SSSP 2026 Annual Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS SUBMISSION DEADLINE

All papers must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. (Eastern Time) on January 31, 2026 in order to be considered.

Current Server Date and Time: Wednesday, October 15, 2025 (Eastern Time)

Listed below are the sessions for the 2026 Annual Meeting.

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Session # Session Title Sponsor(s) Organizer(s)
1 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Where We Belong: Community Responses to Exclusion and Harm in 2026
Session Description Many communities are facing divisions over what or who ‘belongs’, and where; what and whose history should be memorialized, and how; and what and whose futures are invested in, and why. The issue of belonging has been further complicated in our current political moment. This session centers on contested places shaped by legacies of exclusion, violence, and threats to wellbeing that result from the devaluation of certain people/ communities and, concurrently, the places they live. The papers in this session explore how communities are responding to place-based harms, inclusive of activist and grassroots efforts, NGO initiatives, and state-sponsored policies.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  1. Stanlick, Sarah E. [ sstanlick@wpi.edu ]
2 PAPERS IN THE ROUND: Scholar Café: Building Collective Wisdom through Intergenerational Scholar Sharing
Session Description This session would be a roundtable opportunity for intergenerational sharing of experiences as a social justice / social problems scholar. We identified in this recent gathering that there is much wisdom within the membership of SSSP, as well as a clear opportunity to build more bonds to sustain us during an increasingly difficult higher education landscape. This session is meant to be prompted, roundtable discussions to help folks share their journeys, talk about pressing issues in their work, and build connections for future scholarship and action.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  1. Stanlick, Sarah E. [ sstanlick@wpi.edu ]
3 People Have the Power?: Community Power and Community Decision-making-THEMATIC
Session Description The papers in this session explore how power operates at the community level, who represents a community, and how communities build the power to influence decisions. The communities involved in these studies vary, including coalitions, neighborhoods, schools, cities, and other groups. All are sites of contested power and exemplify communities’ recognition of and responses to social problems.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  1. Stanlick, Sarah E. [ sstanlick@wpi.edu ]
4 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Teaching and Engaging with Reparations and Restorative Justice
Session Description In the current political context, pressures to erase the history of the marginalized and to ban the teaching of colonial, racialized, gendered, and classed histories, with their profound legacies and ongoing consequences, continue to mount. This session invites critical pedagogical interventions, analytical works, and case studies that center reparations as an ongoing political and practical necessity for reckoning with and addressing the impacts of historical and systemic harms.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  1. Stanlick, Sarah E. [ sstanlick@wpi.edu ]
  2. Maldonado, Marta M. [ Marta.Maldonado@oregonstate.edu ]
(co-organizers)
5 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Co-constructing Methodologies for Community-engaged, Participatory Action Research
Session Description In this session, we seek work that is rooted in community voice and disrupts deficit-based narratives in community-based participatory action research. We hope to raise examples of methodologies that center epistemic justice through meaningful co-creation. This session promotes research ethics grounded in relationality, disrupting the university- academic divide, as well as global north and south divides in knowledge production and social problem definitions.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Global
  1. Stanlick, Sarah E. [ sstanlick@wpi.edu ]
  2. Padilla, Beatriz [ padillab@usf.edu ]
(co-organizers)
6 PAPERS IN THE ROUND: Building Collective Wisdom through Intergenerational Scholar Sharing
Session Description This session brings together scholars at different career stages to reflect on the value of intergenerational exchange in knowledge production, mentorship, and community building. Presenters explore how sharing experiences across generations strengthens collective wisdom, sustains critical traditions, and nurtures emerging scholars. Topics include navigating academic pathways, fostering supportive professional networks, and leveraging diverse perspectives to reimagine the future of scholarship. By foregrounding collaboration and dialogue, the panel demonstrates how intergenerational engagement enriches research practices, democratizes expertise, and cultivates more inclusive intellectual communities.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Labor Studies
  1. Morales, Leticia [ leticia022morales@gmail.com ]
7 Rural Spaces and Services-THEMATIC
Session Description This thematic session explores the unique challenges and opportunities for change shaping rural communities. Rural spaces face persistent issues of inequality, limited access to resources, and structural barriers in health, education, housing, and social services. At the same time, these communities generate creative forms of resilience, care, and solidarity that deserve sociological attention. Presentations in this session highlight the structural opportunities and constraints associated with rural environments; how policies, practices, and politics affect service delivery; and how rural residents navigate, resist, and reimagine systems of support. By examining rural spaces through the lenses of sociology, social work, and social welfare, this session underscores the significance of rural life for understanding broader questions of justice, equity, and social well-being.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  3. Sport, Leisure, and the Body
  1. Johnston, Michael O. [ johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu ]
  2. Lobao, Linda [ lobao.1@osu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
8 Unequal Environments: Ecological Disparities and Violence-THEMATIC
Session Description Examining ecological disparities and violence demands an interdisciplinary lens that interrogates the complex interplay of environmental, cultural, political, and economic systems. This session explores how structural forces, including toxic colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental racism, produce and reinforce ecological injustices that disproportionately impact marginalized communities across global and local contexts. Papers may address a range of topics related to environmental inequality, including climate change, resource extraction, land, food, and water access, pollution, and other forms of ecological violence.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, and Change
  1. Mills, Jack Mitchel [ jmills4@fsu.edu ]
  2. Schoeneman, Andrew [ aschoene@richmond.edu ]
(co-organizers)
9 WORKS IN PROGRESS / RESEARCH FEEDBACK: Media as a Site of Digital Resistance
Session Description Resistance and social action manifest across a range of spaces, including the symbolic and discursive realm of media. This session explores media as a dynamic site of social engagement, contestation, and transformation. It examines how individuals, communities, and movements utilize media platforms to express their identities, challenge inequality, raise awareness of social problems, mobilize collective action, and challenge dominant narratives. Papers may examine myriad topics related to media and social change, including digital activism, cultural expression, political communication, grassroots organizing, and the role of media in shaping public discourse and policy.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, and Change
  1. Tehrani, Sara [ Sara.tehrani@ucf.edu ]
10 Racial Politics and Resistance in the Midst of Settler Colonialism
Session Description Only recently have Ethnic and Racial Studies and Indigenous Studies begun to engage in systematic dialogue about how the racial state has always functioned as a settler colonial state. This session explores how both historical and contemporary racial politics and social movements confront and resist the intertwined structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. This session aims to highlight the work of racialized social movements in exposing, challenging, and disrupting ongoing colonial violence, racialized dispossession, and carceral regimes.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, and Change
  2. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  1. Tehrani, Sara [ Sara.tehrani@ucf.edu ]
  2. Mohammadi, Foroogh [ foroogh.mohammadi@acadiau.ca ]
(co-organizers)
11 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Decolonizing Solutions: Lessons from the Global South for the Global North-THEMATIC
Session Description Theoretical foundations to addressing social problems have primarily utilized frameworks developed in, and applicable to, the Global North. Often, such frameworks are applied in a colonialist fashion to the Global South. In an attempt to decolonize this part of the conversation, this session aims to center the theoretical frameworks and social change strategies of the Global South in addressing social problems in the Global North.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, and Change
  2. Global
  3. Social Problems Theory
  1. Lister, Sione Lynn Pili [ sionelister@asu.edu ]
  2. Moussawi, Ghassan [ moussawi.ghassan@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
12 Advocacy and Change
Session Description This session features presentations that broadly address advocacy and making change. Institutional ethnographers start from the "everyday" with the premise that people's experiences are organized by larger ruling relations. However, the goal, to paraphrase Marx, is not simply to analyze these phenomena, but to change them, as "ruling relations" pertain to power dynamics that generate disjunctures, inequalities, and marginalization. The papers in this session take up and explore this dynamic in some manner through research, activism, or both.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, and Change
  2. Institutional Ethnography
  1. Eastwood, Lauren [ eastwole@plattsburgh.edu ]
  2. Awsumb, C. Michael [ c.michael.awsumb@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
13 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Teaching Social Problems through Experiential Learning
Session Description Addressing social problems and advocating for social justice requires research, collaboration and innovation. This session will focus on the power and utility of experiential learning to teach about social problems in our classrooms and communities.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, and Change
  2. Teaching Social Problems
  1. Pearce, Jessica S. [ jessica.pearce@louisiana.edu ]
14 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Inventing Criminality across the Globe
Session Description This session critically examines the social, political, and legal construction of “criminality” as a transnational phenomenon. We interrogate how laws, state policies, and media discourses across the globe actively invent and racialize categories of crime and deviance to control marginalized populations. Presentations will explore the exportation of carceral logics, the criminalization of migration and poverty, and the governance of bodies through globalized “wars” on drugs and terror. By analyzing these processes, the session seeks to uncover how power operates to designate threats, legitimize inequality, and expand punitive systems, challenging the naturalized assumptions behind who and what is deemed criminal.
  1. Crime and Justice
  1. Mallick, Rafia Javaid [ rmallick1@student.gsu.edu ]
15 Mass Incarceration and Perpetual Punishment
Session Description This session explores the intersection of mass incarceration and the U.S. criminal legal system's overreliance on perpetual punishment. Perpetual punishment is broadly defined - whether it be the pains of incarceration, extreme sentencing, denials of criminal legal relief, or other collateral consequences that result from a criminal conviction.
  1. Crime and Justice
  1. Budd, Kristen M. [ kbudd@sentencingproject.org ]
16 State of Policing
Session Description This session is open to work across the spectrum of perspectives on issues in and with policing. This includes challenges to effective crime control and challenges deriving from issues with policing. Work is welcome which discusses perspectives ranging from police abolition and issues of disparate police involvement (overpolicing) to issues arising from insufficient police responsiveness (underpolicing) of victimization within marginalized communities. Topics can include issues related to effective policing and questions of the necessity and value of policing deriving from police misuse of force and bias in policing surveillance, interactions, interrogation, and carceral system capture (e.g., arrest). Discussion related to the criminalization of immigration and related enhanced law enforcement powers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are also welcome.
  1. Crime and Justice
  1. Carpenter, Jennifer M. [ jcarpenter16@student.gsu.edu ]
  2. Tabbutt, Kelly [ tabbutt@alfred.edu ]
(co-organizers)
17 Algorithmic Injustices: Effect of AI on Vulnerable (Marginalized) Communities
Session Description This session explores how AI technologies impact marginalized communities and the environment. It may include analyzing how algorithmic bias arises in the criminal legal system, such as predictive policing, crime risk assessments, and surveillance monitoring, as well as in environmental injustices like biased resource management and insufficient environmental resource allocation in low-income areas. Using sociological theory, social research methodologies, and case studies, papers should analyze the connection between AI technologies, marginalized groups, and environmental issues, while suggesting solutions for algorithmic accountability.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  3. Environment and Technology
  1. Craig, Miltonette Olivia [ moc006@shsu.edu ]
  2. Salvaggio, Marko [ msalvaggio@tulane.edu ]
(co-organizers)
18 The Border Crossed Me: Shifting Lifeworlds of Immigration-THEMATIC
Session Description This session critically examines the lived experiences of immigrants navigating the profound social and psychological shifts precipitated by global migration. Moving beyond traditional narratives, we explore the concept that immigrants are not merely crossing borders, but borders, in their legal, social, and cultural forms, actively cross and reconstitute their lives. Presentations will delve into themes of racialization, belonging, and identity formation within transnational social fields. We investigate how immigrants and their descendants negotiate power, agency, and resistance within these contested spaces, offering a nuanced analysis of the constantly evolving lifeworlds shaped by the relentless movement of political and social borders
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  3. Labor Studies
  4. Law and Society
  1. Craig, Miltonette Olivia [ moc006@shsu.edu ]
  2. Mallick, Rafia Javaid [ rmallick1@student.gsu.edu ]
  3. Mohammadi, Foroogh [ foroogh.mohammadi@acadiau.ca ]
(co-organizers)
19 Therapeutic Regimes: Intersection of Medicine, and Alternatives to Traditional Criminal Legal Responses-THEMATIC
Session Description Legal entities have used medicalization both to oppress, and to advocate, for people with disabilities and mental illness. While in some cases, disability and mental health are used to circumvent traditional punitive measures, these categories have also been used to justify harsher treatment and even excessive force. Furthermore, medical facilities can also act as proxies for enacting legal directives, including involuntary commitment. It is also worth noting that how and when legal systems used medicalization when deciding legal responses is inconsistent and may vary with factors such as race and gender of the person being detained. This session explores how medicine and the legal system interact, and what that means for people being evaluated by these institutions.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  3. Law and Society
  1. Rivers, Peper E. [ pelang@iu.edu ]
  2. Williams, Stephani [ stephani.williams@gmail.com ]
  3. Maconi, Melinda Leigh [ melinda.maconi@moffitt.org ]
(co-organizers)
20 Gender and Violence
Session Description This session considers the many ways in which violence intersects with gender, be that on violence perpetuated on the basis of gender; gendered trends in criminal behavior; anti-violence movements; and more. We welcome papers which consider how gender and violence interplay around the world, including intersections with legal and other macro-level systems.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  3. Law and Society
  1. Klein, Lloyd [ creditcardman21@yahoo.com ]
21 Weaponization of Child Welfare
Session Description This session will look at how child welfare systems often operate as a tool of control and surveillance to regulate lifeworlds. In the present child welfare systems, marginalized families and BIPOC communities are disproportionately surveilled, investigated, and separated. Under the guise of “protection,” policies and practices hold power to dismantle kinship networks, impose white, middle-class family norms, and punish families for systemic inequities beyond their control. Panelists will share how these patterns reflect colonial practice and dominant carceral systems while overlooking community-driven solutions. Discussants will explore ways to resist harmful colonialist practices and imagine new approaches to child and family well-being rooted in dignity, solidarity, and collective care.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Craig, Miltonette Olivia [ moc006@shsu.edu ]
  2. Cook, Denae J. [ denae.cook@utah.edu ]
(co-organizers)
22 Colonial Racial Capitalism Today: Spectacularization, Dispossession, and Resistance
Session Description Overt and spectacularized forms of colonial and racial dispossession have become increasingly common in the United States (e.g. the White House’s use of AI imagery to display alligators in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uniforms; federal agents deployed into cities to “hunt down” immigrants). These acts have gone hand-in-hand with new forms of dispossession and privatization, like the expansion of drilling on federal land, and increasing disinvestment in public institutions. This session invites work that examines the connections between spectacularized forms of extra-economic violence and dispossession in the current era of colonial racial capitalism. It also invites work that examines and or/implements innovative resistance strategies and potentials.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  1. Juarez, Nicolas [ nijuarez@umich.edu ]
  2. Maldonado, Marta M. [ Marta.Maldonado@oregonstate.edu ]
  3. Mohammadi, Foroogh [ foroogh.mohammadi@acadiau.ca ]
(co-organizers)
23 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Right to Resist: Counter-Hegemonic Agency and Emancipatory Anti-colonial Political Praxis
Session Description You will not be emancipated by the benevolence of an oppressor - and so, how shall we resist? Papers in this session will explore questions about and experiences in unapologetic and transformative political praxis against oppression and injustice (e.g., colonization, violence, genocide, crimes of the powerful, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, structural violence) and the politics supporting them. Of special interest are those engaging the problematic: “who determines the 'right' or 'acceptable' way to resist your oppressor?” 
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  1. Awsumb, C. Michael [ c.michael.awsumb@gmail.com ]
  2. Rabii, Watoii [ wrabii@oakland.edu ]
  3. Maldonado, Marta M. [ Marta.Maldonado@oregonstate.edu ]
(co-organizers)
24 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Under Siege: Power, Resistance, and Solidarity in Higher Education
Session Description Students, faculty, and institutions face escalating authoritarian threats such as political attacks, funding cuts, and efforts to silence academic inquiry. These assaults intensify longstanding racial, ethnic, gendered, and class disparities within higher education. This session examines how authoritarian pressures reinforce inequality and how communities of scholars and students are developing practices of resistance, solidarity, and participatory democracy. Ethnic studies and other critical traditions have historically played a central role in these struggles, and they continue to provide vital frameworks for surviving this moment, resisting authoritarianism, and fighting for liberation.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  2. Educational Problems
  1. Awwad, Amani M. [ awwada@canton.edu ]
  2. Perez, Christina [ CPEREZ@DOM.EDU ]
(co-organizers)
25 Community Approaches to Mental Health: Educators, Policy-Makers Activists, and Social Identities-THEMATIC
Session Description How do activists, communities, experts and researchers come together to understand, support, frame and advocate for community mental health and disability? Disabled bodies and mental illness have consistently been marginalized and continue to be controlled and disenfranchised. However, people with disabilities and mental illness, as well as community leaders, have not been passive and have organized and fought for their rights to exist in societies. This can take many forms, from traditional protests, to internet activism, artistic expression, organizational work, and policy. This session will explore the innovative ways disability and mental health activists, their communities, organizations, and researchers are collaborating to solve complex community challenges.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  1. Ivanova, Lily [ lily.ivanova@gmail.com ]
26 Disability, Mental Health, and Society
Session Description How do individuals experience, create, and challenge identities of disability and mental illness? How do communities come together to understand, support, advocate for, and research, disability and mental health? This session explores the policies, institutions, and organizations shaping individual and community experiences of disability and mental health, and how are they changing, inviting a wide spectrum of papers that develop our sociological understandings of disability and mental health.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  1. Maconi, Melinda Leigh [ melinda.maconi@moffitt.org ]
27 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Exploring and Resisting Academic Ableism
Session Description Despite the existence of policies mandating accessibility in education, learning institutions of all types continue to perpetuate and reify ableism. Educational policies are not made with accessibility in mind, but rather, are created for certain bodies, minds, and abilities, with ad hoc accommodations later offered (inconsistently) to those whose bodies and minds don’t fit. People with disabilities can and do resist this marginalization of their bodies and minds, but often still remain in institutions that were designed to uphold ableism. This critical dialogue explores both oppression and resistance of people with disabilities in academic settings.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Educational Problems
  1. Maconi, Melinda Leigh [ melinda.maconi@moffitt.org ]
28 Families in Distress: Caregiving for and with Family Members with Disabilities and Mental Health Needs 
Session Description As the first social institution, the family performs a vital role in the survival and growth of its members. Families provide resources, nurturance, socialization, development of life skills, and support. Yet achieving these goals often comes with stress as families experience various transitions, unexpected events, shifting societal and political realities, all of which multiply for families of people with disabilities. This session explores how families experience and navigate such challenges, particularly examining the development and integration of a family member with disabilities. Families can at once provide support and be sites of additional crises. Research on the reciprocal relationship between support and stress that occurs within and around the family will be the focus of this session.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Family, Aging, and Youth
  1. Olaitan, Muhammed Faisol [ olaitanfaysal@gmail.com ]
29 Medicalization as a Social Problem: A Tool of Oppression and Resistance
Session Description

Medicalization offers a diagnosis, an explanation, and in some cases, even an identity to people with disabilities and mental illness. However, these same diagnoses can be used as a tool of oppression to control and disenfranchise bodies and minds deemed too different or inconvenient by those in power. This session explores how medicalization is socially constructed as a tool for colonization and as a tool for resistance, and the ways in which we can understand medicalization itself as a social problem.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Social Problems Theory
  1. Maconi, Melinda Leigh [ melinda.maconi@moffitt.org ]
  2. Ivanova, Lily [ lily.ivanova@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
30 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: AI and Education
Session Description This critical dialogue will explore the profound and multifaceted impact of artificial intelligence on the current state and future of education. The rapid evolution of AI tools presents both unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges. We will explore the potential benefits of AI in terms of its ability to personalize learning and increase efficiency, while at the same time we will consider how its integration risks exacerbating existing social inequalities. AI has the potential to reproduce biases, amplify the digital divide, increase surveillance, and lessen the development of critical thinking skills. This dialogue will consider AI’s role in the commodification of education and how social dynamics between students and teachers, and the overall educational landscape is significantly being changed.
  1. Educational Problems
  1. Waldron, Linda M. [ lwaldron@cnu.edu ]
  2. Saunders, Fredricka R. [ fredricka.saunders@ndsu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
31 WORKS IN PROGRESS: Revitalizing Sociology to Resist Processes of Colonization-THEMATIC
Session Description Many sociology programs are experiencing declining majors and minors. Resulting, some are being combined with other programs (e.g., Criminal Justice), face being placed in moratorium (i.e., the program no longer accepts majors or minors and is being discontinued), or they have been eliminated as academic choices shaping prospective career paths. We need to discuss what skill sets and career paths are available to students that major, master, or get a PhD in the field. Outside of higher education, what return on investment do students gain? Understanding the outcomes of majoring in sociology at all levels in higher education will help faculty, academic programs, and institutions develop strategies to resist processes of colonization of our life worlds.
  1. Educational Problems
  1. Coates, Rodney D. [ coatesrd@miamioh.edu ]
  2. Zalewski, Jacqueline M. [ jzalewski@wcupa.edu ]
(co-organizers)
32 WORKS IN PROGRESS: Problems and Issues in Medical Education and the Health Professions in a Time of Social Backlash
Session Description Many current and prospective educators and learners in academic medical and higher education are excluded from full participation based on race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, ablism, sexual orientation, and related characteristics. Yet many use strategies including leaning on epistemic communities; drawing on cultural connections; contributing expert knowledge; resisting and persisting despite historical exclusion. This session explores how marginalized educators and learners participate in medical and health education. We also welcome works-in-progress highlighting innovative research designs and decolonizing methodologies exploring how members exert agency as they successfully navigate their worlds. We are interested in the potential futures of medical and health education and broader institutions in this time of backlash against participation of minoritized others, and the implications this has for society.
  1. Educational Problems
  2. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Bulanda, Jennifer Roebuck [ bulandjr@miamioh.edu ]
  2. Beach, Christine [ christinebeach@arizona.edu ]
(co-organizers)
33 WORKS IN PROGRESS: “Bring Your Own Brilliance”: Sharing Our Ideas That Have Been Successful in Teaching
Session Description In this session, presenters are invited to bring their most innovative and successful teaching strategies, techniques, and ideas to the floor. Participants can share insights, experiences, and best practices that have enhanced learning in their higher education classes. Presenters could showcase their unique approaches, from engaging pedagogical methods, creative use of technology, strategies for ensuring inclusivity and supporting student well-being, to writing practices to improve the class's contents. This session is an excellent opportunity to learn from each other's brilliance and build a collective resource of teaching excellence. Participants can be seasoned educators or junior scholars who desire to share their experiences.
  1. Educational Problems
  2. Teaching Social Problems
  1. Pham, Janelle M. [ jpham@oglethorpe.edu ]
  2. Zalewski, Jacqueline M. [ jzalewski@wcupa.edu ]
(co-organizers)
34 The Colonisation of Environmental Protection
Session Description This session welcomes papers that explore colonial-era patterns of exploitation and the extent to which neoliberal thinking has taken control over management, protection and exploitation of natural resources and indigenous lands. The session considers how free market thinking and an anthropocentric approach to environmental resources might weaken environmental protections to favour certain interests, markets or to protect certain sectors. We welcome papers that examine varied conceptions on the idea of colonisation and contemporary debates on the challenges of maintaining and strengthening environmental protection.
  1. Environment and Technology
  1. Nurse, Angus A. [ angus.nurse@aru.ac.uk ]
35 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Criminalising Dissent: Legal Action Against Environmental Human Rights and Political Activists
Session Description This session invites papers on how law is used to silence or intimidate environmental activists. We welcome work addressing the criminalisation of climate protest, oppressive policing, restrictions on political demonstrations, and broader patterns of legal violence. Submissions may focus on any region, movement, or form of resistance.
  1. Environment and Technology
  2. Law and Society
  1. Thomas, Tanesha A. [ thomasta@montclair.edu ]
  2. Nurse, Angus A. [ angus.nurse@aru.ac.uk ]
(co-organizers)
36 WORKS IN PROGRESS: Environment, Inequality, and Marginalized Knowledge
Session Description Environment, inequality, and marginalized knowledge are deeply interrelated aspects of social and ecological life, yet inequality shapes who bears the burden of environmental harm and who enjoys its benefits. Indigenous peoples and low-income communities of color are disproportionately exposed while wealthier populations have greater ability to influence policy. Marginalized and indigenous knowledge plays a crucial role in challenging these dynamics. This inclusive session is designed to foster intellectual and community-based connections and encourage ongoing and newer projects.
  1. Environment and Technology
  2. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Thomas, Tanesha A. [ thomasta@montclair.edu ]
  2. Butkovich Kraus, Nicole M. [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
37 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Evolving Families over the Life Course
Session Description Whether through an individual lifetime or across multiple generations, the roles and structures of families continually evolve, adapting to the varying needs of family members as well as to social conditions. The last few decades have been characterized by remarkable changes in assumptions and forms of families, particularly with the aging of many populations. This session invites work on families across all stages of the life course, with a special emphasis on children, youth, and aging populations. Highlighting the interconnected lifeworlds of family members in various stages of life, new scholarship in these areas can provide insights into continuing patterns and new horizons of family life. 
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  1. Frost, Ami MH [ afrost@ou.edu ]
38 Resisting Colonization of the Family-THEMATIC
Session Description The day-to-day work of living in a family system often shields individuals from recognizing the influences of colonization in their midst. Yet rather than colonization existing outside the family, colonizing forces are exerted both on and within families. In this session, we will explore topics regarding the gendered objectification, commodification, and financialization of the family (and within the family) through division of unpaid work/paid work, gender socialization/rejection, concerted cultivation, care work, etc. The politicization and control of bodies, sexual behavior, gendered roles, and other phenomena are often socialized and enacted within families, but they can also be a site of resistance against these forces. 
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Frost, Ami MH [ afrost@ou.edu ]
39 Invisible Families
Session Description This session focuses on diversity within the family, highlighting families beyond the white, middle-class, heteronormative families that receive the bulk of the attention of family researchers. We welcome submissions for works that touch on topics such as racial/ethnic identity family experiences, LGBTQ+ family experiences, diverse types of parents and or parenting experiences, children and or adults with disabilities, families. Works on other diverse families are also welcome.
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  2. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Dickerson, Tia M. [ td2859@columbia.edu ]
40 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Resistance and Joy-THEMATIC
Session Description Following in the call from Shuster & Westbrook to center joy better in sociological work, this session looks at ways in which, amid a global rise of fascism and anti-LGBTQ+ movements, those of varying identities are engaging in resistance movements. In particular (though not limited only to this), we seek papers which look at how these resistance movements embrace cultures of joy as resistance tactics.
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Kao, Ying-Chao [ yckao@vcu.edu ]
41 GSPCP Works in Progress
Session Description This roundtable is open to all topics relating to gender and sexuality and its many intersections, especially those which are early in the research process and seeking feedback or input. 
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Regan, Hannah R. [ hxr256@case.edu ]
42 The Politics of Disinformation and Gender
Session Description With the rise of disinformation, misleading narratives in the public sphere have led to ongoing societal conflicts. This session explores how significant a role disinformation plays in fascist movements, specifically on gender violence. Examples include anti-LBGTQ+ conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, or how anti-intellectualism connects with anti-feminism. This session examines how disinformation affects public opinion and policy in our everyday lives, as well as strategies for debunking and preventing misinformation from spreading.
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Fuller, Kat [ fullek5@unlv.nevada.edu ]
43 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Medicalization and Surveillance of Gender and Sex-THEMATIC
Session Description This session focuses on the ways gender and sex have been medicalized, and the ways in which medicalization and surveillance of sex and gender are ways of enacting and enforcing colonization. In this critical dialogue, presenters will engage attendees in a discussion of the ways institutions and systems (including but not limited to political, legal, economic, and medical systems) act as systems of control and consider ways in which we might resist and reconstruct such systems.
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  2. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Bulanda, Ronald E. [ bulandre@miamioh.edu ]
44 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: New Trends in Global Migrations and (Im)mobilities in Anti-immigration Contexts
Session Description This session will focus on discussing and addressing the most recent migration flows, types of mobility and (in)mobilities taking place around the world in times when anti-immigration discourses and reactions against migrants are taking place. The session is looking for presentations about different regions in the world, including the Global North and South.
  1. Global
  1. Padilla, Beatriz [ padillab@usf.edu ]
45 Doing Research in Global/Transnational Contexts with Critical Decolonial Lenses: Tools and Epistemologies-THEMATIC
Session Description This session explores the methodological and epistemological challenges of conducting research in global and transnational contexts through critical decolonial lenses. Presenters will engage with innovative tools and approaches that disrupt dominant knowledge hierarchies, foreground community voices, and center relationality, reciprocity, and justice in the research process. By highlighting diverse case studies and reflexive practices, the session aims to foster dialogue on decolonizing methodologies, ethical collaboration across borders, and reimagining knowledge production beyond Eurocentric frameworks.
  1. Global
  1. Vergara, Angela [ angela.vergara@ucf.edu ]
46 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Mapping Colonization of Lifeworlds: "How Institutions Invade Daily Life"-THEMATIC
Session Description This session examines how powerful institutions shape and colonize everyday life across the globe. By tracing how rules, policies, and systems embed themselves into daily routines, we will explore how these “invasions” influence personal experiences, limit choices, and transform the ways people live, work, and relate to one another
  1. Global
  2. Institutional Ethnography
  1. Eastwood, Lauren [ eastwole@plattsburgh.edu ]
  2. Solomon, Brenda [ bsolomon@uvm.edu ]
(co-organizers)
47 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Fighting Global Inequalities: Actions towards Social, Ethnoracial and/or Gender Justice
Session Description Since the onset of globalization, inequalities have been on the rise. Even if class struggles is relevant, other inequalities, such as gender, race, ethnicity, among many others, have been recognized to societies. In addition, these inequalities have a decisive impact at the global level, especially considering the Global North and South in terms of assimetry, power differential, access to resources, extractivism, among others. Through this critical dialogue session, we want speakers to address these issues, focusing on examples that seek to fight such inequalities. 
  1. Global
  2. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Butkovich Kraus, Nicole M. [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
  2. Padilla, Beatriz [ padillab@usf.edu ]
(co-organizers)
48 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Intersecting Margins: Comparative Health of African Diasporas and Racial Minorities in the Americas-THEMATIC
Session Description This session explores the comparative health outcomes of African diasporic and other racialized minority populations across the United States, Canada, and South America. Grounded in medical sociology and public health, and drawing on a comparative framework, presenters will analyze how intersections of race, region, and citizenship status shape health disparities between marginalized groups—including African diasporic, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian communities—and dominant populations. Case studies will include comparisons of African Americans and recent African immigrants in the U.S., as well as parallels in health challenges faced by Black Brazilians and Black Canadians, highlighting the structural, social, and transnational forces driving health inequities across the Americas.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Staggers-Hakim, Raja [ raja.staggers-hakim@uconn.edu ]
49 Disasters and Health
Session Description Disasters are growing in frequency and severity over time, spanning climate-related disasters, epidemics and pandemics, social disruptions such as war and conflict, and more. The impacts of disasters on health, healthcare, and health policy are numerous. Moreover, social vulnerability perspectives hold that disasters impact marginalized populations more severely due to the worsening of pre-existing inequalities in disaster context. This session invites all papers related to disasters and health, welcoming interdisciplinary scholarship and activism, and diverse methodological approaches.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Berndt, Virginia Kuulei [ virginia.berndt@mcdaniel.edu ]
50 How Institutional/Systemic Factors Impact Family, Health & Well-Being-THEMATIC
Session Description This session explores how institutions extend their reach into the lifeworlds of individuals and communities, shaping the rhythms of daily life in ways that often remain hidden. By mapping these processes, we uncover how policies, organizational practices, and global systems influence personal choices, relationships, and opportunities. Drawing on examples from diverse contexts, the session highlights both the subtle and overt ways institutions colonize lived experience, and considers how approaches such as Institutional Ethnography (IE) can make these dynamics visible and open pathways for change.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  2. Institutional Ethnography
  1. de Ruiter, Hans-Peter [ hans-peter.de-ruiter@mnsu.edu ]
51 Caregivers, Care Recipients, and Health
Session Description The session will focus on research on the nature of or alternatives to current policies and practices regarding the provision of either formal or informal caregiving to persons with health issues. As such, presentations may be at any jurisdictional level (national, state, or local) and either present research-based details of the current policy or practice and its impact on health, or present research on both a current policy or practice and research examining an alternative policy or practice to improve caregiving and health outcomes.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  2. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Cabin, William [ wcabin@umich.edu ]
  2. Jablonski, Erica FS [ e.jablonski@unh.edu ]
(co-organizers)
52 New Directions in Institutional Ethnography
Session Description This session explores innovative applications of Institutional Ethnography (IE) that address contemporary social issues, shifting political contexts, and new methodological intersections. Presenters highlight how IE continues to evolve as a critical, justice-oriented sociology for uncovering ruling relations in everyday life.
  1. Institutional Ethnography
  1. Koralesky, Katherine E. [ katie.koralesky@ubc.ca ]
53 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Contingency and the Professions
Session Description The session explores how contingency shapes professional identities and practices across diverse fields. Presenters examine the rise of precarious employment and shifting expectations in their professions. Talks address academic contingency and its implications for the profession and professionals navigating precarious structures. These papers highlight how contingency destabilizes traditional notions of professionalism while opening new questions about labor, legitimacy, and the future of work.
  1. Labor Studies
  1. Kahn, Seth [ skahn@wcupa.edu ]
54 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Labor and Class
Session Description The session examines how labor and class intersect to shape lived experiences, social structures, and professional opportunities. Presenters highlight the dynamics of working-class life, the impact of precarity and contingent labor, and the ways in which class stratification intersects with race, gender, and migration. The papers foreground how class is reproduced, contested, and transformed within institutions and everyday life.
  1. Labor Studies
  2. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Morales, Leticia [ leticia022morales@gmail.com ]
  2. Maani, Sara [ sara.maani@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
55 Law in/as Crisis-THEMATIC
Session Description This thematic session on law and its (dis)contents will present papers that address contemporary, emerging, and growing problems related to law, legal consciousness, and legal systems. Submissions to this session might focus on variance in the ways that laws are applied, how legal systems create and maintain various forms of inequality, crises within legal systems, the law as a site and source of crisis, and more.
  1. Law and Society
  1. Branch, Michael [ branchms@hawaii.edu ]
  2. Esthappan, Sino V. [ sinoesthappan2026@u.northwestern.edu ]
(co-organizers)
56 Class Across the Lifecourse: Birth, Health, Aging, Death
Session Description This session focuses on the intersection of class and demographics ranging from the beginning to the end of the lifecourse.
  1. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Butkovich Kraus, Nicole M. [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
57 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: American Colonization of the Sociological Imagination: The Intersection of Colonization and PCI -THEMATIC
Session Description How has American hegemonic dominance shaped the broader sociological imagination? When we discuss colonization, is there a way to move beyond this that doesn’t other non-American research, and, in particular, how does this intersect with work on poverty, class, and inequality?
  1. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Butkovich Kraus, Nicole M. [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
58 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Institutional Inequalities: Constraints on Communication, Research, Organizing, and Action
Session Description This session invites research that addresses institutional stratification in the ability to conduct research, organize social action, and even communicate within itself and with the larger public. How are various institutions weathering political and economic challenges and what are successful strategies for retaining independence of thought and action on and off campuses.
  1. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Butkovich Kraus, Nicole M. [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
59 New Directions in Social Problems Theory
Session Description This session explores new trends and developments in social problems theory.
  1. Social Problems Theory
  1. Mey, Clara [ csmey@me.com ]
60 All the Feels: Emotions as Acts of Resistance-THEMATIC
Session Description Emotions in sport, leisure, and bodily performance are more than entertainment. They are social forces that challenge domination, subvert authority, and reclaim joy. From locker rooms to stadiums, emotions have long resisted the corporatization and bureaucratization of play. Athletes, fans, comedians, and participants use feeling to confront racism, sexism, ableism, and political control. This session invites papers exploring emotions as lifeworld practices that resist colonization, whether through stand-up, memes, digital critique, community theater, or parody leagues that disrupt gender norms. We welcome work that examines feeling and performance as embodied resistance, a tool for solidarity, and a medium for reimagining the social, political, and economic conditions of sport and leisure.
  1. Social Problems Theory
  2. Sport, Leisure, and the Body
  1. Johnston, Michael O. [ johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu ]
  2. Stout, Joshua H. [ jhstout@ilstu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
61 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Beyond Our Problems: How to be More Solutions-Oriented in the Classroom
Session Description This session addresses the realities of our current political climate as educators and activists dialogue with their students and communities about social problems. With emphasis on linking theory to praxis, this session considers ways to discuss and enact social change with our students and in our communities.
  1. Social Problems Theory
  2. Teaching Social Problems
  1. Johnson, Jacqueline [ jjohnson@adelphi.edu ]
62 Anticolonial Social Movements-THEMATIC
Session Description Anticolonial social movements have been a significant force in the fight for freedom and self-determination. These movements have emerged from various regions around the world, driven by the desire for cultural pride, political independence, and the end of oppressive systems. They have utilized a range of strategies, from non-violent resistance to armed struggle, to challenge colonial rule and promote the rights of colonized peoples. Colonization, in all its forms, depends on and requires processes such as objectification, commodification, corporatization, financialization, criminalization, militarization, and bureaucratization, among others. Papers in this session may address how anticolonial social movements have resisted the colonization of lifeworlds throughout time, and how they continue to have an impact today.
  1. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Pacho, Agata [ pacho.agata@gmail.com ]
63 Decolonizing the Classroom-THEMATIC
Session Description This session considers both the forces of colonization manifest in our educational systems and the importance of decolonizing our classrooms to create more inclusive, equitable and collaborative environments for learners.
  1. Teaching Social Problems
  1. Tartari, Morena [ morena.tartari@northumbria.ac.uk ]
  2. Linhart, Laurie J. [ lclinhart@dmacc.edu ]
(co-organizers)
64 Colonized Childhoods-THEMATIC
Session Description Wages for Housework organizer, Selma James writes, "The least powerful in our society are our children." Today, this appears more true than ever, and even more so for children of marginalized identities, with ongoing family separation at the border, attack on trans children's rights, and televised infanticide occurring at historically unprecedented rates. This session calls for papers that ask: What is a childhood? Which children get to have one? What is the social function of childhood? What needs to happen for children to be free?
  1. Program Committee
  1. Brubaker, Sarah Jane [ sbrubaker@vcu.edu ]
65 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Engaging with Indigenous Knowledges in Universities with Colonial Legacies: Challenges and Guiding Principles for Good Practice-THEMATIC
Session Description This session explores the challenges of recognising and including Indigenous knowledges (IKs) in research and teaching practices within institutions that continue to carry colonial legacies and perpetuate colonial violence through everyday practices. Through critical dialogue, scholars will reflect on both the obstacles and examples of good practice. The discussion will focus on how IKs are conceptualised within university structures, the challenges IKs pose to dominant institutional processes, and the ways colonial legacies continue to constrain or endanger them. The session aims to reveal opportunities for transformative change in the politics of knowledge.
  1. Transnational Initiatives Committee
  1. Pacho, Agata [ pacho.agata@gmail.com ]
66 “On Being Included”: The Promises and Pitfalls of “Diversity Management” in the Neoliberal Era-THEMATIC
Session Description In her work On Being Included, Sara Ahmed contends that “‘diversity management’ becomes a way of managing or containing conflict or dissent” (2012:13). In an attempt to eradicate inequality, she explains how these processes ultimately elide the very institutions and structures that reproduce it. In the current political-economic climate, diversity management has taken on a new meaning as universities, whether by mandate or “anticipatory obedience,” have dismantled DEI policies and brutally repressed student and faculty protest engaged in the real work of local and transnational social change. This session invites papers to reflect on “being included” in this changing landscape and the cost of resisting diversity management in favor of more liberatory scholarship and activism. 
  1. Transnational Initiatives Committee
  1. Gow, Jamella N. [ j.gow@bowdoin.edu ]