While everyone is welcome to submit, we especially encourage submissions from those who are not able to participate in the 2025 Annual Meeting in Chicago in August. Thank you in advance for helping to make this an engaging event.
Bringing DEI into Teaching and Learning
Session Organizer: Mindy Stombler, Georgia State University
This session aims to explore innovative approaches, best practices, and research findings that advance DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in sociological teaching and learning. We encourage submissions on topics related to the integration of DEI broadly conceived, as well as more specific topics such as: strategies for integrating DEI principles into curriculum design, reevaluating learning objectives and assessment strategies through a DEI lens, incorporating diverse perspectives and voices into course content, culturally responsive teaching practices, creating inclusive and accessible classroom environments, equitably communicating expectations and performance feedback, potential bias and discrimination in course policies/requirements, integrating intersectionality in teaching and learning, modeling DEI-informed pedagogy and practices for graduate student instructors, technology-enhanced approaches for promoting DEI, advancing DEI in online instruction, evaluating the effectiveness of DEI initiatives in teaching and learning, and critical anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies and practices. This session particularly encourages submissions that demonstrate successful integration of DEI in sociological teaching and learning in increasingly inhospitable environments.
Climate and Society
Session Organizers: Christof Brandtner, EM Lyon and Ioana Sendroiu, University of Hong Kong
Climate change is rapidly reshaping human societies, with future effects touching on most if not all aspects of social life. This calls for a reevaluation of how sociology engages with the world, touching on all sociological subareas. Indeed, inasmuch as the effects of climate change are not felt equally across all segments of society, with marginalized communities facing the most severe consequences, sociologists are especially well-placed to understand responses, adaptations, and innovations in the face of the climate crisis. We therefore welcome work that spans sociological sub-fields, while encouraging perspectives and insights connecting environmental sociology to the future of work and organizations.
Health Inequalities and Inclusion
Session Organizer: Anna S. Mueller, Indiana University Bloomington
The 21st century has brought with it a series of challenges to human health and well-being that demand new efforts to understand how (1) the social determinants of health, (2) the provision of medicine and healthcare, and (3) the structure of medicine as a profession shape health inequalities and inclusive healthcare practices. This session of the 2025 ASA Virtual Mini-Conference invites papers focused on medical or mental health sociology, broadly defined, with a particular emphasis on papers that interrogate pressing problems in health and medicine or that contribute to problem-solving sociology, science translation, or policy. All theoretical and methodological approaches are welcome, as are scholars from underrepresented or minoritized backgrounds, early career scholars, and those working in or on the Global South.
New Approaches to DEI
Session Organizer: Oneya Fennell Okuwobi, University of Cincinnati
With everything from plane mishaps to bridge collapses being blamed on DEI, it is clear that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are under attack. Is this indeed a threat, or given the scholarship showing many diversity programs to be ineffective, is it more of an opportunity? While some organizations are shifting away from DEI in favor of metrics such as well-being, others are redoubling their commitment. How are organizations using this inflection point to chart new paths, and what might these experiments mean for racial equity? For this session, we seek papers that investigate new approaches to DEI. Studies that center the experiences of employees of color and/or illuminate intersectional considerations are especially encouraged.
Open Topic Session
Session Organizers: Rachelle Brunn-Bevel, Fairfield University and Charles Gallagher, La Salle University
There will be two open topic sessions presented at the Virtual Mini-Conference. All submissions on the conference theme of “Reimaging the Future of Work” are welcome.
Reimagining and Recreating Good Jobs, Careers, Companies
Organizer: Vincent Roscigno, The Ohio State University
Sociologists of work, organizations, and stratification have done a remarkable job over the past two decades highlighting important mechanisms that reify inequality within contemporary organizations and the negative social-psychological implications of employment precarity, segregation, unequal returns, and poor workplace social relations. Such research is important, of course, yet the findings (by default) tend to overlook more positive workplace dynamics, structures, and everyday practices—i.e., dynamics, structures, and practices that are arguably good for workers, that can confer dignity, that can benefit organizations, and that even have the capacity to undo some of the more common inequalities we are familiar with.
This session offers an opportunity to flip the script. Specifically, we are seeking submissions highlighting approaches, strategies, and findings that center on positive organizational and interactional workplace dynamics, job experiences, and outcomes. To do so might entail new and distinct conceptualizations and modeling of workplace processes; emphases on alternative data collection and outcomes across and within jobs and workplace organizations; or simply flipping the outcome within existing models and analyses of inequality, work, and organizations (e.g., integration rather than segregation, worker dignity rather than injustice, opportunities for advancement rather than mechanisms of social closure, pay equity rather than wage gaps, etc.). Innovative and alternative approaches and submissions in these regards are welcomed.
Theorizing Gendered and Racialized Organizations and Processes
Session Organizers: Krista Brumley, Wayne State University and Kris De Welde, College of Charleston
Sociologists have embraced the imperative of exploring gender, race, and the ways these intersect within the context of work organizations. Embedded within organizational structures and processes, power, privilege, and oppression have historically shaped individuals’ experiences, opportunities, and outcomes in the workplace. And yet, work and organizations have changed dramatically in recent decades – increased remote work, job sharing, commuting schedules, expectations of availability, collaborative work, decline and resurgence of labor organizing, stagnant pay, decreased job security, concerns over generative AI – all of which have shifted what it means to labor in organizations. As such, there is a pressing need for theoretical frameworks that can analyze the complexities of emerging shifts in gendered and racialized work organizations and processes.
We welcome theoretical and empirical papers (15-35 pages) or extended abstracts (3-5 pages, double-spaced) that critically engage with the theorization of gender and race within changing work organizations (e.g., higher education, industry, non-profit, government). Submissions should center intersectionality in theorizing about and studying gendered and racialized organizations and processes in reimagining the future of work. Topics can address questions such as, but not limited to:
- What can we see more clearly when we apply frameworks that make legible multiple and intersecting identities in changing work contexts?
- How can our existing theories be built upon/expanded/evolved to understand organizational trends?
- How might globalization, neoliberalism, and technological advancements (re)shape gendered and racialized work dynamics?
- How can our theoretical frameworks provide insight into understanding the changing complexities of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives?
