Rethinking Social Class and Classification In Times of Global Crises

We currently face multiple crises, such as those related to capitalist accumulation, labor and care work, coloniality, democracies, equality, the environment, university and techno-scientific systems, among many others. These crises involve intense conflicts, even wars. Both crises and conflicts have acquired global dynamics and frameworks, linked in complex ways to local and national scales, that is, to specific regional variations and logics. In this context, social class appears to have powerfully re-emerged as a mode of classifying the social. This session asks how the category of social class conditions the conceptualizing of contemporary crises, informs diagnoses of associated conflicts, and shapes proposals concerning possible emancipatory solutions. Other social classifications, including ethnicity and race, gender and age, culture and region, have been also depicted as fundamental to understanding and transforming current global crises. These alternative social classifications are regularly combined with class, such as in theories of intersectionality and interpretations of populism, while other explanations of social mobilizations and collective identifications tend to exclude class. In this session, we invite proposals that rethink social class, in both theoretical and practical terms, as a key issue for confronting our times of global crises and their urgent conflicts over hierarchies, exploitations, identities, and ideologies. We are particularly interested in how this rethinking of class takes distinctive forms in accordance with different regions and perspectives, as well as whether a rethinking of this order implies a profound reflection on other ways of classifying and about the process of classification itself.