Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Shamus Khan

Date: 

Monday, January 23, 2023, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Allison Dining Room

Segregated Inclusion: Elites and the Changing Dynamics of Inequality

Shamus Khan, Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies, Princeton University

Abstract: Exclusion has been the dominant paradigm for explaining durable inequality, leading scholars to argue that the inclusion of subordinated groups into social institutions historically controlled by dominant ones should pave the way to equality. Yet as many institutions have become more inclusive, inequality remains stubbornly persistent. Scholars of durable inequality suggest that in these more inclusive contexts, residual dynamics of exclusion explain residual inequality. We argue that these contexts define a new regime of segregated inclusion, wherein inclusion itself is partially responsible for the production of between-group inequality. The classic paradigm of durable inequality makes it difficult to identify this regime, because it lacks the analytical tools for understanding how inclusion might cause inequality. We propose that while inclusion gives subordinated groups access to material resources they did not previously enjoy, its segregated character legitimizes institutions that dominant groups retain privileged connections to and naturalizes disparities between formerly included and excluded groups, thereby entrenching status inequality.

Shamus Khan is the Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch), which was named a best book of 2020 by NPR. He was a co-principal investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sex and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, was the founding series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Upsala University for “the best sociologist under 40”.