Moralities In Turbulent Times: Ideological Narratives, Inequality, and the Struggle over Social Worth

This session speaks directly to the Congress 2027 theme by examining how moral conflicts become socially organised, politically intensified, and symbolically legitimised in contexts of crisis, inequality, and uncertainty.

Rather than treating moralities as fixed values or norms, the session approaches moral life as a struggle over ideological narratives, symbolic power, and social worth. It invites papers that analyse how persons, practices, institutions, and futures are classified as worthy or unworthy, legitimate or illegitimate, responsible or blameworthy. We are interested in how moral claims, outrage, responsibility, virtue, innocence, guilt, hypocrisy, and deservingness are mobilised to gain recognition, defend privilege, challenge domination, or expose silenced injuries.

The session foregrounds the relationship between moralities, ideology, inequality, and moral authority. How do class, habitus, institutions, and access to economic, cultural, symbolic, and moral capital shape who can appear responsible, credible, virtuous, or trustworthy? How do narratives acquire legitimacy while others are dismissed as resentful, excessive, or incompetent?

We also invite contributions that conceptualise moral conflict as a discursive potlatch: an unequal economy of hearing, acknowledgement, and response, in which being heard operates as a socially mediated and unequally distributed gift. Struggles over morality are therefore also struggles over audibility, recognition, and dignity.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and comparative papers addressing moralisation, social worth, performed virtue, symbolic violence, recognition, and audibility in relation to democratic erosion, populism, ecological crisis, war, migration, postcolonial conflict, gender backlash, technology, academic disputes, and inequalities. The session follows the standard open paper format, with 4–5 presentations and discussion.