We live in societies fractured from top to bottom by corrosive and scarring inequalities.

These cover multiple axes: notably including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and geography – but this list is far from exhaustive. From its founding moments, the discipline of sociology has prized its capacity to dissect and analyse social divisions, and to understand how inequality is not just some peripheral social phenomenon but lies at the heart of social life itself. This keynote panel brings together three eminent sociologists to reflect on how we can use the sociological imagination to make sense of contemporary challenges and illuminate our current lives. 

Meet our speakers and chair

Professor Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology in the Department of International Relations in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. While her research interests are primarily in the area of postcolonial and global historical sociology, she is also interested in the intersection of the social sciences more generally with recent work in postcolonial and decolonial studies. Her recent work addresses the political economy of race and colonialism.

Professor Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has researched how we evaluate social worth across societies, the role of cultural processes in fostering inequality, symbolic and social boundaries, and the evaluation of knowledge, as well as topics such as dignity, stigma, racism, class cultures, collective well-being, social resilience, and social change. 

Professor Mike Savage is Professorial Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute. Mike has long standing interests in analysing social stratification and inequality. He 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. 

Dr Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at LSE. Her research on global mobility, nationalism, and Japanese politics has been translated into over a dozen languages.