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Social Exclusion and Power
Social Exclusion and Power
Tuesday, 12 July 2016: 10:45-12:15
Location: Hörsaal 45 (Main Building)
RC35 Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (host committee) Language: English
Identified as a key concern by European social policy in the late 1980s, social exclusion has since become a widely used concept in various fields of sociology. Generally referring to the ways in which individuals or groups are blocked from participating in social practices and access to rights and resources, it has been linked to the notions of underclass (especially in England) and precariousness (at first in France) within the sociology of poverty and of inequality as well as to broader theoretical concerns about the functioning of modern society in systems theory (primarily in Germany).
All these different research contexts share the assumption that, in order to be adequate to contemporary society, classical hierarchical models of social stratification have to at least be supplemented by vertical approaches along the lines of an in/out distinction, shifting attention to those that have been “cut-off from society” and are deemed “superfluous”.
But to what extent is the concept of social exclusion able to do justice to central concerns of the “older” hierarchical approaches to social stratification related to power? This session invites conceptual, theoretical and empirical papers addressing the question of how mechanisms of social exclusion are linked to such processes as domination and exploitation. Additional discussion of further theoretical ambiguities of the notion of social exclusion like its relation to inclusion, to integration and to the sometimes narrow focus put on participation in the labour market is welcome too.
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