Conference "The Politics of Equality"

Submission Deadline: 1 November 2026

Call for Contributions under the topic “The Politics of Equality: Ethnographic and Qualitative Perspectives on Merit, Difference, and Power in Academia" for the International Conference at the Department for Cultural Anthropology/Cultural History at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, 23 – 26 June 2027.

Over the past decades, policies and practices concerned with equality – often institutionalised under headings such as equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), particularly in the United States – have become key instruments of contemporary academic governance. We use “politics of equality” as an intentionally broad analytical term that encompasses formal policies as well as the wider negotiations, practices and power relations through which equality is given meaning. Rather than presupposing a fixed understanding of equality, the term directs attention to how equality, equity, fairness, difference and inclusion are differently understood, translated, enacted and contested in academic settings. The politics of equality do not unfold as a linear story of institutional progress. Instead, initiatives are repeatedly challenged, reframed or rolled back. In various national contexts, appeals to meritocracy, neutrality and academic freedom are mobilised to question or dismantle equality and diversity programmes. Recent legal and political developments frame equality politics as undue political intervention and reassert the claim that “only merit should count.” Debates regarding affirmative action and DEI initiatives in the United States do so most trenchantly, but attempts to roll back such achievements are also evident elsewhere, as illustrated by a draft bill introduced by the far-right Alternative for Germany in the parliament of the federal state of Thuringia.

Against this background, the conference starts from the well-established premise that equality and diversity politics are not solely emancipatory instruments, but complex practices that fundamentally reshape academic institutions, professional identities, and systems of knowledge as a whole. While research on higher education has produced important insights into the implementation and effects of equality and diversity policies, qualitative and especially ethnographic work remains comparatively scarce. This is not surprising, given the often-discrete character of decision making at universities, where crucial negotiations unfold in committee rooms, informal conversations, and generally “backstage”, with documentation generally focused on decisions but not process. Long-term ethnographic engagement – with its emphasis on participant observation, interviews, and socially empathetic proximity to institutional actors – is, however, particularly well-suited to access these hidden arenas and to illuminate the everyday practices, through which equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are negotiated, performed, institutionalized, resisted, and sometimes undone. The conference seeks to foreground the negotiated character of EDI and thus encourages contributions that explore these processes and ask what such struggles reveal about contemporary academic cultures and power relations.
We are particularly interested in contributions that move beyond purely conceptual or theoretical analysis and, through the use of ethnographic and other qualitative empirical methods in contemporary as well as historical perspective, engage closely with the everyday practices, actors, and arenas in which EDI policies have taken and continue to take shape. This includes administrative and managerial contexts, committees and hiring procedures, evaluation and audit regimes, as well as informal negotiations and embodied performances. By foregrounding the social, cultural, and political dimensions of EDI work, the conference aims to foster a nuanced understanding of how ideas and practices of equality, diversity, and inclusion effectively challenge existing hierarchies, asking at the same time to what extent such new strategies, in one way or another, nonetheless reproduce hierarchies. International in scope, the conference seeks to offer for the first time comparative insights into the heterogeneity of equality policy structures, their embeddedness in specific societal contexts and academic cultures, and the distinct histories of their formation. Such a comparative perspective highlights institutional and cultural variation, while making it possible to identify shared patterns, tensions, and translations of equality politics across different academic systems.

Embracing qualitative approaches, ranging from ethnography to microhistory, the conference inherently opens the floor for methodological debates – reflecting further the risks and potentials of approaches that have rarely been employed in EDI assessments. We seek to diversify the current repertoire of empirical tools, and to explore the specific epistemological value of immersive research methods.

Equality politics are increasingly perceived as a competitive resource, while mechanisms of control and accountability in the name of transparency and fairness continue to expand. In the face of such ambivalence, the conference aims to explore forms of crucial transfer work in both directions—between scholarly and administrative communities—and to lay open possibilities for making their deep and historically sedimented entanglement productive. The central question that the conference poses in this context is how the relationship between feminist theory, gender studies, and EDI politics is currently configured, and to what extent equality policies draw on gender research but also generate impulses that feed back into and shape feminist theoretical debates.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Equality/equity, diversity, and inclusion as political projects within academic institutions 
• Competing and conflicting notions of gender equality, merit, excellence, and fairness 
• Backlash, resistance, and rollback of gender equality and diversity policies 
• Meritocracy, neutrality, and academic freedom as counter-discourses to gender equality 
• Gender equality officers and diversity specialists as political, epistemic, and affective actors 
• Emotional labor, and affective economies of EDI work 
• Recruitment, hiring, promotion, and evaluation practices 
• Disciplinary cultures and their specific negotiations of equality and of difference 
• Historical and genealogical perspectives on EDI policies in academia 
• Feminist movements and the institutionalization of equality, diversity, and inclusion 
• Ethnographic, autoethnographic, comparative, and transnational approaches 
• Interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, sociology, STS, gender studies, history, education studies, and related fields 

The conference welcomes contributions from scholars at all career stages working at the intersection of academia, administration, and policy. We particularly encourage submissions that adopt qualitative approaches grounded in contemporary as well as historical research that critically engage with the ambivalences and contradictions of equality politics.

Travel expenses for presenters will be reimbursed in accordance with the German Federal Travel Expenses Act and the guidelines of Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The conference is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Heisenberg project "The Politics of Equality".

The conference will be held in English.

We look forward to receiving abstracts of max. 250 words, together with a short CV to the following email address by 1 November 2026:

Prof. Dr. Victoria Hegner
Conference Convenor
Department of Cultural Anthropology/Cultural History
Friedrich Schiller University Jena

victoria.hegner[ at ]uni-jena.de