Society for the Study of Social Problems

NOTE: This one-day conference being organized by the SAGE Journal CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY is being held the day following the SSSP Annual Meeting in the SSSP Hotel. By cooperative facilities agreement, all SSSP members registered for the 2008 Annual Meeting may attend and participate in the 2008 Critical Sociology Conference free of charge. 

 
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 no later than MARCH 15, 2008 for full consideration. no later than 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 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