Sorting People into Kinds. Perspectives on Human Differentiation.

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 artifacts 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 Studies, Princeton
Loïc Wacquant, UC Berkeley
and Eviatar Zerubavel, Rutgers University, NJ