Short · Mary Waters on climate displacement, resource scarcity, and the coming test for diversity

Short · Loren Landau on decentering the West in diversity scholarship

Grounding · Sylvie Delacroix on conversational AI and a loss nothing registers

Short · Paul Spoonley on social media as the battleground for diversity's future

Short · Sakura Yamamura on decentering Western frameworks as diversity moves to the Global South

Rethinking democracy for the age of AI and information abundance. A working group of the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science. Click to read Informational Democracy, a Substack public...

Essay · Justin Gest on Why Authoritarian Regimes Outlast Popular Anger — and How Emigration Quietly Shrinks the Constituency for Democracy

Short · Phil Kasinitz on cosmopolitanism, demographic necessity, and national identity

Essay · Matt Sheedy on How New York's First Muslim Mayor Is Rewriting the Stereotypes — and What That Reframing Means for Islam, the Left, and the Politics of Representation

Short · Thomas Faist on the debt we owe future generations

Essay · Atinuke O. Adediran on How Corporate Language Defines, Measures, and Now Erases Racial Categories

Essay · John Borneman on Why Germany's Reunification Story Reveals the Logic of Polarization — and How an "Intersubjective Third" Can Interrupt It

Short · Brenda Yeoh on combining microscopic and telescopic lenses to understand migration

Essay · Magdalena Nowicka on Why We Need Neither More Categories Nor No Categories — but Different Ones That Make State-Produced Inequality Visible

Essay · John Borneman on Why Syria, Lebanon, and Diaspora Communities Reveal That Political Order Is Never About Producing Unity, but About Living With Difference

Essay · Nando Sigona on How Brexit Reshaped Britain's Architecture of Belonging — From Open-Ended Security to Conditional, Bureaucratically Managed Precarity

Short · Johanna Lukate on why social categories mutate rather than disappear

Essay · John Borneman on Why Identity Is Not a Stable Inner Essence — and How the Self Holds Difference Within Itself

Short · Jens Schneider on which differences to keep and which to overcome

Essay · James Hampshire on Why the Neoliberal Order Is Collapsing — and What a Material Politics of Difference Could Look Like After It

Futures of Difference explores how social categories — race, gender, migration — are transforming. Essays & conversations with 30+ leading scholars. A scholarly platform from the Max Planck Institute,...

Essay · Vitor Barros on Why Some Categories Become Communities — and What That Means for Identity, Belonging, and Constructivist Sociology

Short · Miri Song on siloed categories, campus speech, and the need for productive disruption

Futures of Difference explores how social categories — race, gender, migration — are transforming. Essays & conversations with 30+ leading scholars. A scholarly platform from the Max Planck Institute,...

Short · Junjia Ye on why diversification must look beyond Western cities

Short · Dan Hiebert on black swan events and the limits of predicting diversity's future

Michèle Lamont — how imagined futures create real inequality. From Futures of Difference at Schloss Ringberg.

Podcast · featuring Ann Phoenix on Psychosocial Identity, Intersectionality, and Social Complexity

Essay · Nancy Foner on How Jews and Italians Became White, Why Today’s Immigrants Face a Different Path, and What History Reveals About Racial Change

Futures of Difference explores how social categories — race, gender, migration — are transforming. Essays & conversations with 30+ leading scholars. A scholarly platform from the Max Planck Institute,...