Scholars from around the world came to New York for the Stone Center’s intensive summer workshop.
The Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality held its fourth intensive summer workshop on inequality earlier this month, drawing a diverse group of students and faculty. The workshop was attended by 100 participants, mostly Ph.D. students and early-career scholars, doubling the number of attendees in past years. They arrived from several universities based in the New York City metropolitan area, from across the U.S., and from several countries, including Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K.
The week-long workshop, “Inequality by the Numbers,” took a broad approach to the study of socio-economic inequalities, covering disparities in income, wealth, education, social mobility, and happiness. Drawing on a range of mostly quantitative methods, the instructors looked at inequalities through multiple lenses — such as gender, class, and race — and assessed differences within New York City, across the United States, and globally.
“This was the largest and the most interdisciplinary class in its four-year history,” said Professor Leslie McCall (Sociology, Political Science), who directed this year’s workshop and was one of the 19 instructors. “It was precisely the kind of informed conversation across disciplines, forms of inequality, and generations of researchers that is much needed, both inside and outside the academy.”
The instructors included top scholars in in the field of inequality research, including Graduate Center professors Richard Alba (Sociology), Ruth Milkman (Sociology), Paul Krugman (Economics), who is also a senior scholar at the Stone Center, and Janet C. Gornick (Political Science, Sociology), who is director of the Stone Center.