SSSP 2026 Annual Meeting
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
Program Committee, 2025-26
Room: Minetta
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
Session 002: The Biopolitics of LGBTQ+ Lives in the Age of Disinformation
Room: Ambassador I
Sponsor: Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities
Organizer: Kat Fuller, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Presider: Michelle L. Estes, Rowan University
Description: This session examines how transgender, nonbinary, and intersex communities are governed through the overlapping forces of state power, medical authority, and disinformation. Presenters analyze how contemporary political actors increasingly rely on distorted narratives, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and media-driven fear to justify surveillance, restriction, and exclusion. Across national and institutional contexts, the papers demonstrate how transgender, nonbinary, and intersex individuals are constructed as threats to be managed through law, policy, and bureaucratic classification, resulting in dehumanization and material harm.
Papers:
“Anti-Trans Legislation: Illegible Harm, Impossible Truths, and Discrimination by Disbelief,” Caro A. Mooney, University of California, Irvine
“Codifying Binaries: Moral Entrepreneurs and Anti-Transgender Legislation in U.S. State Legislatures Between 2018-2024,” Anneliese M. Schenk-Day and Jack G.R. Wippell, The Ohio State University
“Executive Order Declares Intersex People Do Not Exist! Federal Efforts to Recapitulate Victorian Misunderstandings of Sex,” Cary Gabriel Costello, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’: What Does This Mean for Incarcerated Transgender Individuals?” Michelle L. Estes, Rowan University, Rachel Schmitz, Oklahoma State University and Zachary T. Carlisle, St. Ambrose University
“‘Gender’ and the Triumph of the MAGA Right in the Heritage Foundation Projects 2025 and 2026 and the First Year of the Trump Administration,” Gillian Niebrugge Brantley and Patricia Lengermann, The George Washington University
“The Glocal Right Circuits: Mapping the Transnational Flows of Anti-LGBTQ Conservatism between Taiwan and the United States,” Ying-Chao Kao, Virginia Commonwealth University
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
Session 003: Advocacy and Change
Room: Ambassador II
Sponsors: Conflict, Social Action, and Change
Institutional Ethnography
Organizers: Lauren Eastwood, State University of New York, Plattsburgh
C. Michael Awsumb, Northwest Missouri State University
Presider: C. Michael Awsumb, Northwest Missouri State University
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.
Papers:
“At All Costs: Testifying for Housing Justice through Canada’s Federal Human Rights Review Panels,” Alex Nelson, Western University, Honorable Mention of the Institutional Ethnography Division’s Student Paper Competition
“Call It Power and Resistance: Naming and Conceptualizing, Carefully, in Institutional Ethnography,” Brenda Solomon, University of Vermont
“Layered Youth: How a South Korean Housing Movement Made ‘Youth’ Politically Usable,” Eunchong Cho, University of California, San Diego
“Playing Their Game(s): Legible Contention through Strategic Mirroring at the Paris 2024 Olympics,” Sara Lancieri, Sapienza University of Rome
“The Role of Women in the Promotion of Peace and Social Justice in the Philippines: Lived Experiences, Challenges, and Lessons,” Diana Therese M. Veloso, De La Salle University
“The Social Organization of Health Work among Women with Autoimmune Diseases,” Dara Gordon, University of Toronto
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
THEMATIC
Session 004: Doing Research in Global/Transnational Contexts with Critical Decolonial Lenses: Tools and Epistemologies
Room: Minskoff
Sponsor: Global
Organizer, Presider &
Discussant: Angela Vergara, University of Central Florida
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.
Papers:
“Am I (Theoretically Speaking) the Drama? A Reflexive Examination of Anti-Blackness Research and Its Potential to Reify Coloniality and Hegemony,” Bryan L. Greene, Morris College
“Community Ethnography in Central America’s Gang Territories,” Anjuli Fahlberg, Tufts University
“Denaturalizing Borders through ‘Community-Engaged Scholarship’: Maya-Mam Articulations of Indigenous Resistance across the Guatemala–Mexico Border,” Jeffrey A. Gardner, Sam Houston State University
“Studying Elite but Racialized Immigrants in the United States: How Transnational and Decolonial Methodologies Unpack the Paradox of Privilege and Precarity,” Rianka Roy, Wake Forest University
“‘Play This Song Next!’: Becoming More Than an Objective Interviewer as a Researcher of Sexual Violence,” Sukanya Bhattacharya, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
Session 005: CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Contingency and the Professions
Room: Palace
Sponsor: Labor Studies
Organizer &
Presider/Discussant: Seth Kahn, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Description: This session explores how contingency shapes professional identities and practices across diverse fields. Presenters examine the rise of precarious employment and shifting expectations within their professions. Talks address academic contingency and its implications for professionals navigating precarious structures. These papers highlight how contingency destabilizes traditional notions of professionalism while raising new questions about labor, legitimacy, and the future of work.
Papers:
“‘We’re All Gig Workers Now’: Perspectives of Professional Human Service Workers on Workplace Precarity,” Cheryl A. Hyde, Temple University
“Financial Precarity and Professional Distress: The Impact of the Gig Economy in Social Work,” Alison Fedoris Leslie, Widener University
“From ‘Professor Staff’ to ‘Professional Staff’: Contingency, Solidarity, and the Mission of Higher Education,” Maria C. Maisto, Independent Scholar
“Organizational Tacitness and Gendered Risks: Cultural Matching Reexamined,” Yinan Wang and Zehra Yildirim, Harvard University
“Resisting the Trope of ‘De-Professionalizing’ Higher Education,” Seth Kahn, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
“Digitalization of the Economy and the Changing Landscape of Informal Work,” Debarashmi Mitra, Central New Mexico Community College
“How the Rise in Nonstandard Work Changes ‘Good Jobs’ in Creative Industries,” Erica Mildner, University of British Columbia
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
Session 006: CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Inventing Criminality across the Globe
Room: Pearl
Sponsor: Crime and Justice
Organizer: Rafia Javaid Mallick, Georgia State University
Presider/Discussant: Jennifer Carpenter, Georgia State University
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 invent and racialize categories of crime and deviance to control marginalized populations. Presentations 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 about who and what are deemed criminal.
Papers:
“Colorblind Crimmigration: Anti-Blackness and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965,” Nicolas R. Howard, Old Dominion University
“State Data and the Production of Quantitative Knowledge: The Case of Police Stops in the United States and France,” Michael Zanger-Tishler, Harvard University, Winner of the Crime and Justice Division’s Student Paper Competition
“Economic Connectedness or Social Exposure? Reassessing Cross-National Homicide Rates Using Social Dimensions of the KOF Globalization Index,” Ali O. Shodunke, The Pennsylvania State University
“Martyrdom, Masculinity, and Ideological Worldmaking: A Textual Analysis of Islamic State Nasheeds,” Obydullah Al Marjuk, University of South Florida
“Scare Tactics as Communicative Performance in Low-Budget Scams: Why People Still Fall for Them in the 21st Century,” Essien Oku Essien, Drexel University
“‘Now I’m Older So I Really Try Not to Fight’: Adolescence, Criminality, and Black Youth Advocacy in Post-2020 Philadelphia,” Sophia Lindner, Yale University
Date: Friday, August 7
Time: 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM
Session 007: Colonial Racial Capitalism Today: Spectacularization, Dispossession, and Resistance
Room: Plymouth
Sponsor: Critical Race and Ethnic Study
Organizers &
Presiders: Nicolas Juarez, University of Michigan
Marta M. Maldonado, Oregon State University
Foroogh Mohammadi, Acadia University
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 depict 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, such as the expansion of drilling on federal land and increased 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 possibilities.
Papers:
“World-Economy and Global Supply Chains: Theoretical Background,” David A. Smith, University of California, Irvine
“‘Were They Coming Back For Revenge?’: State Violence and Indigenous Stereotypes in Minnesota Ghost Stories,” Kevin Revier, SUNY Cortland
“Alienation in the Colonial Context of Palestine: The Occupied Laborers in Israel as a Case Study,” Viletcia Barghouti, Michigan State University
“Children’s Perceptions of Conflict after October 7, 2023: An Analysis of Drawings Collected from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme between 2024–2025,” Uzma H. Chowdhury, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Infrastructures of Pain, Disorientation, and Dispersal: How the Unhoused Navigate Hostile Architecture in Washington, DC,” Ganesh A. Bhojwani, Denison University
“Freedom Doing: Abolitionist Movement Narratives in the U.S., 1820–2023,” Jadelynn C. Zhang, Emory University
