Exploring how race, gender, migration and other social categories are contested and reconfigured in contemporary societies worldwide.
Find essays and more at: https://futuresofdifference.substack.com/
Steven Vertovec, Futures of Difference
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Building on his first essay in my Futures of Difference series, anthropologist John Borneman asks: does identity reveal an authentic inner self – or does it just fit us into reductive boxes? His answer: difference already lives within the self.
"Who is imagined as part of the future, & who is being left out as categories mutate?" In our latest FoD short, social psychologist Johanna Lukate pushes back on one of our most comfortable assumptions - that putting "post-" in front of a category means we've moved beyond the power it once carried
Are we already living in a dystopia? The sociologist Miri Song (Kent / LSE) thinks – in some sense – yes. Watch her answer in our short video series, which is part of my Futures of Difference Initiative.
At our Futures of Difference Workshop, Ann Phoenix offered a synthesis I keep returning to: we may share a hopeful narrative about diversity, but we rarely stage our perspectives against each other. This connects directly to my launch essay on shifting categories of difference. Both are linked below
What turns a category into a community? In a new essay for our Futures of Difference series, @barrosvitor.bsky.social Barros takes up a question many of us face: how to make sense of the strong identities driving public life today. He offers a conceptual move worth thinking through.
Migration researcher Jens Schneider (University of Osnabrück) offers a simple but consequential intervention: not all differences are the same. Watch the latest episode of Futures of Difference here. #FuturesOfDifference #SocialDifference #Sociology
New on FoD: in a timely piece for our Initiative, James Hampshire (Sussex) reads Mamdani's NY victory as a path beyond the neoliberal compromise on migration: a material politics of difference that brings people of different races, ethnicities & faiths together around shared economic interests.
Steven Vertovec, Futures of Difference
Steven Vertovec, Futures of Difference
Steven Vertovec, Futures of Difference
We are happy to share this milestone for evidence-based migration research. Congratulations to the IPM team - and especially to our Managing Director Steven Vertovec, President of the IPM, on the official launch at the Second International Migration Review Forum at the @unitednations1945.bsky.social
Nearly a decade after Brexit, what has actually changed?In a new FoD essay @nandosigona.bsky.social argues that Brexit’s deepest legacy is reshaping belonging. Insecurity has become a feature of governance rather than a by-product via status checks, income thresholds & conditional settlement routes
"Friedman im Gespräch": in der vorletzten Ausgabe dieser Spielzeit spricht Michel Friedman am 18.5. mit @steffenmau.bsky.social und Karin Prien über Deutschland: was bleibt von einer Demokratie, wenn Wähler:innen sich nicht mehr für sie interessieren? es gibt noch Karten im Vorverkauf!
Short · Johanna Lukate on why social categories mutate rather than disappear
Essay · Nando Sigona on How Brexit Reshaped Britain's Architecture of Belonging — From Open-Ended Security to Conditional, Bureaucratically Managed Precarity
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,...
Thank you to everyone who attended last week's launch of the International Panel on Migration. We look forward to expanding our work and connecting with scientists, academics, and the public going forward. Learn more about the IPM at migrationpanel.org.
#migrationscience #ipmlaunch #imrf2026
