The Conference

Addressing Social Inequalities in the Global North and South

On behalf of the Organising Committee, it is an honour to welcome you to the RC28 Spring Meeting 2026. This academic meeting is proposed as a pluralistic space for dialogue, collaboration and critical reflection on one of the most urgent and persistent problems of our contemporary societies: social inequality. We bring together perspectives from different regions of the world in the conviction that a comparative, transnational and multidimensional perspective can provide the analytical keys necessary to understand, analyse and transform our social realities.
 

This scientific conference is part of the academic work, with the results of a well-established trajectory, of RC28 Social Stratification of the International Sociological Association, and where we count on the support of the European INCASI2 project  (International Network for Comparative Analysis of Social Inequalities) for its organisation. We hope that this meeting will serve as a forum for rigorous and creative collaboration to address the epistemic, theoretical and methodological challenges and policy proposals that the study of social inequalities poses on a global scale.
 

The ISA RC28 brings a strong historical and comparative international perspective to the analysis of social stratification and mobility. Its emphasis on rigorous methodology, longitudinal analysis and cross-national comparison of the various dimensions of social inequalities has made a crucial contribution to understanding how inequalities are structured, change and are reproduced, as well as the opportunities for social mobility in different socio-economic configurations. The participation of established researchers and academic networks, together with promising young researchers, guarantees analytical excellence and offers the possibility of building bridges between global sociology and the concrete realities of the Global South.
 

In this sense, the INCASI2 project constitutes a scientific network that pays particular attention to the intersectional, intertemporal and interterritorial dynamics of social inequalities from an international perspective. With researchers from 29 organisations in 6 European and 7 Latin American countries, it studies and integrates different dimensions such as education, occupation, income, gender, social mobility, migration, life courses and public policies. This model proposes a relational and dynamic approach to inequalities, linking structural, institutional and biographical factors in the study of social reality. The academic conference aims to be a space of encounter and mutual learning between the global North and South. Comparative analysis is a powerful epistemological tool to denaturalise the given, to avoid ethnocentric views, to reveal the mechanisms of reproduction of inequalities on a global scale and to explore proven and viable alternatives in public policy. We aim to build a global conversation that acknowledges regional specificities but also highlights structural connections and common trajectories.
 

We invite all participants to use this space to share reflections and methodologies, compare empirical findings, and build social networks.
 

The themes suggested below are an invitation to participate in the conference with papers that make regional or cross-national comparisons, but the conference is also open to all contributions that characterise RC28:
• Intergenerational social mobility in global contexts
• Comparative analytical models for the analysis of social inequality
• Interactions between class, gender and race/ethnicity in the production of inequalities
• Labour market segmentation and occupational trajectories
• Education, stratification and reproduction of inequality
• Gender, care and structural inequalities
• Social policies and welfare
• Youth, precariousness and social uncertainty
• Territorial, ethnic and linguistic inequalities
• International migration
• Digital inequality and exclusion in contemporary societies
• Comparative and intersectional methodologies for the study of inequality
• Social innovation and co-creation of inclusive public policies
• Comparative perspectives between the Global North and South in social theory on inequalities

Participation in RC28 meetings requires active RC28 membership. If you would like to become a member, please visit this page
https://sites.google.com/site/rc28hp/join-us?authuser=0 or contact the RC28 Secretary/Treasurer at  rc28.foundation@gmail.com .

CALL FOR PAPERS