Hierarchies are pervasive. They structure our economic organizations, political institutions, and overall social relations. We find hierarchies at work, in our political systems, in our relation with non-human groups, even within the family. In a less explicit way, hierarchies also tend to shape the very way we interact with each other.

The concept of hierarchy also plays a central, if often implicit, role in many works of social and political philosophy. Despite this, the concept itself remains largely under-theorized. This conference will bring together scholars from various areas of social and political philosophy to discuss, among other things, the relevance or inescapability of hierarchies, their grounds, rationale, and structural effects, their justifiability, and the conditions, if any, under which just or non-dominating hierarchies may occur.

We aim to include a range of perspectives on the normative significance of hierarchy across social, institutional and political contexts, such as: division of labour and organization of work; systems of meritocracy; hierarchies of race/class/gender/species; stereotyping; political power/authority.