Preconferences
Preconferences provide an opportunity for disciplinary peers to gather for an extended period to discuss their work related to a particular field of study, theory, perspective, question, controversy, or professional context. All preconferences are scheduled for Friday, August 9. Registration is required.
Department Leaders Preconference: Navigating Conflict as a Sociology Department Leader
8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $150 Department Affiliate/$180 Non-Affiliate, includes refreshments
Session Organizer: Aaryn L. Green, American Sociological Association
Department leaders can engage in valuable discussions with fellow department chairs and directors of graduate and undergraduate studies as we delve into the intricacies of navigating conflict. Whether managing faculty disputes, addressing issues between faculty and students, handling department-administration dynamics, or navigating external pressures, this preconference will connect you with colleagues and equip you with effective strategies for enhancing your approach to conflict management.
Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice and Joy Across Species
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizers: Cameron Thomas Whitley, Western Washington University; Jordan Fox, SUNY-Buffalo; Seven Mattes, Michigan State University; Victoria Brockett, Loyola University Chicago; Erin N. Kidder, Eckerd College
The theme of the 2024 ASA Annual Meeting is Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy. Intersectional solidarities are strategies of affirmative advocacy. While intersectional discourse is often human centered, in this pre-conference we propose that fostering interspecies solidarity is essential in addressing complex global social problems.
Humans are in continuous collaboration with animal and ecological others, interconnected and entangled in social, cultural, and environmental systems – a reality that the Covid-19 pandemic made strikingly clear. Beyond sharing viral vulnerabilities, we are submerged together in complex systems of domination, exploitation, resistances, and flourishing, albeit in disparate roles.
This pre-conference encourages the generation of such collaborative partnerships across sub-disciplines and beyond constructed boundaries. It is not only an ethical imperative, but an analytical one. From meat-packing plants, medical testing, zoos, the ongoing sixth extinction, and in how we navigate our environments, non-human animals are influential parts of our social worlds. In this pre-conference, we will build a conversation around interspecies solidarity that invites all to take part in. Our committee has paid special attention to universal design in the incorporation of a diverse group of voices in terms of race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, disability status, age, and academic level among other things.
More specifically, this pre-conference is coordinated by the ASA Animals and Society section with support and participation from the Environmental Sociology, and Science, Knowledge, and Technology.
Goals: 1. Increase dialogue regarding how animals are intertwined in the investigation and understanding of various topics across sociology; 2. Enhance collegial connections among various subsections of the American Sociological Association. Specifically, this preconference encourages conversations among the Animals and Society, Environmental Sociology, and the Science, Knowledge, and Technology section; 3. Provide attendees with research and teaching ideas, and potential future collaborations; and 4. Create networking and mentoring opportunities for students.
Reproductive Futures: Theory, Innovation, and Justice in the Sociology of Reproduction
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizers: Carlo Sariego, Yale University; stef m. shuster, Michigan State University; Andréa Becker, CUNY-Hunter College
With the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v Wade and state legislators introducing restrictive policies that upend people’s reproductive autonomy, the significance of bringing sociological methods and theories to bear on reproduction is urgently needed. Yet reproductive injustice is not a ‘new’ issue. Historically and contemporarily, reproduction has always been under the surveillance of a broad swath of institutions, organizations, and actors while simultaneously fomenting social mobilizations. Recently, several calls have been made to advance the study of reproduction, to center questions of reproductive justice following the work of Black feminists and a reorientation of sexed and gendered categories. As such, the sociology of reproduction interfaces with every major area of inquiry within our discipline. Yet, few opportunities exist to convene a diverse group of scholars to reflect on the sociology of reproduction.
This preconference seeks to do just that; bringing together important voices in the development of a sociological approach to reproduction as well as experts in the intersecting subfields of reproductive health, rights, and justice, transgender studies, gender, and sexuality. Our proposed panels are ambitious in scope, playfully serious about futures of reproductive in/justice. To both recognize and encourage the variety of ways “reproduction” has become an important object of study for sociology, our ultimate goal for this mini-conference is to explore the future of this sub-field by offering a series of panels, spaces for people to make connections, and opening possibilities for future collaborations. Moreover, aligned with the 2024 meeting theme, this preconference will contribute to building intersectional solidarities by demonstrating the significant reach reproduction has across a variety of sociological approaches and areas of inquiry.
Culture, Interaction, and The Psychosocial: Exploring the Intersections
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizers: Thomas DeGloma, CUNY-Hunter College; Lynn Sharon Chancer, CUNY-Hunter College; Neil G. McLaughlin
This preconference will feature current research by scholars who are interested in the intersections of cultural, interactionist, and psychosocial paradigms in the social sciences. Panelists in this pre-conference will explore these connections while discussing a variety of timely cases and topics. They will also work toward outlining new agendas and identifying new research questions for a multi-dimensional interpretive sociology, one that specifically embraces theories and concepts inherited from psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism, and cultural sociology. While in conversation with one another, participants will explore the deep meanings underlying human actions, events, and experiences, with particular attention to current issues and new questions involving power and resistance, or oppression and liberation. Participants will also discuss methodological strategies for bringing psychosocial, interactionist, and cultural theories together to develop a more robust sociological scholarship that takes multiple foundations of social life into account.
On-The-Ground Research with the Right in 2024: Challenges, Benefits, and Building Solidarity
8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Whether researching contemporary conspiracy theories, the ongoing impacts of conservative talk radio on rural communities, or religious leaders’ transmission of right-wing politics in the public sphere, sociologists grapple with how to conduct on-the-ground research in today’s increasingly polarized climate. The groups under research might be incredibly diverse but researchers face shared challenges, especially researchers identifying as women, scholars of color and those of diverse gender/sexual identities. This preconference aims to both identify and begin to approach these difficulties–institutional, personal, theoretical, ethical, methodological and logistical.
Qualitative data on right-wing people/groups/spaces are crucial to understanding injustice in different contexts, the changing dynamics of US democracy, and the spread of (mis)information. Indeed, this research carries serious implications for the future of public discourse and democracy. This preconference will bring together US-focused researchers in advance of the 2024 presidential elections, with a particular aim to better prepare researchers in the field. We aim to create a solidaristic space for participants to build community and collaborations, and facilitate generative conversations about the challenges and benefits of qualitative, on-the-ground research with rightwing groups, including the far right. Though focused on the US context, we see this as a forerunner event for more global, comparative workshops and materials on best practices. Future plans include a larger “best practices” session and/or a follow-up preconference with global scholars at the ASA 2025.
The goals of this preconference are to: 1) Create a supportive space where solidarity and collaborations are fostered across topics and approaches; 2) Produce working guidelines and “best practices” to support research that in turn aims to decrease polarization and injustice; 3) Engage and challenge participants to consider ethical, methodological, and practical elements of research on the right; and 4) Identify and build a network of diverse colleagues working in different subfields but engaging with the rightwing, through the visibility of the ASA’s flagship event. The overarching goal of this preconference is to thus refine and strengthen our own research agendas and the nascent, dynamic field of ‘rightwing studies’.
Teaching and Learning Section Preconference: From Classroom to Community
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $10 Students/$20 Faculty
Session Organizers: Natascia Boeri, Bloomfield College; Michel Estefan, University of California-San Diego; Emily Kiyoko Carian, University of California-Irvine; Stephanie L Bradley, University of North Carolina-Charlotte; Matthew Howard McLeskey, SUNY-Oswego; Stacey Bryley Livingstone, UC San Diego; Luis Diego Gonzalez-Diaz, University of Florida; Elizabeth Ziff, University of Indianapolis; Benjamin Gallati, Indiana University; Daina Cheyenne Harvey, College of the Holy Cross; Brandon James Moore, California State University-San Marcos; Carly Elizabeth Schall, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; Cassie Mead, Indiana University
At the heart of transformative education is the capacity to envision and enact change. This Preconference Workshop seeks to engage educators in a critical dialogue that illuminates the emancipatory potential inherent to an intersectional approach to pedagogy and course design. The Workshop is also a platform for networking, allowing educators from various disciplines and institutions to forge connections, share experiences, and build a vibrant, supportive community. We aim to empower every attendee, providing them with tools and insights to bolster success in their professional journey as teacher-scholars. Most crucially, we recognize the immediacy of many challenges instructors currently face in their teaching; therefore, our sessions are crafted to ensure that participants depart with practical pedagogical strategies, ready for immediate implementation in their classrooms, fostering environments of hope, justice, and joy.
Self Society Symposium
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizer: Lauren Langman, Loyola University-Chicago
For about 18 years, a group of sociologists, some political scientists and a philosopher or psychologist have joined what now seems an annual tradition, preconference, the Self Society Symposium, rooted in long sociological traditions of Cooley-Mead and Symbolic Interactionism and the Frankfurt School that integrated the sociological with the psychodynamic-authoritarianism that was an innovative concept that remains especially relevant today insofar as we have the ascent of a variety of countries that have embraced right wing populisms, dictatorships and social movements that border on and cross into Fascism replete with swastikas, Nazi salutes and “Heil Hitler” chants. But at the same time, we see those reactions to the move to right have been revitalized progressive movements embracing a better world to come, especially of youth, and counter cultural movements such as carnivalization, collective forms of hedonistic enjoyments like rock concerts, or raves, especially when many use weed, or Pride marches what I have termed, the “joy transgression.”
Antisemitism, Intersectionality, and Solidarity after October 7
1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizers: Chad Alan Goldberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Arnold Dashefsky, University of Connecticut
Our preconference builds on the success of two previous preconferences on the sociology of antisemitism and seeks to advance their work at a crucial time. When the first preconference was held in 2019, memories were still fresh of the murderous assault on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described as “the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.” Our second preconference in 2023 was held following major antisemitic incidents in the previous year, including the armed taking of hostages at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, and a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, by a white supremacist whose online manifesto called for the murder of Jews. Our proposal for a third preconference in 2024 comes just four months after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023. It was the third-deadliest terrorist attack in terms of the number of casualties in the half century for which data are available, and the worst in terms of per capita deaths, with more than one in every 10,000 Israelis murdered. The ADL described it as “the worst violence committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” Not only the massacre itself but the reactions to it are deeply disturbing. The ADL reported more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents in the US in the two-month period after October 7, a 337-percent increase from the same two months in 2022, and the highest number of incidents during any two-month period since the ADL started tracking data in 1979. The worsening manifestations of antisemitism in the US and globally underscore the urgency of integrating insights from the sociology of antisemitism into current thinking about intersectional solidarities. There must be a place for all, including Jews, in communities of hope, justice, and joy.
Courses
Courses are half-day opportunities for sociologists to gain new skills and knowledge. Topics and content reflect the training sociologists need and seek. All courses are scheduled for Friday, August 9. Registration is required.
Python for Social Sciences: Why and How
1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizer: Dmitry Gimon, Park University
The aim of the course is to discuss Python as a tool for conducting research in social sciences. The course is geared towards students, and researchers at any stage of their career with limited or no prior knowledge of coding. The course will cover the benefits and limitations of using coding in social science research. A comparison to other common tools will also be discussed. We will investigate use cases to understand when coding is a good fit for participants’ research methodology, and when it is not.
The center piece of this course is a hands-on workshop teaching coding environment, importing data of various origins, and basic data manipulation with Python. We will also cover the use Python to explore data and running basic statistical tests. Finally, we will discuss various Python extensions useful for social scientists including ones for network, text, and geospatial analysis.
Research Data Management for Sociologists: Introduction to Social Science Data Management and Sharing
1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizers: Dessi Kirilova, Syracuse University; Derek James Robey, Harvard University
This course provides an introduction to social science research data management (RDM) with a particular focus on the benefits and potential uses of well-managed data and concrete recommendations for each of the critical data management processes: initial planning; documenting data appropriately and effectively; formatting and organizing data; storing data, including data transfer, encryption, and file sharing, both during and after the end of the project. The course will serve the needs of both early scholars embarking on their first independent empirical project and of established researchers looking to improve their practices.
RDM is essential for ensuring that empirical research creates well-organized, well-documented, high-quality and potentially shareable research data; it is also a teachable and highly transferable skill. This course is designed as an overview of three interrelated topics: first, attendees will learn the goals of intentional data management, as well as current good practices for collecting, documenting, storing and safeguarding their primary research data. Second, they will learn how to plan for and put in writing the RDM choices they need to make, with a focus on appropriate eventual data sharing. Third, they will discuss the ethical and legal aspects of data management, with attention to human participant and copyright / archival rights considerations. During the hands-on portion of the course, attendees will create a first draft of their own data management plan (DMP) for a specific research project or assess an existing DMP according to a common rubric.
Learning objectives: Learn about developments in expectations about data management and sharing, as they affect scholarly communication and the evaluation of research; Develop a list of key elements of planning for effective data management during a project’s lifecycle; Formulate requirements for documenting, organizing, and transforming data; Discuss benefits and challenges to the sharing of human participant data, and formulate some strategies to address those challenges; Apply their new knowledge by drafting their own DMP (or, if not applicable, by evaluating a provided DMP).
Global Social Thought Pedagogy: Teaching Alternative Paradigms and Addressing our Racism
1:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Registration Fee: $5
Session Organizer: Lester R. Kurtz, George Mason University
Global Social Thought is an investigation into alternatives to classical Western social theory, an exploration of a classical “The Great Books of Global Thought” and contemporary Nonwestern scholarship, an exercise in what many call decolonizing the curriculum. We begin by outlining classic streams of thought from South Asian, East Asian, African, Islamic, and Indigenous American thought, then explore contemporary issues in social theory. In addition to providing an overview of the curriculum, we would provide substantive examples of social thought from China, India, and Africa.
Given the current effort to address structural racism and ASA’s diversity initiatives, it is time to remedy the ethnocentrism, sexism, and racism of our curricula. Human knowledge is so profoundly influenced by the social context in which it is constructed that our theories should not be based exclusively on reflections of the male Euro-American experience that provides the foundation for modern social sciences.
Lester Kurtz has taught this course for three decades, mostly as a graduate seminar, at George Mason, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University, and is currently developing a book with an overview. Other panel participants have research and publication experience in the area.
Prof. Liu Cheng is the UNESCO Peace Studies Chair for China and a professor of history at Nanjing University, the person most responsible for developing peace studies in Chinese universities. Sowmya Ayyar is a doctoral student at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India, and an expert on women in the Yogi tradition. Benjamin Adjei is a doctoral student at George Mason University; originally from Ghana, he has researched indigenous African perspectives on the environment with lessons for the climate crisis.
We wish to share insights into our explorations in this area to enhance ASA member pedagogy and help build a global network facilitating dialogue among these complementary intellectual streams. The course explores scholarship from the Global South on issues such as the relationship between the individual and society, the nature of human nature, theories of social change, movements, revolution, and social order, the role of the state, central concepts and metaphors, and positions on the most fruitful means and purposes of social inquiry.
