With the development of global economies, inequality has become a ubiquitous feature of human experience. Like the air we breathe, it is everywhere. Manifested by poverty and lack of access to basic human services, inequality is deeply personal; it affects the sensibilities, basic welfare, and life-chances of many millions of people. But in a broader, political, social and cultural context, inequality is regularly created and recreated by the socio-economic dynamics of the hierarchies in which lives are embedded and through the creation of personhood by social constructs such as race, gender, and class. These hierarchies can be manipulated by influences that remain largely anonymous and beyond the range of public scrutiny. At the dawn, and perhaps decline, of what some call the second Gilded Age, we take a critical, multi-disciplinary look at inequality and the many shapeshifting forms it takes. Among the questions we address are:

*How can we understand the ubiquity of inequalities?
*Why do inequalities persist and even return?
*How and why do people fashion categorical identities and rank them along continua of from, say, least to most or bad to good?
 *How does inequality persevere amidst the trappings of democracy? How do the ideology and language of democracy obscure the manner in which inequality develops and thrives?
*How can we make better sense of the "agency of inequality" and the muscular ways it shapes life-outcomes?

This Workshop brings the strengths of diverse angles to craft a more complex grasp of human inequality: our penchant for reckoning difference by disparity. Our initial discussions will examine how various academic disciplines make sense of inequality, how human disparities are constructed and how human identities are intertwined with and shaped by agents of inequality.