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CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: ASA Junior Theorists Symposium 2015
This has been doing the rounds for a few days now but it is an excellent opportunity for serious, theory-orientated early career sociologists. If they can afford it of course.
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
2015 Junior Theorists Symposium
Chicago, IL
August 21, 2015
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 13, 2015
We invite submissions for extended abstracts for the 9th Junior Theorists Symposium (JTS), to be held in Chicago, IL on August 21st, 2015, the day before the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The JTS is a one-day conference featuring the work of up-and-coming theorists, sponsored in part by the Theory Section of the ASA. Since 2005, the conference has brought together early career-stage sociologists who engage in theoretical work.
We are pleased to announce that Patricia Hill Collins (University of Maryland), Gary Alan Fine (Northwestern University), and George Steinmetz (University of Michigan) will serve as discussants for this year’s symposium.
In addition, we are pleased to announce an after-panel on “abstraction” featuring Kieran Healy (Duke), Virag Molnar (The New School), Andrew Perrin (UNC-Chapel Hill), and Kristen Schilt (University of Chicago). The panel will examine theory-making as a process of abstraction, focusing on the particular challenge of reconciling abstract “theory” with the concrete complexities of human embodiment and the specificity of historical events.
We invite all ABD graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors who received their PhDs from 2011 onwards to submit a three-page précis (800-1000 words). The précis should include the key theoretical contribution of the paper and a general outline of the argument. Be sure also to include (i) a paper title, (ii) author’s name, title and contact information, and (iii) three or more descriptive keywords. As in previous years, in order to encourage a wide range of submissions we do not have a pre-specified theme for the conference. Instead, papers will be grouped into sessions based on emergent themes and discussants’ areas of interest and expertise.
Please send submissions to the organizers, Hillary Angelo (New York University) and Ellis Monk (University of Chicago), at juniortheorists@gmail.com with the phrase “JTS submission” in the subject line. The deadline is February 13, 2014. We will extend up to 12 invitations to present by March 13. Please plan to share a full paper by July 27, 2015.
Call for Papers – ESA Emotions Network Midterm Conference 2014**DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 6TH 2014**
4 mm square section mild steel bar
225 x 218 x 170 cm
Photograph by Stephen White, London
** DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 6TH 2014**
The ESA Emotions Network (RN11) will hold their 6th midterm conference between 25-27 September, 2014. The conference will take place on the island of Rhodes, Greece, in the University of the Aegean. This year, in addition to the usual streams, the conference will feature two special workshops on emotions – one for PhD students (featuring Prof. Helena Flam and Prof. Helmut Kuzmics), and one on the use of literary analysis for sociology of emotions research (again, featuring Prof. Helmut Kuzmics and Dr. Stephanie Bird). The proposed sessions, towards which you might pitch your abstracts, include: Theorizing Emotions; Emotions and: Morality; Globalization; Religion; Civic Action; Power; Literature; Law; Finance; Visuals; Migration-Sensations-Spaces; Post-Atrocity Emotions; and Researching Emotions Empirically. The full call for papers is here: CfP RN 11 Midterm Rhodes final(pdf).
Abstracts not exceeding 300 words should be sent by the 31st of March 2014 to Jochen Kleres (jkleresATposteo.de). Please use “RN 11 midterm submission”in the subject line of your email. Also, please send your abstract indicating whether it is for a specific session listed above. Notifications about the abstracts selected for presentation at the midterm conference will be made by mid-May 2014. Conference fees, more precise conference times, and links to accommodation will be announced then.
I hope to make it this year myself and I urge those working on affect or emotions to submit an abstract. I have been to other conferences with this group and always found them both intellectually stimulating and, perhaps more importantly, filled with interesting, warm and (not least) fun social scientists from all over the world. But hurry up! The deadline is Monday!
41st SAI Annual Conference May 10th 2014: Call for Papers
***NOTE: ABSTRACT DEADLINE MARCH 14th 2014***
The 41st Annual Conference of the SAI will be held at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Aungier Street on May 10th 2014. This will be an open conference with no prescribed theme. This one day conference will focus on high quality papers and presentations with time for discussion and debate.
This year’s conference will also feature a Plenary Roundtable on ‘Teaching Sociology’. Speakers include Dr. Daniel Fass (TCD, Provost Teaching Award 2012), Dr. Amanda Haynes (UL, Excellence in Teaching Award 2005 & 2011) and Dr. Rebecca King O’Riain (NUIM,
You may submit an abstract from two different forms of presentation:
1. Ordinary Paper (300 words)
2. Poster Presentation (200 words)
Those wishing to present a paper at the conference should submit an abstract as a Word attachment by email to:
sai2014conferenceabstractsATgmail.com no later than Friday 14th March 2014
Submissions will be reviewed and authors notified by Friday 28th March 2014.
Further details on abstract submission and more below the fold.
Continue reading “41st SAI Annual Conference May 10th 2014: Call for Papers”
CfP: First National Conference on Narrative Inquiry – Researching and Writing Irish Storyscapes
Call for Papers: The European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
This new and exciting journal has issued a call for papers. First issue will be out in 2014.
Call for Papers
The European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
Official Journal of the European Sociological Association
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recp20#.Uklk6dK-pNF
The study of culture is the fastest growing area in both European and North American sociology. After years of mild neglect, political sociology is also re-establishing itself as a central plank of the discipline. The European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology aims to be a forum not so much for these fields of study considered separately, as for any work that explores the relationship between culture and politics through a sound sociological lens. The journal takes an ecumenical view of ‘culture’: it welcomes articles that address the political setting, resonance or use of any of the arts (literature, art, music etc.), but it is also open to work that construes political phenomena in terms of a more philosophical or anthropological understanding of culture, where culture refers to the most general problem of meaning-formation. As for work that lies between these poles, it might address the relationship between politics and religion in all its forms, political symbolism past and present, styles of political leadership, political communication, the culture of political parties and movements, cultural policy, artists as political agents, and many other related areas. The journal is not committed to any particular methodological approach, nor will it restrict itself to European authors or material with a European focus. It will carry articles with an historical as well as a topical flavour. The journal aims to have a robust book reviews section, and while the language of reviews will be English, we wish to promote reviews of and review articles about significant new work written in other languages. The journal’s most general aim is to foster and perhaps rekindle the sort of intellectual sensibility that was once a staple of the sociological tradition.
Editor in Chief:
Charles Turner (University of Warwick; UK, D.C.S.Turner@warwick.ac.uk )
Editors:
Ricca Edmondson (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland; ricca.edmondson@nuigalway.ie)
Paul du Gay (University of Copenhagen, Denmark; pdg.ioa@cbs.dk)
Eeva Luhtakallio (University of Helsinki, Finland; eeva.luhtakallio@helsinki.fi)
Reviews Editors
Beatriz Padilla (University of Minho, Portugal; beatriz.padilla@iscte.pt)
Erle Rikmann (University of Tallinn, Estonia; erle@iiss.ee)
Editorial Assistant
Zeynep Talay (talayzey@yahoo.com)
Call for Papers – Poesis: The ambivalent creation of truth.
Call for Papers: (Submission deadline 1st of November)
Sixth International Political Anthropology Workshop in Ireland on
Poesis: The ambivalent creation of truth.
29th & 30th of November, 2013
Waterford Institute of Technology
Organised by the Department of Applied Arts, Waterford Institute of Technology, the Journal International Political Anthropology, and the School of Sociology & Philosophy, University College Cork
Conveners: Tom Boland (Sociology, WIT, tboland@wit.ie,)
John O’ Brien, (Sociology, WIT, jfobrien@wit.ie)
Poesis, from the Ancient Greek (ποίησις) means production or composition. This creativity is central and vital to humanity; from language, story and song through objects, homes and art to political and social institutions. To study society and culture separately is scarcely tenable: this conference concerns the centrality of meaning, narrative and even beauty to human life. Yet, in modernity poesis and culture are often relegated to being little more than entertainment or even frothy ideology which distorts ‘real’ social processes. Furthermore, for academics oriented to investigating, interpreting or even measuring social forces, how poesis creates truth is a matter of deep ambivalence.
There is nothing more poetic than the sense, or even the sensation, of moving through fiction towards the truth. As Nietzsche pointed out, all of our truths are fictions which we have ceased to recognise as creative poesis: the foundational concepts of philosophy, theology and all the modern disciplines emerge from stories. Inevitably, we live culturally within one fictional world or another, or even in many worlds that overlap in complex ways. Yet, we are ambivalent about this poesis: Whose fiction is it? Does fictional mean false, ideological and erroneous? And what might happen if the fiction starts to wear thin – will there be disenchantment, alienation or renewal?
The intersections of culture and society are no narrow specialism, but increasingly a concern common to many disciplines. Cultural anthropology, at least since Geertz, has taken the meaning-making practices of human societies as a central area of inquiry. Cultural sociology has grown from a minor field to a central paradigm. Literary and performance theory, musicology and cognate disciplines have become increasingly concerned with culture and context, from new historicism to reader response theories. This conference will bring together papers concerned with poesis and culture from all of these areas which engage with the ambivalent status of truth after the cultural turn, the historical turn and the performative turn.
The question of poesis and truth cannot be confined to the sepulchral realms of high art or the distracting froth of popular culture. Despite the dominance of technocratic discourse, the political world is animated by fictions, from universalising utopian visions to images of the nation. Ultimately politics is a contest over meaning. Similarly that thing which we sometimes call ‘economic reality’ is also a storied world, with confidence, booms and busts the material of our contemporary morality tale. The tale of technological world domination, the bildungsroman of entrepreneurial success, the Faustian pact of progress and the carnival world of the market are all fictions. And of course, culture is now an industry, so that tourism, advertising and education are sites of the production and consumption of poesis and truth.
However, this brings us to problems of distinction: Are all societies alike in creating meaning? Modernity is associated with a dearth of meaning, a decline of poesis and truth becoming singular and univocal – but is this our near-sighted parochialism? Are all elements of society meaning-making? Every human action exists in a nexus of meaning, but it is hardly an undifferentiated continuum, and surely there are particular sources of meaning which deserve academic attention, from poetry, to religion, to authority, to ritual and beyond.
We invite plenary and session papers on:
– Poetry and truth, theory and meaning.
– Society as a fictional world: in modernity and beyond.
– Politics as the contested field of meaning.
– Poesis and everyday life.
– The marketplace for meaning and productive poesis.
Deadline for abstracts is Friday 1th of November 2013.
Feel free to contact the convenors earlier for consultation and information
CfP: European Sociological Association 11th Conference-Turin, Italy, 28 – 31 August 2013
This year’s European Sociological Association (ESA) bi-annual conference will be held in Turin (Torino), Italy, on the 28 – 31 August 2013. The general theme is on ‘Crisis, Critique and Change’, and the pdf containing calls for all the networks and streams is here (though, annoyingly, without hyperlinks in the contents section to each of the different streams…sigh). I hope to attend, and have a few potential papers that I am thinking of presenting. Hopefully I will be able to drum up some money from somewhere.
Abstracts must be submitted online by the 1st of February-so hurry up!
The network that I am most associated with is RN11, the sociology of emotions network. These are a a great bunch of international scholars-warm, welcoming, interesting, insightful-so I urge you, if you have research that engages with emotions and emotionality, to consider submitting to these sessions. The specific RN11 call is below. Hope to see you there!
JH
RN11 – Sociology of emotions
Coordinators:
Jochen Kleres jkleres@gmx.de University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Stina Bergman Blix Stina.BergmanBlix@sociology.su.se Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Sylvia Terpe sylvia.terpe@googlemail.com Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany
The continuously growing field of the sociology of emotions has demonstrated that emotions are of fundamental significance to all aspects of social life. As a theoretical endeavor, the sociology of emotions aims at becoming superfluous as a separate field of scholarly interest by integrating into mainstream sociology. For this reason, we welcome papers that investigate the role of emotions in all aspects of society and social life. While all high-quality papers with a central focus on emotions will be considered, we also suggest a number of possible special topics listed below. This includes also contributions from neighboring disciplines that have significant relevance to sociology.
Sessions
- 01RN11 Theorizing Emotions
Key theoretical frameworks for the sociological analysis of emotions have stood the test of time during more than thirty years since they launched the sociology of emotions. Nevertheless, the potential for sociological theorizing of emotions is far from exhausted. For instance, the classics of sociology, far from mute on emotions, provide a valuable source of inspiration. Theoretical frameworks such as that of Norbert Elias may also engender innovative theorizing. While sociological interest in emotions is swiftly growing, emotions are still not recognized by mainstream social theorizing as a fundamental aspect of social life. We want to encourage contributions that try to develop innovative theories of emotions as well as theories that demonstrate how emotions can be integrated into social theorizing more generally.
- 02RN11 Specific Emotions
Despite a history of several decades, the sociology of emotions has by and large not explored and theorized specific emotions. We welcome papers which develop theories of specific emotions that are highly relevant to social theorizing in general as well as useful for empirical research.
Morality, moral orientations and moral values have a long tradition in sociological research and theorizing. But how is their relation with emotions to be conceptualized? Are there particular ‘moral emotions’, and if so what constitutes a ‘moral emotion’? How are moral orientations and moral actions affected by emotions? Do emotions qualify as a substitute for lacking moral values? We welcome theoretical contributions as well as empirical studies dedicated to these questions.
- 04RN11 Finance
Recent periods of economic turmoil in the world have the potential of shaking entrenched beliefs in the sober objective rationality of the economic sphere and its actors. Arguably, not only the recurring economic crises but also everyday finance business demonstrate that emotions are a key to all economic action and finance in particular.
- 05RN11 Law
Just like finance, the law is often conceived as a realm of objectivity and rationality. Burgeoning research shows that emotions are a pervasive feature of law and the court system. Papers that pinpoint, for instance, the role of emotion management by judges, emotions in court interaction, emotions and notions of justice, etc. are welcome.
- 06RN11 Methods
There is still a dearth of methodological reflection for empirical emotion research. We welcome papers that present approaches to studying emotions empirically. Specific issues could include, but are not limited to: how can researchers deal with their own emotions within the analysis? How can one delineate an emotional culture empirically? How can one approach emotions within a transnational analysis? How can different approaches to empirical research inform a focus on emotions? How would they have to be developed?
- 07RN11 Post-Atrocities Emotions
In the past two-three decades resurgence in idealism, calling on societies split by violent conflicts to pursue truth, justice and reconciliation (often cast as a preconditions for making a transition to democracy), has re-asserted itself. Both trans-nationally and in each of the societies whose members had taken part in atrocities, there are attempts to formulate rules for post-atrocity times which spell out which emotions are prescribed and which are proscribed. Contributions are welcome highlighting in a critical way these emotional regimes and the vested interests behind them. How are emotions and emotional practices used and negotiated in order to come to terms with what has happened, to castigate perpetrators or to heal and forgive? This might also relate to explorations into the emotional dimensions of trauma.
Continued after the jump!
Call for Papers: Poesis: The Ambivalent Creation of the Truth.
Sixth International Political Anthropology Workshop in Ireland on Poesis: The ambivalent creation of the truth.
Deadline for abstracts is Friday 13th of January 2013.
Feel free to contact the convenors earlier for consultation and information
http://www.politicalanthropology.com
Waterford Institute of Technology
Organised by the Department of Applied Arts, Waterford Institute of Technology, the Journal International Political Anthropology, and the School of Sociology & Philosophy, University College Cork
Conveners: Tom Boland (Sociology, WIT, tboland@wit.ie,) and John O’ Brien, (Sociology, WIT, jfobrien@wit.ie,)
There is nothing more poetic than the sense, or even the sensation, of moving beyond fiction towards the truth. As Nietzsche pointed out, all of our truths are fictions which we have ceased to recognise as creative poesis: the foundational concepts of philosophy, theology and all the modern disciplines emerge from stories. Inevitably – whatever our scientific or critical impulses – we live culturally within one fictional world or another or even in many worlds that overlap in complex ways. And, of course, we are ambivalent about this poesis: Whose fiction is it? Does fictional mean false, ideological and erroneous? And what might happen if the fiction starts to wear thin – will there be disenchantment, alienation or renewal?
The intersections of culture and society are no narrow specialism, but increasingly a concern common to many disciplines. Cultural anthropology, at least since Geertz, has taken the meaning making practices of human societies as a central area of inquiry. Cultural sociology has grown from a minor field to a central paradigm. Literary and performance theory, musicology and cognate disciplines have become increasingly concerned with culture and context, from new historicism to reader response theories. This conference will bring together papers concerned with poesis and culture from all of these areas which engage with the ambivalent status of truth after the cultural turn, the historical turn and the performative turn. How can we turn to the question of meaning and truth again? And how could we not?
Complicating the ‘ancient quarrel’ of poetry and philosophy, Socrates does not simply denigrate poetry, but seeks to purify it into contemplation of the true, then famously launches into the ‘cave myth’. This passage from the cave of illusions into the real world of the forms, with the sun posited as the good, is mediated through metaphor. Why doesn’t he just explain it theoretically? One may as well ask; why can’t we just stare into the sun? The arduous task of leaving the cave is akin to the difficult work of interpretation. The works of theory and of poesis are equally liminal trials, to find meaning, to find truth.
By no means can the question of poesis and truth be confined to the sepulchral realms of high art or the distracting froth of popular culture. Despite the dominance of technocratic discourse, the political world is animated by fictions, from universalising utopian visions to images of the nation. Ultimately politics is a contest over meaning. Similarly that thing which we sometimes call ‘economic reality’ is also a storied world, with confidence, booms and busts the material of our contemporary morality tale. The tale of technological world domination, the bildungsroman of entrepreneurial success, the Faustian pact of progress and the carnival world of the market are all fictions. And of course, culture is now an industry, so that tourism, advertising and education are sites of the production and consumption of poesis and truth.
However, this brings us to problems of distinction: Are all societies alike in creating meaning? Modernity is associated with a dearth of meaning, a decline of poesis and truth becoming singular and univocal – but is this our near-sighted parochialism? Are all elements of society meaning-making? Every human action exists in a nexus of meaning, but it is hardly an undifferentiated continuum, and surely there are particular sources of meaning which deserve academic attention, from poetry, to religion, to authority, to ritual and beyond.
We invite plenary and session papers on:
– Poetry and truth, theory and meaning.
– Society as a fictional world: in modernity and beyond.
– Politics as the contested field of meaning.
– Poesis and everyday life.
– The marketplace for meaning and productive poesis.
Deadline for abstracts is Friday 13th of January 2013.
Feel free to contact the convenors earlier for consultation and information
http://www.politicalanthropology.com
Call for Papers: 4th Midterm Conference of the ESA Sociology of Emotions Research Network, Berlin, 2012
CALL FOR PAPERS:
THE 4th MIDTERM CONFERENCE ON EMOTIONS IN BERLIN
This call for the upcoming 4th midterm conference of the Sociology of Emotions Research Network within the European Sociological Association is addressed to both sociologists and historians and aims at stimulating fruitful debates about emotions across these two disciplines. The midterm conference will be housed jointly by the Max Planck Institute for Human Develop – ment, Center for the History of Emotions and the Cluster “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität (FU), both situated in Berlin. It will take place between the 11th and 13th/14th of Octo- ber, 2012.
Although all high quality abstracts on any emotion-highlighting topic will be given serious consideration, the organizing committee identifiied several focal areas of investigation in which abstracts are particularly welcome. These areas cover current developments of great social impact as well as questions of superior scientifiic importance.
At this point one special shared session is envisioned for which speakers will be invited
Special Plenary Session: Theoretical Explorations
In this session speakers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds will offer an overview of the research on emotions in their respective fields. But the primary objective is not to take stock of existing research. Rather the session will aim at exploring needs and possibilities for theoretical advances in the future. To this end participants are invited to compare theoretical approaches within and across academic disciplines, to identify gaps in existing research agendas and to ponder ways of moving into new terrains. What can we say about intentions and discourses driving various research agendas—are they still inspiring or have they turned into obstacles to further development? Is a new thrust in theorizing badly needed to counterbalance a plethora of unrelated empirical studies?
Regular Sessions:
Specific Emotions: Even as the sociology of emotions was emerging and the concept of emotion management acquired great visibility, critics argued that one needs to take time to explore different, specific emotions. To date this critique has not entirely lost its validity, despite some notable exceptions. Other disciplines may have explored different emotions to some extent, but this either has not made its way into sociological analysis or takes the form of armchair speculations about specific emotions and is of little use for social analysis. In this session we welcome abstracts that explore the nature of specific emotions with a keen eye on making such conceptualizations fruitful for theoretical or empirical social analysis. Abstracts should focus on ways to explore specific emotions, such as, for example, solidarity, hate, mistrust, compassion or sympathy, etc.
Emergence and Reproduction of Groups and Collectivities: Much has been said on emotions binding groups and collectivities by the classics of sociology, but their contributions have not yet led to a coherent research agenda. In a transnational world the question should be addressed anew in what ways and by what means groups and collectivities emerge and become sustained, paying particular attention to the role of emotions and emotionally grounded stereotyping in this process. What is the contribution of sports, mass media, culture, art, education or politics to evoking and sustaining emotions that in turn generate small group and larger collective life? Which of their specifiic traits evoke collectivity-generating emotions? Do they evoke similar or different emotions? Do they have the same or different size publics? Is there a division of labor between them or do they perhaps compete or even undermine each other? In a transnational context, what is their emotion-laden contribution to reminding of, reporting on, creating, competing with, loving and/or hating ‘the other’—whether situated among ‘us’ or across the border(s)?
Emotions and Civic Action:::: Research on protest and social movements has become a large and well-established fiield. On a smaller scale the focus on emotions in social movements has equally gained acceptance. However, emotions also move individuals to become involved in other forms of collective projects that are typically not understood as social movements, such as volunteerism, charity, benevolence, NGOs, the third sector, etc. There is a dearth of sociological research that maps the emotions relevant to non-protest-related collective efforts and investigates how emotions function for these endeavors. Such explorations would also help us defiine differences and similarities between social movements and other forms of civic action and organizing. We invite abstracts that focus on these issues and deal with such questions as : which emotion signify in different forms of civic action, how do they sustain for instance volunteerism, charity, NGOs, etc. over time and how may they lead to demise ? How do they contribute to shifts from one form of civic action to another, such as protest ? What are the potentials of different emotional bases for degrees of politicization ? Are there some emotions which are specifiically mobilized in this context to frame the actions (such as pity for charity) ?
Protest:: How have forms of protest changed in Western and non-Western societies? Demonstra – tions were a relative novelty in the 1960s in Western Europe and the US after the largely conformist post WWII-era. Today as a form of protest they are widely accepted, having lost much of their contesting symbolic force. Are new powerful forms of contestation emerging? Has face-to-face criticism become more challenging and emotionally demanding? Is the Oc- cupy-Movement offering anything new in terms of emotions and as a protest form? Can any special emotions be linked to demonstrations as compared to the Occupy-movement? Protest waves such as the worker demonstrations/sit-ins of the 1960s in Western Europe, solidarity movements, anti-colonial liberation movements, the ‘velvet’ revolutions in Central Europe in
1989, and the Arab Spring in 2011/2012 have exemplified emotion-laden novelties, each in a different region at a different time. What are their commonalities, what are the differences concerning emotional regimes and emotions they have called for? How does the changing role of the media impact on emotional processes in social movements? What difference does it make in terms of emotions that recent protest movements were very much stimulated and organized by the internet and internet-based social networks? And in the context of transnationalization: what does it mean if emotions “travel”? Is there a national difference in their expression?
Body and Space: By now many agree that it is important to study embodied emotions in space. Whether we take a Foucauldian perspective or investigate what professionals do when they work, we are struck by how practices and discourses create embodied emotions in various spatial bodies-artifacts-constellations. How can analysis of the interaction between emotional patterns and spatial settings further our understanding of social and economic dynamics? What role does the body and its being structured by dichotomies like healthy/ill, normal/deviant, rational/irra – tional or superior/inferior play for these processes? What concepts and terms are useful and revealing when analyzing these processes? Should we, for instance, refer to emotions as embodied thoughts, as a specific emotional habitus, distinguishing between affects, feelings and/or emotions? Or should we look for other conceptual tools?
Visuals: In this session speakers will share their knowledge about the visuals and the analytical tools that can be used to focus on the emotions they present to their viewers. How should we analyze it? Which theoretical approaches from other disciplines (as for example art history or fiilm studies) can we use? How do they inspire or limit our focus? How can we combine visual analysis with the analysis of discourses? What is the role of precedents, contextualization, historicization? Are there historically or culturally specifiic ways of forging links between emotions and visual representations? How does one move between protest, popular culture and the classics in art?
Law: An emerging argument has it that even an alleged mainstay of rationality, namely law, has paid increasing attention to emotional patterns and practices. Firstly, emotions have been evaluated as extenuating circumstances in criminal sentences. Secondly, with the tendency to widen the court-room into a space for social negotiations, the emotions of the victims gained in importance. And thirdly, legislators and courts increasingly considered community- or gen- der-specific emotional standards when defiining rules, e.g. in family law, or when judging certain behaviors. What strategies and for what purposes were and are emotions evoked in judicial contexts? How were specifiic trials emotionalized to fight for other (political) agendas? Is it possible to identify a general emotionalization of the judicial sphere? And how are these processes linked to other developments like a general tendency to see emotions from a therapeutic angle? Can scrutinizing these questions further our understanding of the changing role of law within modern societies?
Finance: Since the late 1980s ethnographers, sociologists and historians have researched open outcry trading floors, trading rooms and investment banks. These studies often failed to expand their field of vision beyond the immediate observation area. If at all, they only inadvertently paid attention to emotions. Recurring speculation, economic and financial crises call for a more critical take on the financial world and the assumption that economic actors – or markets – are rational or that individually rational action will create collective goods. In which ways do emotions inform market developments and the emergence of specific economic cultures? And how do these in turn evoke emotions? How were practices of actors in the field of economics driven by emotions? How can we use emotions as category to explain cumulative processes/snow ball effects in these field? What can we learn from studying such interactions beyond the assertion that markets sometimes function “irrationally”?
Post-Atrocities Emotions: In the past two-three decades resurgence in idealism, calling on societies split by violent conflicts to pursue truth, justice and reconciliation (often cast as a preconditions for making a transition to democracy), has re-asserted itself. Both transnationally and in each of the societies whose members had taken part in atrocities, there are attempts to formulate rules for which emotions are prescribed and which are proscribed. Contributions are welcome highlighting in a critical way these emotional regimes and the vested interests behind them. How are emotions and emotional practices used and negotiated in order to come to terms with what has happened, to castigate perpetrators or to heal and forgive? This might also relate to explorations into the emotional dimensions of trauma.
Researching Emotions Empirically: Even though sociological and historical analyses of emotions have by now enjoyed a history of several decades and despite the more recent proliferation of emotion research, there is a dearth of methodological frameworks for investigating emotions empirically. We ask for contributions that develop and critically reflect such frameworks. Specific issues could include: how can researchers deal with their own emotions within the analysis? How can one delineate an emotional culture empirically? How can one approach emotions within a transnational analysis? How can different approaches to empirical research inform a focus on emotions? How would they have to be tweaked?
Emotions and Power: Although both power and emotion are essential features of the conduct and constitution of social life, research on these two phenomena—whatever their conceptual guises—has tended to run in parallel, without explicitly engaging the other. It seems to us that the time is ripe for exploring the connections between these two fundaments of society. To this end we would like to invite submissions that address both, either empirically or theoretically. We are particularly interested in papers that seek to investigate the interrelated role that both power and emotions play in specific arenas or around specific topics. For example, papers that address emotions and power in organisations, in social movements, in politics, in media, in welfare and warfare, in families, in education and so on, are especially sought, though submissions are not limited to these fields of inquiry. Papers addressing emotions, power and gender are also particularly welcome.
Abstracts not exceeding 300 words should be sent by the 1st of May 2012 to Jochen Kleres jkleres@gmx.de. Please send your abstract indicating whether it is for a specific session listed above. Notifications about the abstracts selected for presentation at the midterm conference will be made by mid-July 2012 at the latest. Also conference fees, more precise conference times, and links to accommodation will be announced in July—but please note that Berlin offers a wide range of accommodation opportunities, including many B&Bs, smaller and large apartments to rent as well as no-money-involved arrangements. The conference venues are:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 141195 Berlin, and Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 141195 Berlin.
The organizing committee:
Helena Flam
Benno Gammerl
Bettina Hitzer
Jochen Kleres
Anja Laukötter
Christian von Scheve
