As the UK prepares for the 2021 Census, a student-led conference at LSE will discuss how – and why – we categorise different groups in society, and who is left out.

This conference interrogates the ways in which modes of categorisation, classification, and ‘legibility’ manifest through the production of knowledge and social science research methods. It explores the legacies of dominant methodological approaches to conducting census and surveys, highlighting the colonial histories that underpin their use, as well as their impact on research today.

Panel one, 13:30-14:30

Counting the work that doesn’t count: finding ways to research the invisible work of home, Rosie Cox

The political borders of the statistical 'Others': mobility, race and gender in survey data on migrants, Marion Lieutaud

Panel two, 14.45-15.45

Colonial Classifications and Social Identities in South Asia, George Kunnath

Number in the postcolonial imagination: the development of scientific sample surveys in India, Poornima Paidipaty

Keynote: Inequality and the politics of national classification, 16.00-16.30

Mike Savage will introduce themes from his new book ‘The Return of Inequality: social change and the weight of history’. He will discuss how escalating economic and social inequalities are associated with reviving imperial projects, and that this is associated with a politics of ‘global national ranking’ tied in with an Anglophone scientistic framing.

Discussion, 16.30-17.00

Meet the speakers

Rosie Cox is Professor of Geography and Deputy Dean for the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy. She joined Birkbeck in 2003 after 10 years at Coventry University. Her research focuses on home and particularly paid work within the home and she has published widely in this area, including on paid domestic workers, au pairs and most recently paid handymen. She is currently Chair of the Gender and Feminist Geography Research Group (GFGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society, an editor of the journal GEO: Geography and Environment and co-editor of the Routledge book series 'Home'.

George Kunnath is a social anthropologist. His work focuses on the everyday world of Dalit and Adivasi communities living amidst India’s Maoist insurgency and counterinsurgency; on caste and class relations; relationality of poverty, inequality, conflict and development; and research ethics. At the International Inequalities Institute, he is engaged in a research on the politics of caste-based inequalities among the South Asian diasporas in the UK. Kunnath’s current work also includes a comparative research on armed conflicts and peace processes, focusing on the FARC in Colombia and the Maoist movement in India.

Marion Lieutaud will submit at the end of March 2021 her PhD thesis conducted at the LSE department of Sociology. Her PhD quantitatively investigates the connection between migration journeys, couple formation and the gender division of labour in couples living in the UK and France. The thesis further considers how the design of survey data that overrepresents migrants is a highly political process, in which migration and racial ‘otherness’ are rendered almost indissociable, while themes of migration and gender are largely segregated. She has also conducted research with Prof. Vincent Dubois on the political treatment of welfare fraud in France, using computational methods to quantify the evolution of the narrative over time, and she is involved in a research project with Prof. Paul Segal on inequalities in relation to care and domestic workers. She is an associated researcher at the Centre March Bloch in Berlin, and a member of the Leverhulme doctoral seminar on inequalities. In June 2021, she will join the Sozial Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin as a post-doctoral researcher in the ‘Work and Care’ research unit.  

Poornima Paidipaty is currently an LSE Fellow in Inequalities. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her work examines the intersections of decolonisation, governance and modern social science. She helped lead and organize the Measures of Inequality project at Cambridge University, which explores how metrics and statistical frameworks have been central to our historical and political understanding of equity and fairness. This work is part of an ongoing interest in large-scale state sciences (logistics, cartography, statistics, demography and engineering) and their historical implications for economic disparity and democratic politics in South Asia. She is currently writing a book on the history of large-scale sampling and state-builidng in Nehruvian India. Prior to the LSE, Dr. Paidipaty was the Philomathia Fellow in History at Cambridge and a member of the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.

Mike Savage joined the London School of Economics in 2012 and is now Martin White Professor (the title traditionally awarded to the most senior professor in the Department). He was Head of Department between 2013 and 2016. Between 2015 and 2020 he was Director of LSE’s International Inequalities Institute. His role at LSE builds on his long standing interests in analysing social stratification and inequality. Mike Savage has played a major role in the revival of the sociology of social class in recent decades so that it has become once more a central plank of the discipline.