The Measure of Inequality

From Victorian poverty maps to contemporary debates about the wealthiest 1-percent, the measurement, quantification, and exposition of social disparity has molded public debate and policy commitments. Drawing on cases ranging from colonial India to Occupy Wall Street, the contributors to this special issue reflect on how contemporary understandings of inequality are connected to contingent past choices about models and objects of measurement. The essays cover which inequalities such choices reveal and conceal, how they are constitutive of new issues and political subjects, and how measurement itself becomes a site of political contestation.

Contributors: Maria Bach, Giacomo Gabbuti, Moisés Kopper, Mary S. Morgan, Eleanor Newbigin, Alice O’Connor, Poornima Paidipaty, Pedro Ramos Pinto, Sanjay Reddy, James Tomlinson, Daniel Zamora Vargas