In and out: inclusion, exclusion, and the formal politics of access
Creators: name: Peña-Alves, Stephanie
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: In this study, I theorize the formal structure and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion through an empirical analysis of three domains and levels of analysis: the body, the home, and the nation-state. While inclusion and exclusion are critical topics in sociology, they are primarily studied as institutional phenomena and in specific contexts. Focusing on the formal sociomental relation between “in” and “out” across a range of contexts, I both offer a generic theory of inclusion and exclusion and extend the study of these vital social issues to cognitive sociological terrain. Employing a trans-level, comparative research design I distill common mental models people use to understand inclusion and exclusion, drawing from cognitive frameworks evidenced in forty-two interviews and hundreds of public discourse and policy materials. My research shows that regardless of the vast differences between the domains under study people conceptualize inclusion and exclusion in formally similar ways. First, there are three common cultural ideals at stake in matters of inclusion and exclusion: identity, ownership, and safety. In various accounts, individuals and groups emphasize the need for separation and closure to achieve and protect these cultural ideals; it is exclusion that secures identities, ownership, and safety. Ultimately, exclusion is not only a means of establishing these cultural ideals, it is essential to creating and preserving the relation between “in” and “out,” and social order in general. Second, people generally envision “out” to be threatening to the integrity of “in,” be “in” the identity, ownership, or safety of the body, the home, or the nation-state. I offer the concept of invasion to capture this generic threat of “out” entering “in.” Invasions are envisioned in several common forms, as the threat of entry, contamination, theft, or domination. Invasions are more than events; they reflect particular arrangements between “in” and “out,” and, thus, are representations of social order. In this study, I find that people construct conceptualizations of invasion to strategically reinforce and reconfigure social relations. Such invasion subversions can be used to justify or challenge status-quo arrangements of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, people envision and organize inclusion as a punctuated process of transforming “outsiders” into “insiders,” a mediated process inspired – like exclusion – by invasion. Upending surface-level understandings of inclusion as permitting, rather than restricting, I explore how inclusion is always accompanied by exclusion. In addition, people understand inclusion as a process of allotting different degrees of access to insiders, a phenomenon I call access hierarchies. In extreme circumstances, an access hierarchy can manifest as a stark disproportion in access and power between a privileged “center” and an oppressed “margin.” This margin-center structure of “in” characterizes some of the historical inequalities we see in the domains of the body, the home, and the nation-state.By illuminating these formal structures and dynamics, my work enhances our understanding of inclusion and exclusion and provides a theoretical framework with which to study them.