5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The intergenerational structure of modern societies has been thematized as the determining condition of social differentiation between elders and children. Under the liberal capitalistic system of welfare societies, new grammars of duties, rights and reciprocities, have been established between generations. However, worldwide, such a modern institutionalization of what it is to be a child, and what it is to be an adult, must be scrutinized and problematized since in other parts of the world coloniality came together with processes of modernization. The modern generational order, regarded as an objective condition of both cultural transmission and social change, established a hierarchy where children are positioned under the tutelage and governance of adults. This adultcentric structure has remained solid even in the era of children’s rights, framing intergenerational relations as a site of domination for the young. This becomes instructive about how our social practices fare in terms of justice and equality among generations. In this session we propose to question intergenerational justice and to problematize how children have (less) access to the goods of our society and how knowledge is unevenly distributed among age classes.

This session invites empirical and theoretical papers that study the ways in which age/generational inequality is materialized in different social practices and contexts, ensuing perverse effects in how present democracies operate. It also calls for studies that discuss how children challenge those injustices in intra- and intergenerational alliances ­–and maybe with non-human others–, hopefully leaving some traces to radicalize democracy and strengthen it.