Book Launch: “Hierarchies at Work: Race, World-systems, and Legal Distribution”

November 24, 2025

5 PM-7 PM; Central European Standard Time

10 AM-12 PM; US Central Eastern Time

Room K008, Building K

1 place Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris

and online: https://sciencespo.zoom.us/j/92539877892

Meeting ID: 92539877892

Join this live book launch for Hierarchies at Work: Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution (Columbia University Press, 2025), featuring four of its contributors. The anthology, edited by Rapoport Center co-directors Karen Engle and Neville Hoad, challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Drawing from longtime Rapoport Center projects on inequality and the future of work, lead scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods—especially when brought together—offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.

SPEAKERS:

Pr Helena Alviar García, Sciences Po Law School

Pr Jorge Esquirol, Florida International University

Pr Neville Hoad, University of Texas at Austin

Pr Karen Engle, University of Texas at Austin

COMMENTS BY:

Pr Horatia Muir Watt, Sciences Po Law School

Pr Dina Waked, Sciences Po Law School