Critical Sociology
CALL FOR PROPOSALS AND PAPERS
2008 Critical Sociology Conference
POWER AND RESISTANCE:
CRITICAL REFLECTIONS, POSSIBLE FUTURES
The Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
August 3, 2008
Critical Sociology in cooperation with the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), the SSSP Global Division, the
ASA Section on Marxist Sociology, and SAGE Publications is pleased to provide this special one-day forum for building
an ever broader community that can propose, discuss and debate creative critical/activist scholarship.
The 21st Century was greeted early on by an explosive "blowback" on September 11, 2001, shaking the forward operating
base of global capital and triggering the alarms of an accumulated crisis that was well underway and continues to simmer
across the globe. With the post-WW II social pact all but abandoned in the U.S., a growing financial crisis, and the
stagnating social democracies of old Europe backing into recurrent, post-Fordist crises, the spotlight has shifted. An era
of newly emerging geo-economic centers of gravity, symbolized by a barely controllable expansion in China, threatens to
intensify energy and environmental crises worldwide. The expressions of this 21st Century crisis can be seen in efforts to
criminalize waves of immigration generated by neoliberal capitalist expansion, in recurrent outbreaks of racist and sexist
victimization, in systematic expansion of policies of neglect within a class stratified system of social service, in intensifying
social control packaged as national defense against manufactured "enemies," and in the development and employment of
multiple technologies of genocide. Both inside and outside of centers of power, the rise of new fundamentalisms worldwide
under Judeo-Christian and Moslem labels are working in clumsy concert to smother and overwhelm the growing global
demands for expanded social, political and human rights.
Throughout much of the past century the discipline of sociology struggled to advance beyond its roots in 19th Century
thinking. Sociology in the early 21st Century now confronts a similar challenge of entanglement with its 20th Century roots,
struggling to consolidate new paradigms that can adequately capture the dynamics of a rapidly changing social reality. In
this daunting context, progressive sociologists seek not only to understand society through ongoing theorizing and critical
reflection but also to change the world in which we live through the systematic generation of socially usable knowledge
promoting progressive social transformation.
From its roots in European critical theory, a critical sociology first emerged in the North American context, as elsewhere,
during periods of paradigmatic crisis, in periods when the contradictions between establishment sociology and its
surrounding social realities were particularly acute. For over three decades, the journal Critical Sociology has been a leading
voice of radical and progressive sociological analysis. Originally published as the Insurgent Sociologist, the journal emerged
out of the turbulent 1960s and was formed when the "Sociology Liberation Movement" erupted at the 1969 meetings of the
American Sociological Association (ASA). Critical Sociology has from the onset been committed to publishing scholarship
from a Marxist, post-Marxist, Feminist, and other critical perspectives. Its current editorial mission is to encourage
publication of such scholarship from all parts of the globe with the aim of understanding and transforming contemporary
capitalist society.
In addition to invited speakers, we are asking for proposals for panels or papers for this conference. Paper proposals should
include contact information for the author/s and a short abstract. Panel proposals should include a title and theme of the
panel and a list of papers and authors. Please send all proposals to the organizers at critical.sociology@gmail.com no later than MARCH 15, 2008 for
full consideration.
The organizers will invite all contributors to this conference to collaborate with the journal and contribute to a special issue
of Critical Sociology, and perhaps an edited volume, on the conference themes.
Tentative Panel Themes for this One-day Conference Include:
I: Critical Institutionalism and the Changing Political Economy
II: Transnational Social Movements and Global Social Change
III: Race and the Explosive Contradictions of Immigration
IV: Feminist Contributions to Transforming Sociology
V: What's "left" of postmodern critical theory?
VI: Moving Forward From the U.S. Social Forum
VII: Neoliberal Crises and the Leftist Resurgence in Latin America
VIII: Towards Progressive Social Policy
Conference Organizers:
David Fasenfest, Wayne State University, and Editor, Critical Sociology
Richard A. Dello Buono, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, and Latin American and Caribbean Editor, Critical
Sociology
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