Each year, ASA’s President chooses a theme on which to focus some of the programming for the ASA Annual Meeting—a tradition that ensures our meetings reflect the rich diversity of perspectives and subject matter in our discipline. President Joya Misra has chosen the theme “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy.” Her conception of the theme is below.
Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy
The 2024 theme emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles. Our field is currently undergoing a renaissance as expansions in anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, and transnational theorizing lead us to more grounded, comprehensive, and inclusive insights. The 2024 program theme focuses on how we can use our understanding of intersectional inequalities and solidarities to help build a better world.
Sociologists in a wide range of settings are motivated by the potential to make a difference. This theme calls on sociologists in all of our roles—as students, teachers, advisors, mentors, leaders, applied researchers, academic researchers inside and outside of sociology departments, community-engaged researchers, and public sociologists—to consider how to use sociology to create more just communities and societies. Sociology practiced in all of these different ways makes valuable and meaningful contributions to the discipline, and the 2024 Program Committee invites and welcomes all sociologists to the table.
Intersectionality is also central to the theme. While the term is prone to misconception, intersectionality, at base, is the most sociological of insights: inequalities reflect a wide array of social locations, as well as spatial, historical, political, global, and economic contexts. Thus, rather than reducing inequalities down to one thing (e.g., class, race, gender, ability, or sexuality), sociologists increasingly explore how intersecting identities—which further intertwine with societal contexts—shape opportunities and experiences.
This theme pushes us to not only identify intersectional inequalities, but also theorize building intersectional solidarities, emphasizing how sociology can suggest new ways of organizing society. The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities, created new challenges, and led to millions of preventable deaths. It has also disrupted ideas about how society should be structured, creating new openings for the field.
This theme also reflects the “pleasure turn” in sociology, to consider how sociology can contribute to a positive, transformative vision of society, recognizing that marginalized people find ways to not only survive oppression, but also make spaces for being, thriving, and rejoicing. Following developments in the areas of Black Joy, Trans Joy, and Afrofuturism, joy can ward off cynicism and despair to create power and meaning. The theme suggests that sociology can contribute to a living world, one where solidarity, healing, and growth exist, building communities of hope, justice, and joy.
The 2024 program committee hopes that this theme excites and motivates sociologists to think about new opportunities for the field, while also inviting many voices into the conversation about sociology’s future. We hope that the meeting attracts as wide an array of sociologists as possible to Montréal in 2024, and provides spaces that sustain and support us in our efforts to create a better world.
Joya Misra
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
ASA President
