2025 Events
Racism and racial justice: 40 years on from the Broadwater Farm riots
Hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science and LSE Students' Union
Wednesday 1 October, 6.30 to 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Old Theatre, Old Building.
Speakers:
Sharon Grant, Founding Trustee, Bernie Grant Arts Centre and Secretary, Bernie Grant Trust
Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society, UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society
Dr Roxana Willis, Assistant Professor in Law, LSE
Chair:
Professor Coretta Phillips, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, LSE Department of Social Policy
Join us to explore the legal, political and community-based racial justice work that emerged 40 years ago from the Broadwater Farm riots, examining methods of resistance that continue to address present-day questions of race, racism and social inequality.
On 6 October 1985, The Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham became the site of one of the most significant moments of civil disobedience in British history. Three men, known as the Tottenham 3, were wrongly convicted and later acquitted for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock after a long campaign for justice.
Four decades after the Broadwater Farm uprising, the events of October 1985 continue to resonate in the ongoing struggle against systemic racism. Marking the riots as a significant moment in Black British history, the event explores the Broadwater Farm Riots in the context of politics, community activism, law and criminology, the media and Black injustice.
Local versus National: The effect of income (mis)perceptions on inequality beliefs and preferences
Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series
Tuesday 30 September, 12.30 - 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. CBG 2.03.
Speaker: Dr Katy Morris, Postdoctoral Fellow, Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University.
People are notoriously bad at estimating their position in the national income distribution. However, national income distributions can mask huge local-level variation. In light of new evidence that suggests people anchor to more immediate reference groups, we investigate whether people have more accurate perceptions of where they sit in the local income distribution and whether local income corrections induce greater change in individual inequality beliefs and preferences. Findings from a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States reveal that perceptions of household position within the local (county) and national income distributions are equally inaccurate, with respondents defaulting to the middle rung of the ladder at both scales. Though not uniformly stronger, we find that local income corrections produce more consistent changes in outcomes such as meritocratic belief and support for redistribution than national ones. These results challenge the received wisdom that the national context is the natural or default reference group.
Asymmetric Information and Market Failure in Bank-NBFC Co-Lending Model
III Seminar
Tuesday 23 September, 1.00 - 2.00pm. In-person seminar. CBG 12.01.
Speaker: Dr Bibekananda Panda, 2025 Subir Chowdhury Visiting Fellow, India Observatory, III
Launched in November 2020, India’s Co-Lending Model (CLM) enables banks and NBFCs to jointly extend credit, blending low-cost capital with agile outreach. Regulatory evolution has expanded CLM’s scope beyond priority sectors, positioning it as a key driver of financial inclusion. Yet, uptake remains modest due to trust deficits and asymmetric information among lending partners. Divergent underwriting standards and risk appetites hinder coordination, distorting credit allocation. Stakeholder perspectives reveal that interoperability and mutual trust are essential to unlock CLM’s full potential. If banks and NBFCs align operational frameworks and embrace collaborative governance, CLM can reshape India’s lending architecture toward inclusive, efficient, and sustainable credit delivery.
Global inequality in historical and comparative perspective
III Event for The III at 10: New Directions in Inequality Research
Friday 19 September 2025, 3.30pm - 4.30pm. In-person and online event. Venue TBC to ticketholders.
Speakers:
Professor Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics, EHESS and the Paris School of Economics
Chair:
Professor Francisco H.G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies, LSE III
In this lecture, Thomas Piketty will discuss recent trends in global inequality and analyze the historical movement toward equality and future prospects for more redistribution. He will present new research produced by the World Inequality Lab.
This will include preliminary results from the Global Justice Project. Combining comparative historical data series from the World Inequality Database with global input-output tables, environmental accounts, labour force surveys and other sources, the Global Justice Project explores what a just distribution of socio-economic and environmental resources could look like at the global level from 2025 to 2100 – both between and within countries – in a way that is compatible with planetary boundaries. The project partly builds on the analysis and proposals set out in Thomas Piketty’s Brief History of Equality, extending them into a broader and more comprehensive global framework.
New directions in inequality research
III Event for The III at 10: New Directions in Inequality Research
Thursday 18 September 2025, 5.30pm - 6.45pm. In-person and online event. Auditorium, LSE Centre Building.
Speakers:
Professor Facundo Alvaredo, Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics;
Professor Steven Durlauf, Director, Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, University of Chicago
Professor Larry Kramer, President and Vice-Chancellor, London School of Economics
Professor Anne Phillips, Emeritus Professor, Department of Government, London School of Economics
Chair:
Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, London School of Economics
If not government, then what? A three-part typology of redistributive preferences
III Event for The III at 10: New Directions in Inequality Research
Thursday 18 September, 9.15am to 10.30am. In-person and online event. Auditorium, LSE Centre Building.
Speaker:
Professor Leslie McCall, Presidential Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center, CUNY and Associate Director, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
Chair:
Professor Fran Tonkiss, Professor of Sociology, LSE
Economic inequality is rising or at high levels in many countries across the globe. This has prompted a large, interdisciplinary and international body of research on public demands for government redistribution through income taxes and transfers. It is typically assumed – but not explicitly tested – that any opposition to government redistribution reflects acceptance of inequality or an individualistic belief in the undeservingness of the poor. We test this assumption directly and add a largely unexamined third possibility (besides government redistribution and individual responsibility): that major institutions and actors in the market sphere should reduce inequality in labor earnings. We find substantial support for this third market responsibility option, especially in advanced market economies such as the United States and Switzerland, where support for government redistribution is comparatively low. In contrast, we find the least support across all countries for the idea that inequality levels are acceptable or mainly the responsibility of the poor.
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Wednesday 11 June 2025, 5.00pm - 6.30pm. In-person and online event. Sheikh Zayed Theatre, LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building.
Speakers:
Lea Ypi, Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Fellow of the British Academy
Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows
Chair: Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute
Join us for this Eva Colorni Memorial Lecture with Lea Ypi and Amartya Sen.
What is moral socialism? "If we seek an answer to the waverer who asks us whether he should be a socialist or not," wrote the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer more than a century ago "we do need Kant’s ethics."
In this lecture, Lea Ypi reflects on the failures of state socialism and global capitalism in the twentieth century and suggests a new way forward. Her account seeks to revive the Enlightenment critique of technocratic reason and is grounded on a universal conception of freedom as moral agency.
Racial justice and wealth inequality: a call for action
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Tuesday 10 June, 6.30pm - 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Marshall Building, 2.08.
Speakers:
Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust
Dr Kojo Koram, Reader in Law, Birkbeck School of Law
Professor Mike Savage, Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III
Mina Mahmoudzadeh, PhD candidate, LSE Department of Sociology
Esiri Bukata, MSc Inequalities and Social Sciences alumna
Chair:
Dr Faiza Shaheen, Distinguished Policy Fellow at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute
Important research over the past decade has exposed stark racial inequalities in wealth ownership, pushing the racial wealth gap to the forefront of today’s inequality debates.
This event marks the launch of ‘Why the UK Racial Wealth Divide Matters: a call for action’, a major new report written by the LSE International Inequalities Institute for the Runnymede Trust. Mike Savage, Mina Mahmoudzadeh, and Esiri Bukata will share key findings from the report, highlighting the vast scale of the racial wealth divide and how it has changed in the context of the booming of wealth assets in recent decades. They will also examine the lasting influence of imperial history, the importance of viewing the UK in a global context, and how the remittance economy both reflects global inequalities and perpetuates the racial wealth divide in the UK. The event will be joined by Runnymede CEO Dr Shabna Begum and Dr Kojo Koram (Birkbeck College), who will reflect on the findings and explore their wider implications for racial justice campaigning.
Together, the speakers will open up a vital conversation on how we confront racialised wealth inequality, and what action is needed to build a fairer future.
Monday 9 June, 3.00 - 4.00pm. In-person event. Old Building, 1.20.
Speaker:
Monique McKenzie, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
Chair:
Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE
The nomenclature of the 'bank of mum and dad' has been used in public discourse to describe this growing reliance of children on their family's financial support well into adulthood. Although currently used as a metaphor for intergenerational transfers, this paper considers whether we can deploy the framing of the familial bank as an analytical framework to understand wealth inequality as a function of familial, rather than individual, wealth. By taking a sociological approach to the family as a bank, we can uncover how income, assets, risk exposures (i.e social factors: relationship breakdown, number of children, health) and operating costs (i.e cost of goods and services, housing costs) contribute to the production of wealth inequality and the ability of families to provide intergenerational transfers to younger family members. To illustrate this framework, this presentation will draw on a series of interviews with parents of young adults about the role of familial support for housing, education and employment between 2022-2023. What emerged from these interviews is that intergenerational transfers depend on whether their parent’s financial portfolios can fund both the parent’s livelihoods now and in retirement, alongside support for their adult children.
Hosted by the Department of Sociology and International Inequalities Institute
Friday 06 June 2025 6.30pm to 8.00pm. In-person event. Old Theatre, Old Building.
Speakers:
Professor Gurminder K Bhambra, Professor of Historical Sociology, University of Sussex
Professor Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Harvard University
Professor Mike Savage, Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute
Chair:
Dr Kristin Surak, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, LSE
We live in societies fractured from top to bottom by corrosive and scarring inequalities.
These cover multiple axes: notably including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and geography – but this list is far from exhaustive. From its founding moments, the discipline of sociology has prized its capacity to dissect and analyse social divisions, and to understand how inequality is not just some peripheral social phenomenon but lies at the heart of social life itself. This keynote panel brings together three eminent sociologists to reflect on how we can use the sociological imagination to make sense of contemporary challenges and illuminate our current lives.
Democracy and the right to protest in the UK
Hosted by the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and the International Inequalities Institute
Monday 24 March 2025 6.30pm to 8.00pm. In-person and online event. LSE Lecture Theatre, Centre Building.
Speakers:
Richard Martin, Assistant Professor of Law, LSE Law School
Sam Nadel, PhD candidate, Department of Social Policy, LSE
Pascale Frazer-Carroll, Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, campaigner and social impact director
Chair:
George Kunnath, Associate Professor (Education) and Lifelong Engagement Lead, AFSEE
Throughout history, protests have been a key tactic for activists and movements to express discontent and push for change.
Today, however, the democratic space for protests and collective mobilisation is rapidly shrinking. From more forceful and frequent crackdowns on protesting to introducing new legislation to restrict protest and prosecute individuals, governments across the world, including the UK, are increasingly finding new ways to suppress protest and silence critical voices.
This panel will discuss why protests matter, what the shrinking of democratic space means for social movements and activists, and what can be done to protect freedom of speech and the right to protest.
Where do we draw the line: exploring an extreme wealth line
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Thursday 6 March 2025, 6.30 - 8.00pm. In-person and online event. LSE Old Theatre, Old Building.
Speakers:
Fernanda Balata, Political Economist, New Economics Foundation
Professor Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Professor of Law, UCLouvain and SciencesPo (Paris);
Professor Ingrid Robeyns, Author and Chair in Ethics of Institutions, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University;
Gary Stevenson, Writer and Economist
Chair:
Dr Tania Burchardt, Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) and Deputy Director of STICERD
Extreme wealth concentration is under the microscope as societies around the world grapple with the challenges of inequality, climate breakdown and democratic backsliding. Yet wealth concentration continues to deepen, with some predictions that we will see the world’s first trillionaires within a decade. Is now the time to draw a line and ask: when does wealth become extreme wealth? And what risks does extreme wealth pose?
And even if we accept the moral intuition behind an "extreme wealth line", where exactly would that line be set? Should we draw the line based on the social and environmental harms caused, or community expectations? Can we have just one line or do we need multiple lines depending on harms and contexts?
Our panel draws together leading thinkers and practitioners on the ideas to discuss the viability of an "extreme wealth line" and what it can contribute to addressing the pressing issues of our time.
Peak Injustice: solving Britain's inequality crisis
Co-hosted with LSE Department of Sociology
Monday 24 February 2025 6.30pm - 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Old Theatre, Old Building.
Speakers:
Professor Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford
Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive, New Economics Foundation and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III
Professor Kitty Stewart, Professor of Social Policy and Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE)
Polly Toynbee, Journalist and writer
Chair:
Professor Aaron Reeves, Professor of Sociology, LSE
Why has absolute deprivation continued to grow in the UK? What role does high inequality play in understanding how we have got to the point of peak injustice?
With child mortality rising in the UK and a majority of parents with three or more children going to bed hungry, Danny Dorling looks to the future, highlighting the challenges ahead and identifying solutions for change.
Wealth, poverty and enduring inequality: let's talk wealtherty
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Wednesday 19 February 2025 6.00pm - 7.30pm. In-person and online event. Room 1.08, Marshall Building.
Speakers:
Dr Sarah Kerr, Research Fellow in Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Research Programme, LSE III
Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and Professor, Department of Social Policy, LSE
Dr Rajiv Prabhakar, Senior Lecturer in Personal Finance at the Open University
Frank Soodeen, Director of Communications and Public Engagement, Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Chair:
Professor Mike Savage, Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Martin White Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE
Join us for the launch of Sarah Kerr's new book, in which she undertakes an experiment. Starting from the premise that continuing to centre poverty encourages researchers and policymakers alike to 'look down' she contributes to a strand of social policy and sociological literature that asks: what happens if we 'look up'?
Does class inequality still matter?
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Tuesday 04 February 2025 6.30pm to 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Old Theatre, Old Building.
Speakers:
Zarah Sultana, Independent MP for Coventry South
Professor Mike Savage, Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Martin White Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE
Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior Economics Commentator, The Guardian
Clare MacGillivray, Director, Making Rights Real and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity
Chair:
Dr Faiza Shaheen, Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III
It is ten years since the seminal Social Class in the 21st Century was published. We will revisit the findings, ask if the trends have changed, why class seems to have fallen off the agenda, and what we can do to build solidarity in this new political era.
The research was undertaken by a team of sociologists from across the country over several years and reignited the conversation about the British class system amongst academics, the media, politicians and most importantly the great British public. It composed seven classes that reflected the unequal distribution of three kinds of capital: economic (inequalities in income and wealth); social (the different kinds of people we know) and cultural (the ways in which our leisure and cultural preferences are exclusive).
Ten years on, this free public event will be held at LSE, where Social Class in the 21st Century was first launched in November 2015. This event will again question and open the continued difficult debate about the British Class system. Our panel will ask - does social class still matter in Britain in the 21st century?
Power to the people
Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute
Monday 27 January 2025 6.30pm to 8.00pm. In-person and online event. Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House.
Speakers:
Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive, New Economics Foundation and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III
Jo Swinson, Director, Partners for a New Economy (P4NE) and Visiting Professor, Cranfield University
Lysa John, Executive Director, Atlantic Institute
Chair: Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and Professor, Department of Social Policy, LSE
In 2024, two billion people headed to the polls in some 50 countries around the world. But the drama of these elections risks obscuring just how fragile the foundations of democracy have become. A political system that is geared towards short-term wins, run by politicians that few of us trust, is failing to address complex global problems. Many of us feel disempowered, disillusioned and distrustful.
In this talk Danny Sriskandarajah discusses his new book Power to the People. Drawing on his extensive experience in leading civil society organisations around the globe, he sets out his radical blueprint for change. From giving democracy a participatory makeover to public ownership of social media spaces, and from re-energising co-operatives to creating a people’s chamber at the United Nations, he presents a range of inspiring ideas for how we can reclaim our power and change the world.