This paper elaborates on the concept of situated inequality, presenting it as a theoretical framework through which to understand how institutional conditions influence children’s unequal possibilities of participation in their everyday lives. Drawing on social practice theory and subject-scientific critical psychology, the concept challenges dominant explanations of inequality as rooted in individual deficits or socio-economic background. This perspective emphasises how children’s possibilities of participation, engagement and contribution cannot be understood apart from the institutional arrangements and everyday political activities that organise educational practices.

When analysed from the perspectives of children, issues of inequality appear to be linked to their different access to social resources. Their possibilities of participation in both peer groups and academic activities seems essential to their ability to cope with institutional life, and here children face unequal conditions (Højholt & Røn-Larsen, 2021).

In relation to this, the theoretical contribution of “situated inequality” lies in conceptualising inequality as unequal possibilities of participation – developed through a situated process related to conflictual institutional conditions rather than a predictable consequence of certain background factors. It highlights how children’s (unequal) conditions for participating are negotiated through conflictual collaboration on contradictory societal tasks. The concept of situated inequality therefor enables us to analyse how institutional procedures, and professional dilemmas may co-produce marginalisation and restrict access to social resources in children’s everyday life.

Drawing on empirical analysis from practice research projects the presentation will illustrate how these processes unfold in concrete situations involving conflictual collaboration and everyday politics of different professionals, and how these situations are linked to other situations across institutional arrangements involving interpretation of legislation and administrative procedures. This situated approach opens new possibilities for theorizing inequality as socially and historically embedded, potentially contributing to new possibilities of development of relevant participation opportunities for all children in educational practice.

For many years, user involvement in the mental health sector has been on the rise, urging users to engage not only in their own recovery processes, but also as stakeholders in organizational work, and as co-producers of knowledge. This shift towards a more agentive, engaged, and involved user-subject has been a welcome change to the mental healthcare system and is carried forward from a variety of spheres, spanning users’ movements, patient activism, as well as political agendas of democratization and self-responsibilization.

However, user involvement not only changes the healthcare system, but also ideas about what and who users are (or become), and what they represent. On the one hand they offer unique voices and perspectives, while on the other, their voices and experiences are co-produced by the institutional settings.

In a new research project, we bring the philosophical idea of authenticity to the field of user involvement to investigate how authenticity is co-produced and how it is involved in processes of user (em)power(ment). Our aim is to investigate how authenticity as a capital is distributed amongst service users, professionals, and the structures and knowledge of psychiatry, where authenticity is more likely to ‘adhere to’ and be successfully enacted and performed by some users, more than others. This illuminates a paradox: that while user involvement as a concept is invoked to equalize authority structures between users and professionals, the becoming of the new authentic psychiatric service user perhaps – at the same time – establishes new forms of hierarchies and possible inequalities between users. Exploring (em)power(ment) and (in)equality in the field of mental health thus implies a critical questioning of user involvement and how it may co-create new forms of inequality among service users.

In contemporary western capitalist societies, paid work remains a central source of social worth, dignity, and recognition. Consequently, unemployment challenges not only material conditions but also people’s sense of value and standing. This paper examines these dynamics to develop a situated understanding of (in)dignity as it is lived, negotiated, and contested from marginal positions.

Although existing research often assumes linear linkages between social disadvantage and diminished dignity, through concepts such as stigma, shame, or recognition gaps, this paper approaches the issue empirically. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, we investigate how experiences of marginalisation are constituted through the interplay between subjective meaning-making and the social, institutional, and material conditions in which people live. This approach offers a theoretical lens that bridges political and psychological dimensions of inequality by locating intimate experiences within broader structures of governance and labour market regulation.

Conceptually, we mobilise the distinction between innate and earned dignity, with the former grounded in universal human worth and the latter embedded in social hierarchies and normative expectations of productivity. We examine how this distinction unfolds in the everyday lives of unemployed individuals and how it shapes their efforts to sustain or reclaim dignity under conditions that systematically undermine it.

Empirically, the paper draws on a year-long ethnographic study following 5–7 unemployed people in each location living in remote cities in Denmark, France, and the United States. These participants experience double marginalisation: exclusion from the labour market and geographical peripherality. Working with rather than on participants, we combine shadowing, everyday observations, and participant-generated photography with photo-elicitation interviews. This enables us to trace the micropolitics, affective atmospheres, and embodied tensions that compose daily experiences of (in)dignity.

By analysing how people navigate the tension between being governed (through welfare institutions and labour market expectations) and governing themselves, the paper identifies conditions that shape situated inequality while also highlighting the creative, agentive, and adaptive practices people mobilise in unsettled and precarious circumstances. We argue that (in)dignity is best understood as situated, affective, and relational and as a crucial lens for grasping how inequality is lived and reproduced in everyday life.