Communication with others, categorizing and identifying people and objects, establishing symbolic and moral boundaries, is strongly influenced by culture. Moreover, culture is the way we try to understand and interact with the world around us. At Cultural Sociology, the way social meanings and expressions associate culture will be questioned. How do people create status differences and maintain boundaries between groups? How are international beauty standards (re)produced?

The Institutions, Inequalities, and Life courses programme (IIL) examines institutions in a broad way as the formal and informal rules and arrangements in society that govern individual behavior and social relationships. Examples of institutions are welfare states, labor market arrangements, educational systems, occupational groups, norms and rules in organizations, and gender role norms.

The programme group Political Sociology researches evolving relations of conflict and cohesion in various national and international settings. Our research on citizenship, politics, policies, social movements and the state extends beyond actor-centred approaches through relational analyses and a keen eye for power differentials.

Governance and Inclusive Development (GID) scrutinizes development dynamics at various geographical, jurisdictional and temporal scales, realizing that these are situated in different but interconnected multi-level processes. GID analyses and rethinks dominant development paradigms, and engages with international, national and local development practices, policies and debates to identify viable and socially just alternatives.

The Political and Economic Geographies (PEG) group investigates the role of multi-scalar relationships that are crucial in understanding contemporary economic and political geographies.

The researchers within Urban Geographies study the socio-spatial processes that shape cities and urban life across the world. Our research concentrates on the formation of urban difference and inequality. It seeks to understand how specific spaces, places and mobilities reflect, reproduce and transform social differentiation in terms of class, ethnicity, generation, gender and sexuality. In addition, it studies how resources, risks and political voice are distributed unevenly across urban spaces and populations, analyzing geographies of inequality within and between city regions.

Urban Planning research and teaching at the University of Amsterdam focuses on the relationships between the social, spatial, and environmental dimensions of urban processes, and on ways of purposefully and positively impacting on them.

The research program Challenges to Democracy studies the consequences of current political developments and their historical roots for democratic governance. How do democratic regimes maintain political stability? To what extent can they deliver political equality, legitimacy and prevent societal polarization?

Ongoing trends towards transnational integration of markets and economic transactions are giving rise to far-­reaching transformations of governance both within and beyond the nation-state. The Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV) programme group focuses on the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of these epochal developments in political and economic life.

In recent decades, there has been a growing divergence between the organisation of society and the inherited conceptual framework of the 20th century political sciences. The Transnational Configurations, Conflict and Governance group seeks to re-examine established notions of identities, categorizations and boundaries defined by classical political science concepts through different forms of empirical investigation.

We investigate the manifold ways gender, race, class, citizenship, religion, and sexuality are made and unmade in everyday life, including the ways in which differences and similarities among people, communities, and other living things are created, contested, celebrated or distrusted. We are interested in the everyday experiences of belonging and exclusion and how they shape individuals, institutions, and environments in lasting ways. Our research delves into the political dimensions and the impact these have on people's aspirations and pursuits. We investigate the aesthetics of these world making projects, their pasts, presents and futures.

The Health, Care, and Body programme group aims to analyse evolving health experiences, sexual identities, body practices, and social/cultural influences on scientific knowledge utilization in clinical settings. It also examines care and self-help practices, the exercise of biomedical power, and patterns of resistance or acceptance of medical regimes, scientific knowledge, and technology.

The social consequences of the mobility of people, goods, power, and ideas constitute the central focus of the Moving Matters research programme. Members of the research group explore migrating people and moving commodities, as well as the shifting networks that result from such practices. These networks stretch from the local to the transnational and necessarily involve encounters with the state through deportation regimes, access to resources and technologies, border infrastructures, decolonial and postcolonial movements, labour relations, and violence and conflict.