SO488      Half Unit
Social Scientific Analysis of Inequalities

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The course will consider interdisciplinary approaches to inequality, focusing on (a) how inequality can be conceptualised and explained, (b) how it can be measured and (c) ethical and political issues. Topics to be covered include patterns and trends in economic inequalities; gender, ethnicity, class and age; cultural aspects of inequality; social and intergenerational mobility; global and comparative perspectives; media representation of inequalities; ethical and philosophical approaches; the impact of government, law and social policy.

This course might use Cadmus for submitting assessments. This platform is currently being evaluated by LSE for AI-resilient assessment. For more information, visit Cadmus Assessment Edit Tracking - Guidance for Students.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

This course is usually delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in AT.

It is divided into blocks of related lectures and linked seminars.

Essay

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

• Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2016)
• Piketty, T.  A Short History of Equality (Harvard University Press, 2022)
• Hartley Dean and Lucinda Platt, Social Advantage and Disadvantage (Oxford, 2016)
• O'Neil, C. 2016 Weapons of Math Destruction. London: Allen Lane
• Hickel, J. (2017) The Divide: A Brief Guild to Global Inequality and its Solutions. William Heinemann. London.
• Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women: The Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York. Autonomedia.
• Savage, M., (2021) The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard UP).

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in January

Attendance at all classes and submission of all set coursework is required.