Sorting People into Kinds. Perspectives on Human Differentiation.
About the Symposium
Since July 2021, the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) Human Differentiation has been working towards the aim of studying a
fundamental cultural and social phenomenon: the perpetual categorical differentiation by and of humans, e.g., based on nationality,
ethnicity, religion, age, gender, achievement or sexual orientation.
These are the means via which societies can classify their `human material' (Simmel 1908) and assign them their social affiliations, and,
moreover, delineate other entities such as animals and artefacts such as robots.
The primary goal of the first four years of our research was to accumulate and condense all our diverse research projects – spanning the fields of American studies, anthropology, linguistics, media and theatre studies, sociology, and social psychology – into analytical
tools for studying human differentiation in general and producing a first version of an encompassing theory of sorting people into kinds alongside other forms of social differentiation such as functional (roles), positional (status), or relational (e.\,g., couples, families,
networks) differentiation. Thus, the lion share of our work was comprised of comparing diverse forms of human differentiation in
different social contexts, discourses, and situations, in countries all over the world and in various time frames
At this symposium, as the highpoint of our first phase of research, we wish to discuss and compare the results of our `comparatistic' of human differentiation with the most prominent international experts theorising and researching such phenomena. Alongside talks from prominent experts and CRC members on race, language, migration, mobility, politics, the keynote talks will be held by:
- Antony Appiah, NYU
- Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
- Loïc Wacquant, UC Berkeley
- and Eviatar Zerubavel, Rutgers University, NJ
Conference Dinner
The conference dinner will be held at Heiliggeist located in the town centre in Rentengasse 2. Any bus or tram that goes to Schillerplatz (e.g, tramline 53) takes you within a 10 minute walk of the restaurant. There is also the option of taking a bus or tram to Mainz Hbf West/Taubertsberg and changing to bus 60 to Rheingoldhalle/Rathaus, which is only a few
minutes walk away.
All speakers and CRC members are cordially invited and the cost for food and drink is covered. We only have limited capacity for further participants to come to the conference dinner. If you are interested, please mention it in your registration email.
Registration
If you wish to participate in our symposium or have any inquiries, registration is free, but we request that you send an email to the address linked below