In some countries, apples and oranges cannot be compared, in others apples and pears or – less fruity – grandmothers and machine guns.
A conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the uneasy question of comparison in the social sciences, which are “easily frightened by both accusations from within quantitative traditions that assert the inability of its methods to control variables precisely enough and a colonial past in which cultural comparisons had a dubious taint of racism”. See the CfP here.