SSSP 2027 Annual Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS SUBMISSION DEADLINE

All papers must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. (Eastern Time) on January 31, 2027, in order to be considered.

Current Server Date and Time: Tuesday, October 13, 2026 (Eastern Time)

Listed below are the sessions for the 2027 Annual Meeting.

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Session # Session Title Sponsor(s) Organizer(s)
1 Co-Creating with Community: Cases, Methods and Impacts
Session Description In this session, we will explore co-creation in theory and practice of sociological research. We seek work that is rooted in community voice and challenges deficit-based narratives in community-based participatory action research. We seek to highlight methodologies that center epistemic justice through meaningful co-creation. This session promotes a 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
  1. Draus, Paul [ draus@umich.edu ]
2 Fueled Fantasies: Building Communities Toward an Imagined Future
Session Description This session examines how communities build and sustain commitments to imagined futures whose realization remains uncertain. People do not simply respond to existing social problems; they invest time, labor, resources, relationships, and identities in future possibilities.  Papers will explore how communities make these uncertain futures believable and actionable through shared narratives, expectations, relationships, collective identities, and everyday practices, as well as how they maintain commitment through setbacks, disappointment, and changing circumstances. We will explore how power and inequality shape which futures can be imagined, sustained, and pursued, and how communities resist efforts to narrow what is possible. The session asks how collectively imagined futures can catalyze present action and sustain communities working toward social worlds that do not yet exist.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  1. Johnston, Michael O. [ johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu ]
3 Placemaking, Gentrification, and Neighborhood Change
Session Description This session addresses neighborhood identity, belonging, and change. How do communities engage in placemaking? How are neighborhoods transformed, redeveloped, and gentrified? How do these processes influence the identity of places, belonging, marginalization, and displacement? The session will bring placemaking into conversation with scholarship on gentrification, two central concerns in urban and community research.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  1. Halasz, Judith R. [ halaszj@newpaltz.edu ]
4 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Reciprocity, Mutual Aid, and Moral Economies
Session Description Carrier (2018) frames moral economy as embedded, reciprocal, and ethical – an alternative to the transactional capitalist systems.  Moral economies are constructs that emphasize community engagement and interdependence.  Socially-embedded, value-driven mechanisms such as mutual aid build the foundation of a moral economic system through cycles of reciprocity and trust.  This session aims to explore these alternative sharing economies and their social impact, as well as concrete examples of moral economies and mutual aid in action.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  1. Stanlick, Sarah E. [ sstanlick@wpi.edu ]
  2. Mills, Jack Mitchel [ jmills4@fsu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
5 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Drive-in Sociology: Construction of Knowledge
Session Description W.E.B. Du Bois once criticized sociologists who study communities and populations they do not belong to, or care about outside of advancing their career, as "Drive-by sociologists." To remedy this, we propose a "Drive-in sociology" that requires working and caring about the communities we are learning from and how we best utilize our research to benefit people, not for career advancement or nebulous policy recommendations. Specifically, we call for critical analysis of knowledge production and knowledge apartheid that academia is complicit in and working for societal justice through community-based engagement and respect.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  3. Crime and Justice
  1. Young, Cassandra MF [ cassandra.gonzalez@du.edu ]
6 Works-In-Progress: Research Methodology Feedback
Session Description This works-in-progress session provides a collaborative space for researchers to present developing projects in the fields of education, labor studies, and community-engaged research and receive constructive feedback on research design, methodology, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. We welcome qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and community-engaged research from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The session aims to foster scholarly exchange, strengthen ongoing research, and encourage interdisciplinary dialogue among participants at various stages of their projects.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Educational Problems
  1. Shokeen, Namrata [ namratashokeen8@gmail.com ]
  2. Matthews, Tanya [ tanya.matthews@mcgill.ca ]
(co-organizers)
7 Teams and Scenes: Doing Research with (not on) Subcultural Groups
Session Description Research on subcultural groups raises important questions about access, trust, power, and representation. This session invites scholarship that approach participants as collaborators in knowledge production rather than simply as objects of study. This session welcomes research on subcultural groups that are organized around sport, leisure, drinking, drugs, nightlife, music, and other subcultural scenes. Papers may examine ethnographic relationships, insider and outsider status, reciprocity, participatory methods, ethical dilemmas, or the challenges of these communities whose practices are often stigmatized, criminalized, embodied, or misunderstood. We especially encourage work that considers what changes when researchers study with, rather than merely on, the subcultural groups they seek to understand.
  1. Community, Research, and Practice
  2. Embodied Practices: Substance Use, Sport, and Leisure
  1. Draus, Paul [ draus@umich.edu ]
  2. Guarino, Honoria [ hguar16@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
8 Migration, Labor, and Community Organizing-THEMATIC
Session Description This session examines intersections of migration, labor, and community organizing across local and transnational contexts. It invites contributions exploring how migration regimes and labor regimes interact in shaping the organization, differentiation, and reproduction of labor; how communities, solidarities, and collective capacities are constituted among migrants and across migrants and non-migrants; and how organizing develops within and beyond conventional workplaces and organizations. Contributions may address precarity, informality, racialization, legal status, labor-market segmentation, social reproduction, mutual aid, community infrastructures, and changing forms of labor and migrant organization. It also addresses how collective practices cross boundaries between workplace and community, interact with formal and informal institutions, and shape labor relations and community life, including the conditions, dynamics, possibilities, and limits of these processes.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  1. Maani, Sara [ sara.maani@gmail.com ]
9 The New Information Age: AI, Labor, and Knowledge
Session Description As AI technologies become increasingly embedded in the infrastructures of everyday life, we might ask not only what these technologies can do for us, but also whose interests they serve, whose knowledge they privilege, and how they are reshaping the labor force and economy. This session invites papers on the broad landscape of AI, including misinformation and disinformation; algorithmic bias; citational politics; AI, labor, and the economy; and AI as a pedagogical tool. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider how AI is transforming everyday life and reshaping the social relations, institutions, and systems of power in which these technologies are embedded.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  1. Tehrani, Sara [ Sara.tehrani@ucf.edu ]
10 War, Labor, and Transnational Movements-THEMATIC
Session Description This session examines intersections of war, labor, and transnational movements amid transformations in global production, mobility, and social reproduction. It considers labor as encompassing heterogeneous forms of productive and reproductive activity organized through workplaces, migration, borders, logistics, infrastructures, and transnational networks.

The session invites contributions examining how war reorganizes labor, labor markets, mobility, production, and everyday life; how transnational processes connect and differentiate workers across sectors and territories; how forms of collective organization, solidarity, and mobilization emerge or encounter constraints at different scales, including the relations, conditions, shared processes, and forms of coordination through which they may be connected transnationally.

Contributions may approach these relations across scales, across different historical and contemporary contexts, and through diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  1. Maani, Sara [ sara.maani@gmail.com ]
11 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Global Environmental Movements for Radical Change-THEMATIC
Session Description This session welcomes interdisciplinary papers across scales that examines environmental and climate research and social movements and organizing, broadly understood, including reforming and transforming institutions and working through policy and/or with activists, community members, and policymakers. This work can span global to local contexts and use a diverse array of methods from community-engaged to qualitative to quantitative and spatial methods. Creative work, activist and practitioner talks are especially welcome alongside traditional research and theoretical presentations.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  2. Environment and Technology
  3. Global
  1. Cannon, Clare E. B. [ cebcannon@ucdavis.edu ]
12 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: The Politics of Reproductive and Gender-Affirmative Care
Session Description In 2026, 63 anti-trans bills have been passed so far, 17 of which involve healthcare. These policies are part of a broader politicized healthcare environment in which access to reproductive healthcare is increasingly shaped by legislation, public discourse, and competing definitions of bodily autonomy. This session invites papers that attend to the politics of reproductive health, including (environmental) reproductive justice, gender-affirming care, sexual and reproductive health education, abortion, contraception, surrogacy, fertility, the overmedicalization of pregnancy, reproductive healthcare and provision in carceral settings, and other forms of embodied healthcare. We also welcome papers that examine how individuals and communities navigate, negotiate, and resist these mechanisms of regulation and control in the pursuit of a more equitable reproductive future.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  3. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Pittman, AP [ ap.r.pittman@gmail.com ]
13 Advocacy and Change-THEMATIC
Session Description This session features presentations that broadly address advocacy and social change. Institutional ethnographers begin from the “everyday,” with the premise that people’s experiences are organized by larger ruling relations. However, to paraphrase Marx, the goal is not simply to analyze these phenomena but to change them, as “ruling relations” refer to power dynamics that generate disjunctures, inequalities, and marginalization. The papers in this session take up this dynamic through research, activism, or both.
  1. Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change
  2. Institutional Ethnography
  1. Eastwood, Lauren [ eastwole@plattsburgh.edu ]
  2. Solomon, Brenda [ bsolomon@uvm.edu ]
(co-organizers)
14 Criminalizing Poverty: Housing, Homelessness, and Justice
Session Description Criminalizing Poverty: Housing, Homelessness, and Justice examines the intersection of poverty, housing insecurity, homelessness, and the criminal legal system. The session explores how laws, policies, and enforcement practices can criminalize behaviors associated with homelessness and economic hardship, often placing vulnerable individuals at greater risk of arrest, incarceration, and continued instability. It also considers the broader social and structural factors that shape these experiences and highlights approaches that prioritize housing, prevention, community support, and equitable access to justice.
  1. Crime and Justice
  1. Carpenter, Jennifer M. [ jcarpenter16@student.gsu.edu ]
15 Resistance and Responses to War and Genocide
Session Description In cases of massacres, terrorist attacks, and mass killings, state security institutions have traditionally been the primary responders, with communities relying on formal systems to investigate crimes and pursue justice. Recent incidents in parts of Africa, however, suggest a shift: some communities are turning to traditional institutions and customary mechanisms to seek accountability and redress. This shift raises questions about the role of traditional institutions in responding to violent crime, particularly where state institutions are perceived as ineffective, inaccessible, or unable to meet community needs. Cases involving Iran and Palestine may offer comparative perspectives on community responses to mass violence and alternatives to state-centered justice.
  1. Crime and Justice
  1. Olaitan, Muhammed Faisol [ olaitanfaysal@gmail.com ]
16 Social Death and Community Response
Session Description This session on mass incarceration explores the intersection of mass incarceration and the U.S. criminal legal system’s overreliance on perpetual punishment. Perpetual punishment is broadly defined to include the pains of incarceration, extreme sentencing, denials of criminal legal relief, and other collateral consequences that result from a criminal conviction. The session also examines how individuals, families, advocacy organizations, and communities respond to the ongoing impacts of incarceration and criminalization. Particular attention is given to community-based responses, grassroots advocacy, reentry efforts, and collective strategies to address the harms of perpetual punishment and advance more just and equitable approaches to criminal legal policy and practice.
  1. Crime and Justice
  1. Tabbutt, Kelly M. [ tabbutt@alfred.edu ]
  2. Carpenter, Jennifer M. [ jcarpenter16@student.gsu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
17 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Navigating and Surviving the U.S. Culture of Fear: The Racialization, Criminalization, and Impacts of Immigration Enforcement
Session Description With the blessing of the United States Supreme Court, the second Trump administration's racialized tactics and policies diminished the legal recourse of immigrant community members to challenge what were formerly understood as illegal racial profiling tactics. These new realities now make habeas corpus petitions harder to file and have also reshaped the landscape for immigration attorneys. This critical dialogue session invites immigration, legal, race, and ethnicity scholars to engage with grassroots organizers and practicing immigration lawyers to understand how federal immigration and border enforcement agencies racialized and criminalized immigrant communities, creating a national culture of fear, along with the strategic reactions by local immigrant communities, social justice activists, and grassroots organizations to the Trump administration’s efforts at racialized immigration enforcement.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  3. Law and Society
  1. Castillo, Florence Emily [ fec1@rice.edu ]
  2. Awwad, Amani M. [ awwada@canton.edu ]
(co-organizers)
18 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Practice
Session Description This session will focus on papers about the risks and benefits of using AI as a teacher, practitioner, or student. Preference will be given to papers with specific examples from teaching or practice settings or specific policies to limit AI use risks.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Educational Problems
  3. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Cabin, William D. [ wcabin@umich.edu ]
  2. Zalewski, Jacqueline M. [ jzalewski@wcupa.edu ]
  3. Mallick, Rafia Javaid [ rafia.mallick@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
19 Institutional Response to Activism and Community Justice
Session Description As the conservative political climate in the US intensifies, institutions of higher education and other systems have become increasingly vigilant in their restrictions against - and punitive responses to - students’ and citizens’ organizing and protests. This session explores ways that institutions are responding to community activism and organizing around social justice issues, as well as the ways that groups are actively pushing back against systemic efforts to suppress and oppress such activism.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Law and Society
  1. Brubaker, Sarah Jane [ sbrubaker@vcu.edu ]
  2. Bohrman, Casey [ cbohrman@wcupa.edu ]
(co-organizers)
20 Weaponization of Criminal Justice
Session Description Throughout the US and across all demographics, individuals are losing their confidence in the criminal justice system as a system that is meant to protect them at the federal and state levels. This distrust comes from multiple experiences, from having negative experiences with the justice system as a victim or offender, to seeing the system as a tool to protect the elite. This session focuses on how the criminal justice system has failed to protect the vulnerable and instead has either further harmed them or rendered them invisible. This session explores the lived experiences of communities that are directly and indirectly violated by the law, courts, and the criminal justice system as a whole.
  1. Crime and Justice
  2. Law and Society
  1. Young, Cassandra MF [ cassandra.gonzalez@du.edu ]
21 Beyond Inclusion: Migrant Networks, Digital Communities, and Transformative Justice
Session Description Migrant and diasporic communities are not only adapting to existing systems and challenges but actively reshaping them. This session explores how migrant communities, including (but not limited to) youth communities, are building forms of solidarity, political participation, and collective power. The session aims to challenge the conventional approach to migration and inclusion and asks how migrant communities are reshaping the meaning and new forms of belonging, justice, and community. We welcome the papers and conversations on migrant organizing, digital activism and engagement, and diasporic networks to shed light on how community responses can challenge exclusion and contribute to transformative social change.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  1. Mohammadi, Foroogh [ foroogh.mohammadi@acadiau.ca ]
22 The Retrenchment of Affirmative Action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Initiatives: The Direct Attacks on Remedying Past Racial Discrimination and Institutional Efforts for Racial Inclusion
Session Description In Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court’s Conservative majority, held that diversity was not a compelling state interest sufficient to constitutionally justify race-based affirmative action in college admissions under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Conservative states' legislators continue to pass laws to severely limit or completely ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at public universities. Perversely, the Trump administration uses Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to threaten to withdraw federal funding from public and private universities, pressuring them to roll back their institutional efforts toward racial inclusion. This regular paper session invites paper submissions on the social consequences of the contemporary retrenchment of affirmative action and DEI initiatives.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  1. Espinoza, Gunercindo Antoneo [ espin129@umn.edu ]
23 Environmental Risk and Marginalized Knowledge: Class, Race, and Place-THEMATIC
Session Description This session examines the unequal distribution of environmental risk and harm across class, race, and geography, with particular attention to the lived experience and knowledge of BIPOC and transnational communities in understanding and responding to environmental injustice for radical change. We invite papers on the siting of hazardous facilities in resource-deprived communities, unequal exposure to pollution and disaster, class and racialized dimensions of climate vulnerability, spatial and housing inequality tied to environmental racism, and policy responses to structural environmental inequality. This session also invites contributions beyond traditional research and theoretical insights including creative work, activist organizing, and practitioner or community-based perspectives.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  2. Environment and Technology
  3. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Thomas, Tanesha A. [ thomasta@montclair.edu ]
  2. Salvaggio, Marko [ msalvaggio@tulane.edu ]
(co-organizers)
24 The Influence of Audre Geraldine Lorde: The Continuation in Intersectionality’s Emergence, Development, and Evolution within Academia
Session Description Living from 1934 to 1992, Audre Geraldine Lorde remains a critical voice in the continuing emergence, development, and evolution of intersectionality analyses across social justice activism and radical justice-centered academia. The continued work within communities of radical activist intersectional academics across now countless fields of study, influenced by Lorde’s body of work, is critical to illuminating the path toward a just world in these most dim times, both within the United States and internationally. This regular session requests paper submissions with an intersectional analytical framework that examines how social oppressions and privileges across various social intersections, throughout the spectrum of both marginalized and privileged identities and communities, factor into and shape the continuing struggles for true social liberation for all!
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Espinoza, Gunercindo Antoneo [ espin129@umn.edu ]
25 Racial and Gender Disparities: Latina/e Experiences in Academia
Session Description Since 2010, Latina women have outpaced their Latino male counterparts in earning advanced degrees (Mora and Lopez 2023). Although Latina students are making significant strides in advancing Latinos' educational attainment, they remain severely underrepresented compared with their counterparts across racial and gender groups. Latinas in academia, across the student, staff, and faculty body, are defending their place in higher education and helping transform and reimagine this historically white-male-centered space. This regular paper session invites submissions on the experiences of Latinas/es as they navigate the academy, including the challenges they encounter and/ or the strategies they employ for resistance and success.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
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26 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Challenges Facing the Voting Rights Act
Session Description Voting rights face challenges such as restrictive voting laws, voter ID requirements, limited access to polling places, misinformation, and gerrymandering, along with recent efforts by the U.S. Supreme Court to erode the 1965 Voting Rights Act's legal enforcement mechanisms. These issues can make it harder for some eligible citizens to vote and raise concerns about equal access to the democratic process. This session seeks a paper addressing the above challenges.
  1. Critical Race and Ethnic Study
  2. Law and Society
  1. Awwad, Amani M. [ awwada@canton.edu ]
27 Creative Methods in Disability and Mental Health Research
Session Description How have methods shaped our understandings of disability and mental health in sociological research, and how can new and creative methods expand these understandings? This session invites scholarship that is pushing the methodological boundaries of research on dis/ability, mental illness, and mental health, to produce new and creative understandings of how these phenomena are structured and experienced in the social world. We invite scholars using a variety of creative methods, including innovative qualitative, quantitative, visual, sound, arts-based, immersive, participatory-action, community, or digital methods, to share and show how these techniques can help researchers achieve new insights and understandings of disability and mental health.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  1. Ivanova, Lily [ lily.ivanova@gmail.com ]
28 Studying Disability and Mental Health for Radical Change-THEMATIC
Session Description In the current sociopolitical context where disability rights, services, and voices are being dismantled by neoliberal capitalism, settler colonialism, and racist ableist politics, how do we study disability and mental health for radical change? This session welcomes work that centers the lived experiences of disabled people from multiple social locations, examines the impact of structural ableism, and/or explores collective practices of “worldmaking” as Robert McRuer describes it. We are especially interested in research that attends to the cultural meanings, categories, and narratives through which disability and mental health are socially constructed.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  1. Maconi, Melinda Leigh [ melinda.maconi@moffitt.org ]
  2. Qin, Rebecca [ siqi.qin@ubc.ca ]
(co-organizers)
29 Migration and Mental Health
Session Description This session explores how mental health is shaped by migration and displacement. Papers in this session examine how migrants navigate identity disruptions, trauma, stigma, care, and mental health help-seeking, taking into account the social structures that shape access to mental healthcare. Bringing these perspectives together, the session also examines approaches to decolonizing mental health and rethinking care through culturally situated understandings of healing, belonging, and community.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Global
  1. Qin, Rebecca [ siqi.qin@ubc.ca ]
  2. Kabir, Natasha I. [ natasha.kabir@usm.edu ]
  3. Rahaman, Melicha [ mrahaman@miners.utep.edu ]
(co-organizers)
30 Medicalization of Bodies and Minds
Session Description This session explores trends and consequences of the medicalization of bodies and minds, including the medicalization of disabled bodies, shifting perceptions and categorizations of mental health and illness, medicalization of aging, the institutions and social forces that result in medicalization, consequences of medicalization for individuals and society, demedicalization, and resistance. Submissions may include theoretical, empirical, and/or applied work on medicalization, inequalities in whose bodies and minds are subject to medical scrutiny/intervention, how medical categories and medical knowledge are constructed and contested, and the actors and institutions that participate in medicalization. We also encourage submissions that explore the consequences of medicalization for policy, practice, and social change.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Dillaway, Heather E. [ hedilla@ilstu.edu ]
  2. Ivanova, Lily [ lily.ivanova@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
31 Being Deviant: The Embodied Experience of Breaking from Social Norms
Session Description This session invites scholarship about embodied experiences of “being deviant” – living in and navigating the social world from an identity, standpoint, or socially applied lens of being outside of social norms. The session welcomes papers that are interested in how societies construct and define what is “normal,” the role of phenomenology and inter-subjectivity in defining “normal” and “non-normal” lived experiences, and how individuals and communities understand, respond to, challenge, reclaim and push forward societal understandings of non-normative experiences. Special interest will be taken in papers that advance our theoretical, empirical, and methodological understandings of difference and normality.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Social Problems Theory
  1. Ivanova, Lily [ lily.ivanova@gmail.com ]
  2. Lane, David C. [ dclane1@ilstu.edu ]
  3. Mey, Clara [ csmey@me.com ]
(co-organizers)
32 Works-In-Progress: Who Cares for the Caregivers? Resident Care, Workforce, and Support Systems in Long-Term Care
Session Description This roundtable focuses on the wellbeing of direct caregivers in long-term care—CNAs, nurses, and frontline staff—highlighting challenges such as understaffing and burnout despite increasing demand for elder and disability care. Participants will explore the structural and interpersonal factors affecting caregiver wellbeing and its impact on residents' quality of life, drawing insights from sociology, social work, and disability studies. The dialogue aims to identify how policy and workplace culture can better support caregivers. Audience engagement through Q&A is also planned.
  1. Disability, Mental Wellness, and Social Justice
  2. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Qin, Rebecca [ siqi.qin@ubc.ca ]
  2. Rani, Momna [ Momnarani@my.unt.edu ]
(co-organizers)
33 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Inequality in Higher Education
Session Description As higher education, particularly in the US, faces political threats beyond anything we've seen in decades, it's easy to overlook threats to the sector's viability from forms of inequality that have long plagued us: inequitable student entry access and access to support services; inequitable labor conditions across the sector; discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, national origin, religion, job status, (dis)ability, and their intersections. These problems are well-documented. Solutions to inequitable conditions in one constituency are often posed as zero sums, such that helping one group hurts another.

Therefore, we invite proposals that extend current research on any form of inequality in higher education, but especially research that speaks across constituencies in order to counteract zero-sum logic. 
  1. Educational Problems
  1. Kahn, Seth [ skahn@wcupa.edu ]
  2. Awwad, Amani M. [ awwada@canton.edu ]
  3. Boadu, Vanessa Ampofoa [ vb154019@ohio.edu ]
(co-organizers)
34 Teaching to Transgress-THEMATIC
Session Description Inspired by bell hooks’ seminal framework, this session will examine the contemporary crisis in education through the lens of critical pedagogy as a practice of freedom. Topics may include research on the impact of curricular mandates, institutional constraints, and systemic inequalities in K-12 institutions and higher education. Papers could examine alternative instructional styles that "teach to transgress," where educators or students use disruptive strategies to challenge banking models of education, confront racial and socioeconomic biases, and foster genuine student agency. 
  1. Educational Problems
  1. Alvare, Melissa A. [ malvare@monmouth.edu ]
  2. Waldron, Linda M. [ lwaldron@cnu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
35 Works-In-Progress: What Can Institutional Ethnography Tell Us About Educational Problems?
Session Description This collaborative session invites works-in-progress of scholars engaging in institutional ethnography in educational settings, where educational settings are broadly conceptualized as primary, secondary, and tertiary education as well as adult and continuing education. We encourage presenters who have engaged in significant data collection, mapping, and/or indexing at the time of submission to allow for discussion to contribute to the development of individual projects as well as to enhance collective understanding of how IE can contribute to understanding educational problems. Institutional ethnography is a method used to understand the ways that policies, practices, procedures, and discourses provide insight into the complexities of schools, so presenters are encouraged to pose questions that acknowledge these tensions and employ an Institutional Ethnographic approach. 
  1. Educational Problems
  2. Institutional Ethnography
  1. Parson, Laura J. [ laura.parson@ndsu.edu ]
  2. Rodriguez, Sophia [ sr7704@nyu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
36 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: “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)
37 All the Feels: Emotions as Acts of Resistance
Session Description This session is an extension of a discussion that began at the conference last year. Emotions in sport, leisure, and bodily performance are more than entertainment; they are social forces that challenge domination, subvert authority, and reclaim joy. Athletes, fans, comedians, and more use feeling and performance to resist the corporatization and bureaucratization of play and confront racism, sexism, ableism, and political control. This session invites papers examining emotions as lifeworld practices that resist colonization through sport, stand-up, memes, community theater, parody leagues, and other forms of embodied expression. We welcome scholarship exploring feeling and performance as forms of resistance, tools for solidarity, and mediums for reimagining the social, political, and economic conditions of sport and leisure.  
  1. Embodied Practices: Substance Use, Sport, and Leisure
  2. Social Problems Theory
  1. Johnston, Michael O. [ johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu ]
  2. Stout, Joshua H. [ jhstout@ilstu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
38 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: NOT Rubble: Ongoing Impacts of Environmental Sociology
Session Description Environmental Sociology has long been interdisciplinary and applied, working with people on the ground to try to improve the relationships among human communities and natural systems. This session allows presenters the opportunity to highlight the breadth of ways in which environmental sociology has been- and continues to be- applied, critical, and impactful. An interactive session, this critical dialogue will give an opportunity for attendees to reflect upon moving their own work forward in ways highlighted, as well as to provide critical feedback on ways not yet considered among panelists.
  1. Environment and Technology
  1. Paulson, Nels R. [ paulsonne@uwstout.edu ]
39 Biopolitics in Place: Bodies, Technology, and Power Across Rural and Urban Spaces
Session Description This interdisciplinary panel explores different ways to identify, understand, study, and eradicate social problems related to power, the body, technology, and the environment across the rural / urban divide. In both rural and urban areas, when facing hazardous conditions, political pressure, discrimination, and bodily threats, cisgender and heterosexual men are less affected than women and LGBTQ+ people, especially BIPOC and people with disabilities. By creating space to discuss sexuality, sociology, public health, environmental, political, and economic realities, technological and industrial conditions, communities, families, survival, dreams, resistance, and spirituality, we hope to bring together in an academic setting lived rural and urban experiences. We welcome scholarly research, creative work, talks by frontline community members, activists, and/or practitioners, and demonstration ideas.
  1. Environment and Technology
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Rafter, Becky [ beckyrafter@gmail.com ]
  2. Fuller, Kat [ fullek5@unlv.nevada.edu ]
(co-organizers)
40 New Trends in the Dynamics of Intergenerational Relationships
Session Description Living in a neoliberal state as life expectancy increases carries opportunities and consequences for intergenerational relationships. An aging population with paltry social safety nets can lead to increasing reliance across generations for various family responsibilities and care. Grandparents raising their grandchildren, young adults caring for aging kin, adults with economic and care responsibilities for both young and old, and many other complex dynamics in families will only increase in coming years. This session invites insights on new ways relationships over multiple generations are developing in current uncertain times. Moreover, intergenerational relationships can be a powerful site for building communities for radical change. 
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  1. Wellin, Chris [ cwellin@ilstu.edu ]
41 Gendered Carework in Communities and Families amidst the Neoliberal Assault on Safety Net Programs and Policies
Session Description The social welfare state in the U.S. was threadbare, even before the assaults on funding and administration in the Trump regime. Only now are impacts from recent legislation being seen and felt, across areas of food insecurity, rental assistance, disability supports and services, and access to healthcare. Families so often have no choice but to absorb these impacts, with unequal ramifications according to gender and sexuality.

In response, there are worlds of resistance and compensation—both individual and collective—which this session is devoted to describing and reflecting on. Only weeks from a pivotal midterm election in the U.S., formal policy advocacy or critique are welcome. 
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  2. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Tehrani, Sara [ Sara.tehrani@ucf.edu ]
42 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Systemic Assaults on Healthcare Provision: Providers, Policy, and Possibilities for Radical Change-THEMATIC
Session Description Healthcare providers and public health systems face mounting challenges from funding cuts, politicization, and changing policy environments. This critical dialogue invites discussion of these systemic pressures and their consequences for public health, healthcare professionals, families, and individuals across the life course. Submissions may consider how healthcare providers can be educated and supported amidst attacks on healthcare provision; the neoliberal shaping of healthcare and health provision; healthcare consequences of and responses to the politicization of public health and provision of care; consequences of funding cuts and policy shifts; inequalities that have resulted from decreased support for public health programs; and the policy, organizational, professional, and collective responses necessary to produce radical change in this arena.
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  2. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Wellin, Chris [ cwellin@ilstu.edu ]
43 Works-In-Progress: Radical Kinship: Inequality, Solidarity, and the Remaking of Family and Community-THEMATIC
Session Description Inequalities are experienced by families and within families. This session explores the multitudinous inequalities of our current society from a lens of family relationships, resources, and the broader policy environment. We seek submissions of works in progress that explore kinship in all forms, examines the transformative power of relationship in community, and encourage ideas for programs and policies for radical alleviation of inequities. 
  1. Family, Aging, and Youth
  2. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Frost, Ami MH [ ami.frost@byu.edu ]
44 Digital Spaces and Gender
Session Description This session examines how digital technologies and online spaces shape experiences of “doing” gender and power dynamics. It considers how social media, online communities, gaming platforms, and other digital environments can reproduce existing gender inequalities while also creating opportunities for resistance, community-building, and self-expression. The session explores topics such as online harassment and gender-based violence, digital activism, representation, and the ways people perform or negotiate gender online. It also considers how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, and other forms of social difference, shaping how individuals experience, participate in, and navigate digital spaces.
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Fuller, Kat [ fullek5@unlv.nevada.edu ]
45 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Impacts of and Responses to Governmental Attacks on LGBTQIA+ Rights
Session Description Though uneven and halting, LGBTQIA+ rights saw progressive expansion during the half-century from the 1970s-2010s, in the U.S. and around much of the world. The 2020s, however, have been characterized by a marked governmental retreat from such protections. This has been quite notable when it comes to restrictions being placed on the rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex individuals. This session explores how LGBTQIA+ communities have been impacted, and how they and allies have organized to respond.
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Costello, Cary Gabriel [ COSTELLO@UWM.EDU ]
46 Works-In-Progress: Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
Session Description A roundtable for scholars, students, and professionals to share works-in-progress and give and receive constructive feedback. Projects may address any topic related to the GSBPC Division.
  1. Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
  1. Fuller, Kat [ fullek5@unlv.nevada.edu ]
47 Reconstructing Life After Migration: Family, Intimacy, and Belonging
Session Description Migrants often rebuild their lives under conditions shaped by displacement, restrictive immigration policies, economic insecurity, discrimination, and unequal access to resources. These forces influence where people settle and how they form, sustain, and understand family, intimate, and emotional relationships. This session invites papers examining the familial, intimate, and emotional dimensions of forced and voluntary migration. We welcome scholars working across the United States, Global South, and Global North, including transnational and comparative perspectives. Topics may include displacement, marriage, caregiving, emotional labor, migrant health, binational couples, transnational families, inequality, and the construction of home and belonging. Papers should consider how race, class, gender, nationality, language, and legal status shape love, grief, uncertainty, obligations, power, resilience, emotional well-being, and migrants’ everyday experiences.
  1. Global
  1. Vergara, Angela [ angela.vergara@ucf.edu ]
  2. Sliaptsova, Viktoryia [ vsliaptsova@usf.edu ]
(co-organizers)
48 You Put Your Right Wing in, You Kick Your Left Wing Out: Reshaping Global Politics in the Era of Trump
Session Description The return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency has intensified debates about the direction of global politics. Across countries and regions, right-wing parties and movements have gained visibility and influence, while established political alliances, institutions, and left-wing projects face new challenges. This session explores how the contemporary political landscape is being reshaped in the Trump era. It invites diverse perspectives on changing political ideologies, populism, nationalism, democracy, globalization, social movements, international relations, and political power. Collectively, the session considers what the rise of Trump and the global right means for the future of politics.
  1. Global
  1. Ryan, J. Michael [ j.michaelsociology@gmail.com ]
49 Change for Whom, and Where? Centering the Global Majority in Radical Change Frameworks
Session Description This session questions the geographic and social assumptions embedded in calls for radical change. Building on this year's conference theme, we ask: whose transformation counts as radical, and from where is that judgment made? Instead of treating change in the West, in the Global North, or from the global minority as the horizon of political possibility, this session invites papers that critically examine how geography and power structures our understandings of radical change and that center places, movements, and epistemologies too often positioned at the margins. We welcome work engaging decolonial, relational, critical race, disability justice, and Global South frameworks, and the like, from those writing and thinking from and with the Global Majority.
  1. Global
  2. Social Problems Theory
  1. Lister, Sione Lynn Pili [ sionelister@asu.edu ]
50 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Teaching Social Problems from a Transnational Perspective
Session Description Social issues in our modern global landscape impact people and communities across defined borders, yet so often social problems are examined within the confines of a specific nation-state. This session provides a forum for scholars, educators and activists alike to discuss strategies, successes and challenges of teaching social problems from a transnational perspective.
  1. Global
  2. Teaching Social Problems
  3. Transnational Initiatives Committee
  1. Dobreva, Tsveta [ tdobreva@albany.edu ]
  2. Hopwood, Junior R. [ hopwoodj@gram.edu ]
(co-organizers)
51 Beyond Access: Reimagining Health and Healthcare in Rural Communities
Session Description Rural health inequities extend beyond healthcare access. They are shaped by economic conditions, social relationships, institutional practices, policy, geography, and availability of community resources. Rural communities are not simply sites of disadvantage; they are places where residents, organizations, and institutions develop strategies to address local health needs and create change. This session invites papers examining the social forces shaping health and healthcare in rural communities and the possibilities for transformation. Submissions may address healthcare access and delivery, policy, social determinants of health, community trust, health navigation, rural healthcare systems, mental and behavioral health, community-based initiatives, or other emerging rural health challenges. Papers that center community perspectives and identify pathways toward more equitable rural health systems are especially encouraged.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Chapman II, Carlos N. [ chapmanc@gram.edu ]
52 Roundtable: Health in the Algorithmic Age: AI, Technology, and the Future of Care-THEMATIC
Session Description Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are rapidly changing how health information is produced, healthcare is delivered, and individuals and communities engage with health systems. Yet technological innovation may both address and reproduce existing health and social inequalities. In keeping with the conference theme, “Building Communities for Radical Change,” this session invites papers examining the social implications of AI and technology for health, healthcare, and health equity. Submissions may address AI-assisted healthcare, digital health, telehealth, health information and misinformation, algorithmic bias, privacy and surveillance, patient-provider relationships, healthcare work, access to technology, or the use of emerging technologies in underserved communities.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  1. Bulanda, Jennifer Roebuck [ bulandjr@miamioh.edu ]
53 Wellbeing and Welfare Across the Life Course
Session Description This session seeks to explore how wellbeing is experienced, negotiated, and transformed across different stages of life, from childhood and youth to adulthood, and later life. We welcome contributions that examine how social institutions, families, communities, and welfare systems shape opportunities for wellbeing and respond to vulnerability, inequality, and need. Papers may address topics including life course transitions, intergenerational relations, care practices, poverty and exclusion, disability, health and mental health, migration, ageing, family change, and welfare reform. We particularly encourage empirical, theoretical, comparative, and policy-oriented contributions that critically engage with inequalities of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and citizenship.
  1. Health, Health Policy, and Health Services
  2. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Amoah, Padmore Adusei [ padmoreamoah@yahoo.com ]
54 Institutional Ethnography: Past, Present, Future
Session Description Institutional Ethnography (IE), grounded in the work of Dorothy Smith, has a rich intellectual and activist history and an increasingly international community of scholars. Beginning from the problematic of people’s everyday lives, IE offers a distinctive ontological shift focused on how lives are coordinated through social relations. Today, the IE community is navigating significant transitions, including academic precarity, declining resources for travel and collaboration, repression of resistant lives, and global turmoil. This session invites reflections on IE’s intellectual and activist history and its future development. What have we learned from Smith, and how can IE networks and scholarship respond to contemporary transformations? We welcome historical, theoretical, empirical, and other contributions addressing these themes.
  1. Institutional Ethnography
  1. DeVault, Marjorie [ mdevault@maxwell.syr.edu ]
  2. Solomon, Brenda [ bsolomon@uvm.edu ]
  3. Diamond, Timothy [ timdiamond88@gmail.com ]
  4. de Ruiter, Hans-Peter [ hans-peter.de-ruiter@mnsu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
55 Reimagining Systems in Community Practice Against Poverty
Session Description Anti-poverty systems are often built to manage scarcity rather than end it, and the apparatus that surrounds them - eligibility criteria, assessment tools, case files, reporting requirements - can reproduce the conditions it claims to remedy. This session asks how these systems are held in place, from the standpoints of people who navigate them or work inside them. It also asks what else is possible: how communities and families organize care, knowledge, and practice, and the strategies they use to survive and resist. Empirical, theoretical, and practice-based papers are welcome. We are especially interested in work that treats people living in poverty as experts of their experience and analysts of the systems they encounter rather than as subjects of them.
  1. Institutional Ethnography
  2. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  3. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Cook, Denae J. [ denae.cook@utah.edu ]
  2. Kraus, Nicole [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
  3. Ridzi, Frank [ frankridzi@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
56 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. Esthappan, Sino V. [ sinoesthappan2026@u.northwestern.edu ]
57 Resisting Legal Violence-THEMATIC
Session Description This thematic session invites papers that examine how activists, communities, and movements resist the use of law as a tool of repression. We welcome contributions on strategies of resistance, counter-mobilization, solidarity practices, and alternative legal imaginaries. Submissions may focus on environmental, human rights, political, or other struggles across diverse contexts.
  1. Law and Society
  1. Esthappan, Sino V. [ sinoesthappan2026@u.northwestern.edu ]
58 Poverty, Inequality, and Intersectionality
Session Description Inequality and poverty intersect with a wide variety of other important sociological identities to create meaningful differences and unexpected similarities. We welcome paper presentations that broadly use an intersectional lens.
  1. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Gutierrez, Julia [ jgutierrez@agnesscott.edu ]
  2. Kraus, Nicole [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
59 Works-In-Progress: Urban Poverty, Rural Poverty
Session Description This session broadly invites works in progress that analyze poverty in either rural or urban setting, with an emphasis on finding the meaningful commonalities and differences between projects to facilitate more informed, holistic work. This session aims to be a supportive and productive roundtable with papers presented with specific requests for useful feedback to move them toward publication or toward successful grant applications.
  1. Poverty, Class, and Inequality
  1. Kraus, Jonathan Andrew [ dr.andy.kraus@gmail.com ]
  2. Kraus, Nicole [ nkraus@wtamu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
60 New Directions in Social Problems Theory
Session Description This session highlights new and emerging ideas and directions in social problems theory.
  1. Social Problems Theory
  1. Mey, Clara [ csmey@me.com ]
61 Radicalizing in Social Problems Theory-THEMATIC
Session Description This session brings together work that critically examines the structural forces shaping contemporary social issues. Radicalizing means “getting to the root”: this session asks how sociological theory can move beyond surface-level explanations to confront the systems of power that produce and sustain social problems. As we explore radicalizing social theory, we consider how to challenge and expand the sociological theory canon by centering radical theorists whose contributions have been overlooked or undervalued. The session also invites work that imagines new subfields and areas of inquiry capable of radicalizing both the discipline and the social world.
  1. Social Problems Theory
  1. Castillo, Sarah E. [ scastil1@utk.edu ]
  2. Brubaker, Sarah Jane [ sbrubaker@vcu.edu ]
(co-organizers)
62 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Activism as Theory, Theory for Activists: Linking Theory and Action for Social Change
Session Description What is the role of theory in activism? Of activism in theory? With emphasis on linking theory to praxis, this session considers theory’s role in aiding discussion and enactment of social change within our classrooms and communities and, conversely, the contributions of activists to theory development. Presenters are invited to imagine pathways to strengthening connections between theory and on-the-ground social problems work.
  1. Social Problems Theory
  2. Teaching Social Problems
  1. Wood, Leslie L. [ lwood@yorktech.edu ]
  2. Capili, Christine M. [ ccapili2@laverne.edu ]
  3. Schwartz, David Jed [ davskischw@aol.com ]
(co-organizers)
63 Living on the Edge: The Sociology of Voluntary Risk-taking
Session Description What makes people willingly risk danger, uncertainty, or failure? What social meanings develop from control-boundary experiences? Exploring the concept of voluntary risk-taking, this session draws inspiration from Stephen Lyng's sociology of edgework, emphasizing it as a social phenomenon rather than an individual trait. Edgework focuses on experiences that blur the lines between order and chaos, involving danger, uncertainty, and potential failure such as extreme sports, perilous jobs, activism, digital interactions, and entrepreneurship. These experiences are sought for their potential to provide authenticity, self-discovery, mastery, community, and transcendence. These pursuits reveal how risk is socially organised, culturally valued, and accomplished through interaction. This session welcomes research that employs various methodologies to investigate the production, performance, and implications of voluntary risk-taking.
  1. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Johnston, Michael O. [ johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu ]
64 Organizing Alternative Systems Outside of Formal Health and Social Care Structures in the Community
Session Description Existing health and social care systems operate within a framework of organized abandonment, as described by Ruth Gilmore, characterized by deliberate state and capitalist disinvestment in specific communities. This leads to vulnerability, harm, and premature death, further entrenching racialized and class-based dispossession. Consequently, these systems are not universally accessible or safe. Disengagement from professional care is often misinterpreted as irresponsibility. The session papers may explore how marginalized groups create alternative care systems in response to systemic failures, emphasizing the gap between top-down notions of health and social care policy and the realities of how care is done and experienced under structural constraints.
  1. Sociology, Social Work, and Social Welfare
  1. Pacho, Agata [ pacho.agata@gmail.com ]
65 Radical Teaching of Social Problems for Radical Change-THEMATIC
Session Description Radical pedagogy critically examines and challenges the power structures in both our social and educational systems, adopting imaginative, action-forward approaches to addressing our most pressing social problems. Consistent with this year’s conference theme of “Building Communities for Radical Change,” this session invites participants to share their vision for a radical pedagogy of social problems.
  1. Teaching Social Problems
  1. Miller, Andrea D. [ andreamiller31@webster.edu ]
  2. Laudone Jones, Stephanie [ stephanie.laudone@gmail.com ]
(co-organizers)
66 Centering Colonialism, Carcerality, and Imperialism in Sociological Studies of Palestine
Session Description Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, previously described as a prison, has turned the area into a death camp. Across historic Palestine, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel), Palestinians are subjected to escalating state violence, surveillance, and ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the diaspora face parallel; pressures, including heightened monitoring at work and in society when they speak out for their besieged and murdered people. This session invites scholarship centered om Palestinian experiences and resistance practices that are examined through comparative, transnational, feminist, and queer analytical perspectives. Topics may include surveillance and militarized occupation; Indigenous land-based resistance; Zionism as racism, imperialism, and/or settler colonialism; global weapons testing and sales serving imperialism and/or capitalism; and anti-colonial/anti-imperial movements in and beyond Palestine.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Weiner, Melissa F. [ mfweiner@holycross.edu ]
67 Beyond DEI: On Resisting the Fascist University and Becoming Organic Intellectuals in the Age of Nathan Cofnas-THEMATIC
Session Description Systematically marginalized scholars have both called out and resisted the actions of academia (and its institutions) that have sought to reify and compound harm in Black and Brown communities. This session seeks papers that challenge academia while theorizing ways that intellectuals can collaborate with members of their communities in order to be closest to the most pressing issues that society faces, amongst the most marginalized people. 
  1. Program Committee
  1. Foote, Aaron C. [ footea@grinnell.edu ]
68 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Bridging Radical Communities: A Critical Dialogue between Black, Brown, Working-Class, LGBTQIA, and Other Marginalized Communities-THEMATIC
Session Description Contemporary society has pushed radical communities into silos, where members often talk (and theorize) about their struggles in isolation without fully acknowledging the ways in which oppression, and mobilization against it, are and need to be interlocking. This critical dialogue aims to put to the forefront the perspectives of a plethora of oppressed communities with the goal of building solidarity amongst people of interrelated struggle.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Foote, Aaron C. [ footea@grinnell.edu ]
  2. Birla, Swati [ birlas@newpaltz.edu ]
(co-organizers)
69 Thinking Borders, Nations, Citizenship-THEMATIC
Session Description Nationalism has returned to the forefront in two distinct forms. The first is nativist and right-wing: it promises economic and political security by closing borders and protecting national economies. The second is a defensive nationalism that positions itself against imperial aggression. Critiquing nationalism today requires examining how these border, nation, and citizenship regimes work together — discursively and materially- and how they might be challenged together. This session brings together engaged scholars and activists from movements across the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Africa to speak to the lived realities of war, migrant work, and statelessness. 
  1. Program Committee
  1. Birla, Swati [ birlas@newpaltz.edu ]
70 Pathways to Liberation: Building Resistance to Genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, and Sudan-THEMATIC
Session Description Congo, Palestine and Sudan have a long history of being subjected to colonization and genocide. The genocides in all three countries make clear their oppression and liberation are intertwined. These connections run deep: profits stripped from Congolese and Sudanese resources reportedly flow into illegal Israeli settlement construction, while surveillance technologies, tested and refined through contracts tied to Congo and Sudan, are used on Palestinians. This session invite papers exploring these intersections and what we can do to advance the liberation of Congo, Palestine, Sudan, alongside our own, both domestically and around the world. 
  1. Program Committee
  1. Williams, Johnny Eric [ 2027ssspprogramchair@gmail.com ]
71 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Building Communities for Reproductive Justice-THEMATIC
Session Description Despite social, medical, and legislative barriers to reproductive justice, people work on the ground to obtain, facilitate, and provide comprehensive reproductive healthcare. This critical dialogue session brings together activists, practitioners, lawyers, patients, students, and scholars to exchange knowledge, ideas, and experiences for building successful communities of action to facilitate reproductive justice in realms including but not limited to abortion, contraception, voluntary sterilization, assisted fertility, and birth justice.  
  1. Program Committee
  1. Carter, Shannon K. [ skcarter@ucf.edu ]
72 Reproductive Justice in Global Context
Session Description Reproductive justice, coined in Chicago in 1994, entails the human rights to bodily autonomy, to have children, to not have children, and to parent with dignity. Yet, structural barriers including oppressive legislation, welfare policy, unequal access to quality healthcare, obstetric racism, and war compromise reproductive justice in the U.S. and globally. This session invites papers focused on reproductive justice, including issues such as abortion, fertility, contraception, sterilization, birth, adoption, infant and child nutrition, vaccinations, and parenting.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Carter, Shannon K. [ skcarter@ucf.edu ]
73 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: A Labor of Love: Indigenous Community Building for Radical Change-THEMATIC
Session Description Chicago is home to one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in the U.S., with a rich history of Indigenous community building. This critical dialogue will bring together Indigenous community leaders in Chicago and scholar-advocates committed to the futurity and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples globally. Together, presenters will share how they engage in community building as a praxis of resistance, resurgence, and radical transformation. By centering Indigenous epistemologies, lived experiences, and community-led approaches, this dialogue seeks to illuminate the labor of love that Indigenous community leaders and scholar-advocates undertake to build a more equitable future for Indigenous communities.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Tehrani, Sara [ Sara.tehrani@ucf.edu ]
74 Biopolitics and Eugenics in the 21st Century-THEMATIC
Session Description Michel Foucault conceptualizes biopolitics as the exercise of political power over biological life, including regulating health, reproduction, bodies, and populations. Likewise, eugenic logic continues to shape understandings about race, gender, disability, and sexuality. This session invites papers that examine the intersections of biopolitics and eugenics across institutions and cultural ideology, including healthcare and medicine, law and legal systems, media, education, and religion. Papers may consider topics such as reproductive technologies; overmedicalization; prenatal genetic testing; settler colonialism, war, and genocide; criminalization and mass incarceration; media representations; and the sociopolitical construction of the “normal” body; as well as how individual actors and communities resist mechanisms of biopolitics and eugenics.   
  1. Program Committee
  1. Tehrani, Sara [ Sara.tehrani@ucf.edu ]
75 Carcerality Without Borders: Uncovering Transnational Networks of Policing, Punishment, and Surveillance-THEMATIC
Session Description Carceral systems are often conceptualized and studied within national borders, yet the ideas, technologies, policies, and practices that sustain policing and punishment have always traveled across them. This session examines the transnational circulation of carceral knowledge and power: from colonial governance and racial regimes, to international police exchanges, border enforcement, surveillance technologies, military tactics, and profitable security partnerships. We invite historical and contemporary research examining how states, corporations, police, military institutions, and other actors learn from, legitimate, and materially support one another. Papers might also examine resistance to these networks and what transnational abolitionist solidarity might entail. Together, the session asks how tracing these connections can expand our understanding of carcerality and our capacity to dismantle it. 
  1. Program Committee
  1. Couloute, Lucius [ lucius.couloute@trincoll.edu ]
76 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Building Coalitions for Radical and Resilient Communities in the Age of Fascism-THEMATIC
Session Description Capitalist accumulation has produced extreme inequality in wealth and power, and growing numbers of people are treated as disposable. Over the past decade, as economic activity has shifted into informal and shadow economies — out of public view and beyond public accountability — leaving those at the periphery more marginalized than at any previous point in the history of capitalism. This session brings together American and transnational labor, housing, education, and environmental activists and scholars to connect local struggles to global systems of accumulation, reflect on the multipolarity of the crisis, and begin building coalitions to strategize about how to resist. We ask why an internationalist perspective on inequality and crisis is necessary today — and what it makes possible.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Foote, Aaron C. [ footea@grinnell.edu ]
  2. Birla, Swati [ birlas@newpaltz.edu ]
(co-organizers)
77 Palestine and the US Academy-THEMATIC
Session Description Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has accelerated a generational shift in U.S. discourse on Palestine. In academia, this shift has been visible in campus encampments and sweeping repression under the Biden administration, helping set the stage for a broader assault on higher education under the next administration. Palestine has become a flashpoint in struggles over academic freedom, exposing fault lines in liberal claims to freedom. Yet these debates remain detached from Palestinians’ material realities on the ground, and their armed resistance to Israeli settler-colonialism, which remains largely unspeakable in the US. This session critically examines transformations and constraints in U.S. liberal academic discourse, including the proliferation of “expertise” decoupled from sociological scholarship and Palestinian lived realities.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Williams, Johnny Eric [ 2027ssspprogramchair@gmail.com ]
78 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Professional Associations and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions in the US-THEMATIC
Session Description The International Sociological Association (ISA), a UNESCO-affiliated scientific association, froze the Israeli Sociological Society’s membership ahead of its 2025 Forum of Sociology in Rabat following pressure from Palestinian and local BDS organizers. The following year, an attempt to bring a BDS motion to the American Sociological Association (ASA) was obstructed by its executive leadership, prompting members to threaten a boycott of the ASA’s annual meeting, including its hotel and registration fees, alongside off-site programming. This session reflects on this failed effort to bring BDS into a highly professionalized U.S. academic context, situating it alongside successful cases. It considers institutional context, power relations, and the limits and possibilities of BDS within professional associations and the corporate university model.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Williams, Johnny Eric [ 2027ssspprogramchair@gmail.com ]
79 CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Who Keeps Us Safe? Violence Interruption, Healing, and the Struggle for Community Safety in Chicago-THEMATIC
Session Description Chicago has built the nation's most developed community violence intervention ecosystem (street outreach, victim advocacy, restorative justice, youth peacekeeping), much of it staffed by survivors of violence they now interrupt. Yet work born from Black and Brown communities' refusal to accept police as sole guarantors of safety is shaped by municipal contracts, philanthropic priorities, and evaluation regimes demanding it prove itself by the metrics of institutions it meant to displace. Its frontline workforce, overwhelmingly Black and often formerly incarcerated, remains underpaid and unprotected. This session convenes interrupters, healers, public health practitioners, youth organizers, and researchers to ask what safety beyond the carceral state requires, where current models fall short, and what sociology owes communities it has studied but rarely served.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Brown, Taurean [ Taure.brown@vanderbilt.edu ]
80 With and Against the Machine: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Radical Organizing-THEMATIC
Session Description Movement organizations face a decision they have little power over. Underfunded groups adopt generative AI for research, communications, and grant writing, gaining otherwise unaffordable capacity. Yet the AI industry displaces workers, expands surveillance of organizers, draws on minerals extracted through imperial violence, and sites resource-hungry data centers in Black, Brown, and rural communities, from South Memphis to Northern Virginia, sparking resistance. This session invites papers taking the contradiction seriously in both directions. What does AI enable for organizations, and at what cost? How do organizers reason about complicity, and what practices of refusal, limitation, or collective governance have emerged? What do campaigns against data centers and algorithmic policing teach? We welcome empirical, theoretical, and practitioner work, including from non-academic organizers.
  1. Program Committee
  1. Brown, Taurean [ Taure.brown@vanderbilt.edu ]
81 Engaging with Indigenous Knowledges in Universities with Colonial Legacies: Challenges and Guiding Principles for Good Practice
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 paper discussion, 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 ]
2000 Test Session - Regular
Session Description

This is required.  Here it be.
  1. Tocher, Janice [ janice@averra.com ]
  2. Koontz, Michele Smith [ mkoontz3@utk.edu ]
  3. Whitaker, Kelsey [ sssp@utk.edu ]
  4. Wilds, Helen [ ssspgra@utk.edu ]
(co-organizers)
2001 Test Session - Critical Dialogue
Session Description

Required here when not logged in as admin - true
  1. Tocher, Janice [ janice@averra.com ]
  2. Koontz, Michele Smith [ mkoontz3@utk.edu ]
  3. Whitaker, Kelsey [ sssp@utk.edu ]
  4. Wilds, Helen [ ssspgra@utk.edu ]
(co-organizers)
2002 Test Session Panel with Panelists
Session Description

Panel - this is required.
  1. Tocher, Janice [ janice@averra.com ]
  2. Koontz, Michele Smith [ mkoontz3@utk.edu ]
  3. Whitaker, Kelsey [ sssp@utk.edu ]
  4. Wilds, Helen [ ssspgra@utk.edu ]
(co-organizers)
2003 Test Session Author meets Critics
Session Description

I must do this so I will.
  1. Tocher, Janice [ janice@averra.com ]
  2. Koontz, Michele Smith [ mkoontz3@utk.edu ]
  3. Whitaker, Kelsey [ sssp@utk.edu ]
  4. Wilds, Helen [ ssspgra@utk.edu ]
(co-organizers)
2004 Test Session - Workshop
Session Description

   Work this Shop!
  1. Tocher, Janice [ janice@averra.com ]
  2. Koontz, Michele Smith [ mkoontz3@utk.edu ]
  3. Whitaker, Kelsey [ sssp@utk.edu ]
  4. Wilds, Helen [ ssspgra@utk.edu ]
(co-organizers)
2005 Test Session - Roundtable
Session Description

bnmghjftrpl      
  1. Tocher, Janice [ janice@averra.com ]
  2. Koontz, Michele Smith [ mkoontz3@utk.edu ]
  3. Whitaker, Kelsey [ sssp@utk.edu ]
  4. Wilds, Helen [ ssspgra@utk.edu ]
(co-organizers)