The theme for this year’s departmental conference is Sociological routes: past, present and future.
With this theme, we aim to interrogate the entanglements and limits, temporalities and trajectories of sociology as a discipline and method. Emphasising routes, we invite thinking across spaces and times, and consider unruly pathways to sociological knowledge and work that goes beyond a static canon. We will turn our gaze to the past to consider the place of the historical approaches to sociological work. Here we invite contributions that engage historical methods and archival approaches, their politics, possibilities and erasures. We consider what the sociology of the present looks like, inviting critical reflections on our contemporary conjuncture, its concepts, categories, catastrophes. Lastly, we consider sociology in its orientations towards the future, asking what normative possibilities, utopias, critical horizons and radical imaginaries sociological thinking can or should offer us.
Conference programme
9.30am | Welcome: tea and coffee
9.40am | Opening remarks: Suzi Hall
9.45am to 11.30am | Panel one: PASTS - chaired by Sigrid Corry
- Alonso Gurmendi-Dunkelberg, "How to Hide a Genocide: Modern/Colonial International Law and the Construction of Impunity"
- Koni Benson, "Interactive Archiving for Mapping Movements of Land Occupations in Cape Town, South Africa"
- Mahvish Ahmad and Koni Benson, "Revolutionary Papers: Counter-Institutions, Politics and Cultures in Anti-Colonial Periodicals in the Global South"
- Marta Pagnini, "Monarchs on the Move: Geographical Inequalities and the Making of Anglo-Britain, 1870–1949"
11.30am to 12.00pm | Coffee Break
12.00pm to 1.30pm | Panel two: PRESENTS - chaired by Rajesh Bhattacharjee
- Hannah Wilson, "Against the Odds: Disillusionment, Ease and the Aesthetics of the Successful Interview"
- Lion Hubrich, "The Problem of Vitality in Unequal Societies"
- Nicolás Arenas, "Unveiling Marketing Governmentality: Epistemological and Theoretical Considerations for Analysing the Instrumentalisation of Emotion in Marketing Practices"
1.30pm to 2.30pm | LUNCH (provided)
2.30pm to 4.00pm | Panel three: FUTURES - chaired by Roni Ajai-Thomas
- Jan Gilles, "Socialising the Climate Cycle"
- Adam Greenfield, "Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire"
- Dan Brown, "People’s Diplomacy at the New World Embassy: Translations, Transnational Solidarity, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries"
4.00pm to 4.30pm | Coffee Break
4.30pm to 5.30pm | Roundtable: On Normative Sociology - chaired by Carla Rivera-Blanco
5.30pm | Closing remarks: Carrie Friese
6.00pm to 9.00pm | Reception, 8 Floor, CKK – drinks, food and DJ
The organising committee includes PhD Candidates (Carla Rivera-Blanco, Rajesh R.Bhattacherjee, Roni Ajai-Thomas and Sigrid Corry) and faculty members (David Madden, Monika Krause and Olivia Rutazibwa) from the Department of Sociology. They are collectively selecting the papers, organising the programme and chairing sessions during the conference.
Previous Conferences
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