Our inaugural project, running from 2011 to 2013, probes the distances between people and places — be they economic, social, culture, etc. — and how those distances are mobilized for the advantage of some, and often, to the disadvantage of the many.
The questions at hand are not just “is there inequality?” (there has always been inequality) but “how much inequality?”, “What is the character of that inequality?”, “Why do people regard certain kinds of inequality as fair, other kinds as unjust?”
Even before the current economic crisis, we were taxed to grapple with the paradox that as many kinds of inequality appear to wane, others seem sharply on the rise, as between the super rich and the middling classes, older people and younger, and among nations, visibly within the European Union, whose states all once seemed to converge around a high Euro-standard of living. Today’s “Indignés” and “Occupy Wall Street” movements call attention to new economic, social and intergenerational inequalities within the western world, resonating with the protest movements around the Mediterranean and with the crisis in expectations of rising middle classes in China and India.
At the CGC|E at Reid Hall, studying Inequality|Inequalities is a scholarly project, but also an ethical one: we have to explore not just what relations are like, but what they should be like. To this end, the CGC|E is hosting a range of initiatives, starting with the new undergraduate research program that starts in January 2012, whose centerpiece is the Colloquium on The Rise and Crises of Middle Classes in Global and Historical Perspective.
In the fall and spring there are the Thursday brown bag seminars cosponsored with the Columbia-EHESP Master in Public Health, which examine inequalities in public health around the world. The Color of Jazz fall lecture series has brought to the forefront social, racial, and political inequalities seen through the production, representation, and instrumentation of Jazz on a global level. This series was created by Columbia Professor Robert O’Meally, one of the world’s leading jazz experts, with Sylvie Laurent, W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard, and promoted jointly with the Columbia-Penn Program and the M.A. in French Studies in a Global Context. Our first cooperation with the Alliance Program took place on November 7-8: The One Percent: Contemporary Sociological Perspectives on Euro-American Elites was a workshop organized jointly by Columbia faculty Shamus Khan and Dorrian Warner with colleagues of the CNRS and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, featuring participants from America and across Europe.
In Spring 2012, we are starting our outreach series on Global Social Crises / Gaping Inequalities, working with the Blinken European Institute, The Committee on Global Thought, Earth Institute-IDDRI, and other European partners, and coordinating events with the New York campus of Columbia University. In the late spring, we look forward to a special rendering for Reid Hall’s venerable space of the MoMA show on “Foreclosure,” curated by Columbia art historian Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, and Columbia Architecture Professor Reinhold Martin, in addition to other programming by Columbia professors with their European and global networks.