dog that didn’t bark? Income inequality and the absence of a Tawney moment in the mass media
Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 February 2020, 12.30 to 1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speakers: Dr Patrick McGovern (Director of the MSc International Migration and Public Policy and an Associate Professor, Reader, in the Department of Sociology), Dr Sandra Obradovic (LSE Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science), Professor Martin W. Bauer (Director of MSc Social & Public Communication, Professor of Social Psychology Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science)

Have rising levels of income inequality been recognized as a scandalous social problem that requires radically different kinds of policy responses? Or has the topic failed to gain enough attention to be considered as a new social problem with the result that it has become subsumed within existing discussions of economic policy? Drawing on an analysis of UK and US newspapers we find that the coverage of income inequality came in three phases; an initial surge in the 1990s, followed by a decline in the early 2000s, and a second surge that takes off after the economic crisis of 2008. Despite this surge in media attention, the problem of inequality seems to have remained an academic concern as it does not appear to have resonated more widely.

Across the three periods, we observe a shift in framing, some diversity in frame sponsors and a shift in political slant, yet public attitudes towards inequality remain stable across this same time-period. Our argument is that social inequality has not become a mobilizing social problem, at least as reflected in the print media.

First, the dominant frames were centred on seemingly natural or inevitable processes of globalization, market forces and technological change rather than a new sense of economic injustice. Secondly, the sponsors remained as a relatively narrow group of academic and applied economists with some eventual interest from politicians. Finally, resolutions of the problem were subsumed within existing approaches to economic policy that included arguments for raising taxation, increasing the minimum wage or else accepting the rise in economic inequality as a necessary evil that provided rewards for hardworking people. Furthermore, these findings are consistent with system justifying attitudes.

In sum, the academic interest in income inequality has failed to ignite a ‘Tawney moment’, by which we mean, a public discourse that recognizes inequality as a scandalous evil, and names it as such.

Dr Patrick McGovern is Director of the MSc International Migration and Public Policy and an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Sociology.

Dr Sandra Obradović is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She obtained her BA in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), her MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and her PhD in Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Professor Martin W. Bauer is the Director of MSc Social & Public Communication, Professor of Social Psychology Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Listen to the podcast episode.

Download the slides.

The Shape of the Beast

Public event

Friday 14 February 2020, 6.30pm to 8.00pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Speakers: Arundhati Roy (Writer, Essayist, Activist), Professor Amartya Sen (Thomas W Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and an LSE Honorary Fellow)

Chair: Dr Sumi Madhok (Associate Professor of Transnational Gender Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, LSE)

Arundhati Roy will read selected extracts from her literary and political work and engage in discussion with Amartya Sen.

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things (1997) for which she won the Man Booker Prize, and more recently of, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Her non-fiction works include My Seditious Heart, The Shape of the Beast and Listening to Grasshoppers. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.

Amartya Sen is Thomas W Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and an LSE Honorary Fellow.

Sumi Madhok is Associate Professor of Transnational Gender Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, LSE.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEInequalities

Who Needs Experts? The politics and practices of solidarity and volunteer humanitarianism in Greece
Seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Wednesday 12 February 2020, 1 to 2pm, CBG 11.13

Speaker: Dr Armine Ishkanian (Associate Professor and Academic Lead, AFSEE programme and III Research Committee Member)

Chair: Dr Susanne Wessendorf (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute)

Since the 1990s, Greece has been both a transit and destination country for migrants but when 850,000 people entered the country in 2015, the situation was termed a “global humanitarian crisis” and by the early 2016, Greece had become the 3rd largest humanitarian intervention in the world. As international humanitarian NGOs and UN agencies began their operations in Greece, they found themselves working in a crowded humanitarian space that was also populated by domestic NGOs, Greek solidarians, international volunteers, EU agencies (e.g., Frontex) and of course, the Greek government. In this talk, drawing on research conducted in Greece with Isabel Shutes in 2017-2018, I discuss the civil society responses to the “crisis” and focus on the politics and practices of two informal, non-professionalised sets of actors: Greek solidarians and international volunteers. Both international volunteers and Greek solidarians criticised the interventions by professional humanitarians and the humanitarian system more generally, arguing that it was overly bureaucratic, ineffective, and apolitical in the sense that it ignored, and in some instances reproduced, structural inequalities. The interventions by solidarians and international volunteers was distinctive from and took place in parallel to the traditional humanitarian system and is representative of a growing global trend of “DIY” aid. Locating the discussion in critical humanitarian studies and drawing on social action theories, in this talk I address the following questions: why did international volunteers and solidarians become involved in aiding refugees and how did their motivations and actions change over time? And, given their critiques of NGOs and the humanitarian system more generally, how did their respective approaches differ and in what ways was their presence in the humanitarian spaces of Greece significant?

Dr. Armine Ishkanian is an Associate Professor in Social Policy and the Academic Lead of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme, at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE. Her research examines how civil society organisations and social movements engage in policy processes and transformative politics in a number of countries including Armenia, Egypt, Greece, the UK, etc.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMigration

Who Needs Experts? The politics and practices of solidarity and volunteer humanitarianism in Greece

Seminar Series on Migration Ethnicity and Race

Wednesday 12 February 2020, 1 to 2pm, CBG 11.13

Speaker: Dr Armine Ishkanian (Associate Professor and Academic Lead, AFSEE programme and III Research Committee Member)

Chair: Dr Susanne Wessendorf (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute)

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMigration

Capital and Ideology
Public Event

Thursday 06 February 2020, 6.30pm to 8pm, Old Theatre, Old Building

Speaker: Professor Thomas Piketty (Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics)

Chair: Minouche Shafik (LSE Director)

In the epic successor to one of the most important books of the century, Thomas Piketty challenges us revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. Join us for this event at which Thomas will discuss his new book, Capital and Ideology.

LSE alumnus Thomas Piketty is Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of numerous articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, Explorations in Economic History, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, and of a dozen books. He has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income and wealth, and political conflict. In particular, he is the initiator of the recent literature on the long run evolution of top income shares in national income (now available in the World Inequality Database). These works have led to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets, and to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution. He is also the author of the international best-seller Capital in the 21st Century.

Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

It’s Slippery at the Top: churn and anxiety amongst elite families Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 04 February 2020, 12.30pm to1.45pm, FAW 9.05

Speaker: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

This paper takes as a starting point the apparent paradox in the behaviour of elite families who strive to accumulate more and more wealth, fearing to lose their position at the top and slip down the inequality curve. To unpack this contradiction the paper explores the fundamental problem that all elite families face, or rather are told they face, by their advisers: the issue of ‘generational algebra’.

Luna Glucksberg is Research Fellow at III. She is an urban anthropologist looking at inequality and socio-economic stratification in contemporary society. She has worked extensively on elites and how they reproduce; on the roles of women and family offices in the reproduction of dynastic families; and on how philanthropy can be used by elites to strengthen their own family dynamics.

Tackling the Care Crisis, Challenging Global Inequality

Public Event - This is a non-ticketed event, on a first come first served basis

Tuesday 28 January 2020, 6.30pm to 8pm, LSE Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House

Speakers: Sarah Bedford (Head of Social Policy, New Economics Foundation), Daniel Button (Senior Researcher, New Economics Foundation), Anam Parvez (Senior Research and Policy Advisor on Gender Justice, Oxfam), Dr Fenella Porter (Co-Director, Women's Rights and Gender Justice, Oxfam), Soledad Salvador (Economist, Center for Development Studies)

Chair: Beverley Skeggs (III Research Theme Convenor and AFSEE Academic Advisor International Inequalities Institute)

Economic inequality is out of control. It is also deeply gendered and based on a flawed and sexist economic model. While a small number of elite are unimaginably rich, at the other end of the economy are a multitude of carers putting in billions of hours of care work for free or with poverty wages. This invaluable work done mainly by women is happening behind the scenes in homes and communities around the world. Yet this system of unpaid and under-paid care work props up the economy and effectively lets companies and the State off the hook through low wages, inadequate investment and services, and low corporate taxation. Following the World Economic Forum in Davos and the launch of Oxfam’s latest inequality report, this session will hear new research from Oxfam and the New Economic Foundation on who cares, the looming and deepening care crisis, and bold solutions to address care in different parts of the world.

Sarah Bedford heads up social policy and work at New Economics Foundation. She is currently leading projects on social action and the future of adult social care.

Daniel Button is a Senior Researcher at New Economics Foundation (NEF). His work covers health and care – focusing particularly on health inequalities and the role of community control, participation and co-production in public services and social change.

Anam Parvez is a Senior Research and Policy Advisor on Gender Justice at Oxfam and a co-author of the report "Time to Care: Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis". Her research focuses on women's economic empowerment and care, social norms and ending violence against women and girls.

Dr Fenella Porter’s background is in Gender and International Development, Global Labour and Trade Union Studies. Her work has included academic research and teaching, and extensive work with NGOs, women’s organisations and trade unions, both in the UK and internationally. She is a member of several professional and activist networks and associations, and is currently a trustee of Womankind Worldwide.

Soledad Salvador is a Uruguayan economist. She is a member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (CIEDUR) and a researcher in the Development and Gender Area. She focuses on issues of gender inequalities in the labor market and also coordinates the project "Promoting the economic empowerment of women through better policies.

Pulling Away? A social analysis of economic 'elites' in the UK

Public Event

Wednesday 22 January 2020, 6.30pm to 8.00pm, Auditorium, Centre Building

Speakers: Professor Lee Elliot Major ( Professor of Social Mobility, University of Exeter and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE), Dr Sam Friedman (Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Director of the MSc Inequalities and Social Science), Dr Katharina Hecht (Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Fellow at LSE III)

Chair: Professor Mike Savage (III Director)

This event will launch a report from a research project at the International Inequalities Institute supported by the Sutton Trust to investigate whether British elites are pulling ahead, not just economically but also socially.

Economic research has demonstrated that the richest 1 per cent in terms of income in the UK have increased their relative advantage since the 1980s but we know less about whether their social mobility and self-identities are becoming more exclusive and hence whether there is a more general process of ‘elites pulling away’.

Lee Elliot Major (@Lem_Exeter) is Professor of Social Mobility, University of Exeter and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE.

Sam Friedman (@SamFriedmanSoc) is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, LSE.

Katharina Hecht is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute (III).

Mike Savage (@MikeSav47032563) is Martin White Professor of Sociology at LSE and Director of the International Inequalities Institute.

The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEWealth

The Wealth Inequality of Nations: exploring and explaining cross-national differences in wealth

Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 21 January 2020, 12.30pm to 1.45pm, FAW9.05

Speaker: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE International Inequalities Institute)

Comparative research on income inequality has produced several coherent frameworks to study the institutional determinants of income stratification. In contrast, no such framework and much less empirical evidence exist to explain cross-national differences in wealth inequality. This situation is particularly lamentable as cross-national patterns of inequality in wealth diverge sharply from those in income. This talk seeks to pave the way for new institutional explanations of cross-national differences in wealth inequality by tracing them to the influence of different wealth components.

Nora Waitkus is a researcher at the International Inequalities Institute and is a sociologist looking at inequality and socio-economic stratification in contemporary capitalist societies.