XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

60

Global Inequality in the Era of Generational Conflict

RC02 Economy and Society (host committee)

Language: English

This session will explore issues related to global inequality and its relationship with inter-generational conflict.  Inter-generational conflict is an old story and continues to reemerge in different forms.  In the world revolution of 1968, students and youth proclaimed that those over 30 years of age were not to be trusted.  We have a newly emerging global inter-generational conflict due to globalization. 
The wealth difference between the young and the old has been increasing in recent years.  With increasing precarious employment under global economy, steady improvements in careers along the path of life cannot be easily attained for the younger generation as it had been for the older generations in the core countries.  Ongoing and novel reconfigurations of class relationships reveal growing inequality and formation of a new mass class of the precariat.  The history of generational relations has taken different forms in the Global North and South.  In the Global South, effective welfare states did not usually emerge, and the precariousness of employment was always general situation. 
This session is open to political, economic, social, and psychological aspects of the related theme, including issues of income, wealth, education, environment, equity of youth rights, and migration.   We welcome papers on the past and present social movements and the ways in which youth have mobilized and been mobilized.  A wave of youth mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s needs to be compared with contemporary developments.  The session calls for papers from various frameworks and methodologies and is not limited to aforementioned topics.