20-22 April 2022
https://www.britsoc.co.uk/bsa2022
Submit your abstract by Friday, 29 October 2021.
Dear Colleagues
During a year in which the pandemic tightened its grip in so many parts of the world, the extent of extreme global inequality in its impact on Covid-19 mortality and vaccine inequity was thrown into sharp relief in 2021. Domestically as well as globally the long-term social, economic and political effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are becoming increasingly apparent - through worsening health outcomes for marginalised populations, deepening poverty and economic precarity, or the entrenchment of political and state corruption for financial gain.
Alongside the burgeoning climate crisis, increasing food insecurity, and ongoing global violence, conflict and state suppression, we ask a seminal question: how do we work towards building global equality and justice – practically and productively - in the here and now?
Sociology is, and should be, a global and historically-informed discipline rooted in a desire to understand, to explore, and to (self-)critique. Despite our myriad sub-disciplinary foci, we as sociologists are all fundamentally interested in routes to genuine, sustainable social progress, not only for wider society but at ‘home’.
Building justice and equality is a multilevel project, and entails employing the sociological imagination to link local struggles to wider issues of domestic and global inequality, and to further orient our focus to dialogue with communities and wider publics. It thus requires us to think about what ‘public sociology’ means in the present time, particularly in a predominantly online space.
Our objective for this conference is to collectively think along the themes of ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, theoretically, practically, inter/transdisciplinarily, and critically, within our substantive areas of interest and action. Papers, as last year, need not address Covid-19 directly.
We encourage submissions which problematise the notions of ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, which think creatively and unboundedly on the social issues facing communities, societies and publics now, and platform/give voice to those for whom social justice and equality is far more than rhetoric. We hope that the virtual spaces for sessions will prove inclusive and generate authentic dialogue and connections between delegates situated across the UK and globally.