Social Inequality Unthought. Exposing Blind Spots through Views from Below

Desigualdad social reconsiderada – descubriendo puntos ciegos a través de vistas desde abajo

 On the basis of arguments put forth by gender studies, dependency/world-system approaches as well as by present-day Latin American postcolonial theories, the paper pleads for a global sociology of social inequality premised on three substantive correctives of the mainstream social inequality research: First, a shift from the focus on the nation-state as sole unit of analysis to a global focus encompassing worldwide center periphery relations alongside nationwide and regional inequalities and the connections between them; second, a systematic and explicit engagement with the theories of social change implicit in concepts of social inequality and the conclusions entailed for the corresponding definition of modernity and the modern; and third, an emphasis on the dynamics behind the emergence of categories along which inequality structures were historically constructed, i.e., on processes of othering such as gendering, racialization, and ethnicization, rather than static categories such as gender, race, and ethnicity.

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