Held to coincide with, and in celebration of, the 19thWorld Congress of Sociology in Toronto (July 15-21, 2018), ‘Re-Imagining Culture and Politics’ is a one-day conference that brings together some of the world’s leading scholars to map out the shifting social and intellectual landscape in these turbulent times. With the seeming entrenchment of populism, the consolidation of market and religious fundamentalism, the popularity of ethnic nationalism, the continuation and reconfiguration of gendered and racial forms of domination—all influenced by ongoing processes of globalization and digitization—we find ourselves at a historic crossroads. To paraphrase Durkheim, former frameworks of understanding are growing old or dying, and others have not yet been born.
The conference aims to foster sustained reflection and a reimagining of these frameworks by asking three related queries: ‘What are our current historical and intellectual circumstances?’ (a diagnostic question); ‘What are the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical tools that we can bring to bear upon this situation?’ (an analytical question); and ‘What are the findings that help us make sense of the present moment?’ (a substantive question).
To guide us through these overarching questions, the conference includes four panels tackling some of the most urgent topics in the social sciences today: ‘Privileged Migration, Coloniality, and Whiteness,’ ‘Digital and/as Cultural Sociology,’ ‘Gender-Based Violence,’ and ‘The Right and the Alt-Right.’
The conference is hosted by York University’s Global Digital Citizenship Lab (GDCL), in conjunction with the Canadian Network for Critical Sociology. Funding for the conference is being provided through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant, the Division of the Vice-President Research & Innovation York University Research Chair program, the Canada Research Chair in Global and International Studies at St. Thomas University, and the Research Office and Department of Sociology at St. Thomas University.
SCHEDULE
9:00AM-9:30AM Coffee, tea, and light breakfast(catered)
9:30AM-11:00AM Panel 1:‘Privileged Migration, Coloniality, and Whiteness’
Chair: Gülay Kilicaslan (GDCL and Sociology, York University)
Presenters:
- Michaela Benson (Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London)
‘Colonial Traces and Neoliberalism in Lifestyle Migration to Panama’ - Hila Zaban (Sociology, University of Warwick)
‘Privileged Migration and Gentrification in Jerusalem’ - Manuela Boatca (Sociology, University of Freiburg)
‘Women on the Fast Track? Coloniality of Citizenship and Embodied Social Mobility’ - Discussant: Matthew Hayes (Sociology, St. Thomas University)
11:00AM-11:15AMBreak
11:15AM-12:45PM Panel 2: ‘The Digital and/as the Cultural’
Chair: Yikun Zhao (GDCL and Sociology, York University)
Presenters:
- Jonathan Roberge and Romuald Jamet (Urbanisation Culture Société, INRS)
‘Music Streaming Platforms in Québec: Some Preliminary Results on Social Uses and Impact of Recommendation Algorithms on French-Language Music’ - Ronald N. Jacobs (Sociology, SUNY Albany) and Eleanor Townsley (Sociology and Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College)
- Ganaele M. Langlois (Communication Studies, York University) and Greg Elmer (Professional Communication, Ryerson University)
- Discussant: Michael Christensen (Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University)
12:45PM-1:45PM Lunch(catered)
1:45PM-3:15PM Panel 3:‘Gender-Based Violence’
Chair: Elisabeth Rondinelli (GDCL and Sociology, York University)
Presenters:
- Robyn Bourgeois (Women and Gender Studies, Brock University):
‘The Blood-Soaked Maple Leaf: Understanding Canada’s Historical and Ongoing Investment in Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls’ - Jeff Hearn (Sociology, University of Huddersfield; Gender Studies, Örebro University)
‘Men/masculinities, Violence and the Case of Online Revenge Pornography’ - Dawn Moore (Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University)
- Rashmee Singh (Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo)
‘Re-Imagining Justice in Cases of University Sexual Violence’ - Discussant: Marcia Oliver (Law and Society, Wilfrid Laurier University)
3:15PM-3:30PM Break
3:30PM-5:00PM Panel 4:‘The Right and the Alt-Right’
Chair: Bojan Baca (GDCL and Sociology, York University)
Presenters:
- Jeffrey C. Alexander (Sociology, Yale University)
‘Raging against the Enlightenment: The Ideology of Steve Bannon’ - Lesley Wood (Sociology, York University)
‘Anti-Immigrant Mobilizations Past and Present’ - Antonio Álvarez Benavides (Social Sciences, Carlos III University of Madrid; CADIS, EHESS, Paris)
‘The Spanish Far Right Revival: Alter-Activism and Discursive Naturalization’ - Discussant: Fuyuki Kurasawa (GDCL and Sociology, York University)
6:30PM- Dinner for presenters and organizers(Peoples Eatery; see directions below)
PRESENTERS
Jeffrey C. Alexanderis the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman and Philip Smith, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life.
Antonio Álvarez Benavidesholds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Complutense University, Madrid, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. He is currently Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Carlos III University of Madrid and Associate Researcher at Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS, EHESS). He has been also associate professor at UVA, UNED and UNIR, has published widely in journals and edited books about social movements, social theory, sociology of migrations and social intervention in Spain, France, Romania, Poland and Algeria, as well as participated on more than twenty international and national research projects.
Michaela Bensonis Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her new book, Lifestyle Migration and Colonial Traces in Malaysia and Panama, with Karen O'Reilly, was recently published with Palgrave. She is the research leader of a project on BrExpats looking at the implications of Brexit for Britons residing in the EU, work that builds on her scholarship and expertise in lifestyle migration. She is the managing editor of Sociological Review.
Manuela Boatcăis Professor of Sociology at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany, with a focus on macrosociology. She works on world-systems analysis, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, gender in modernity/coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe and Latin America. She is the author of Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism(Ashgate, 2015) and co-editor (with E. Gutiérrez Rodríguez and S. Costa) of Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches(Ashgate, 2010). Together with Anca Parvulescu, she currently holds the ACLS Collaborative Fellowship for the book project Comparatizing Transylvania: Rurality, Inter-Imperiality and the Global Modernist Market.
Robyn Bourgeois(Laughing Otter Caring Woman) is an Assistant Professor with the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Brock University. She is a mixed-race Cree academic, author, and artist originally from the Syilx and Splats’in territories of British Columbia. Her research focuses on indigenous feminisms, violence against indigenous women and girls, and indigenous women’s political activism and leadership. Her work has been published in Canadian Woman Studies, UCLA Law Review, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, and Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters.
Greg Elmeris Professor and Interim Chair in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University. His research concerns how social media platforms have changed and reconfigured political communications and electoral campaigns, as well as investigating the role that media and social media play in organizing and reporting on political protest and dissent. He is currently writing a book on the financial histories of social media companies. Elmer is the author The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics, with G. Langlois & F. McKelvey (Peter Lang, 2012), Infrastructure Critical: Sacrifice at Toronto’s G8/20 Summit, with A. Renzi (ARP, 2014), Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future, with A. Opel (ARP, 2008), and Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy(MIT Press, 2004).
Jeff Hearnis Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, UK; Senior Professor, Gender Studies, Örebro University, Sweden; Professor Emeritus, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; Professor Extraordinarius, University of South Africa; and honorary doctor, Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses on gender, sexuality, violence, work, organizations, social policy, and transnational processes. His many books include Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations, with Wendy Parkin, Sage, 2001; European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities, co-author, 2006; Men and Masculinities Around the World, co-ed., 2011, both Palgrave Macmillan; The Limits of Gendered Citizenship, 2011; Rethinking Transnational Men, 2013, both co-ed. Routledge. He is co-managing editor, Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionalitybook series; co-editor, NORMA: the International Journal for Masculinity Studies; Co-chair, RINGS: International Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies. Recent books include: Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times, Sage, 2015, Sage; Men’s Stories for a Change, co-author, Common Ground, 2016; Revenge Pornography,with Matthew Hall, Routledge, 2017; Engaging Youth in Activist Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race, co-ed. with Tamara Shefer, Kopano Ratele and Floretta Boonzaier, Routledge, 2018; Unsustainable Institutions of Men: Transnational Dispersed Centres, Gender Power, Contradictions, co-ed. with Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila and Marina Hughson, Routledge, 2018.
Ronald N. Jacobsis Professor in the Department of Sociology at SUNY Albany. His areas of interest include social theory, cultural and political sociology, mass media, and civil society. His research has examined racial crisis, the sociology of news production, the relationship between African-American and “mainstream” public spheres, and the use of narrative methods for studying discourse. He is currently working on two new research projects investigating media and the public sphere. The first is a study of media opinion and commentary, while the second is an examination of television, entertainment media, and the aesthetic public sphere. Jacobs is an editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and the author of Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King(Cambridge University Press, 2000), and with Eleanor Townsley, of The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2011), as well as co-editor, with Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, of The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology(Oxford University Press, 2012).
Romuald Jametis a Post-Doctoral Fellow at INRS (NENICLab, Chaire Fernand-Dumont sur la Culture). His work focuses on the notion of the social experience of music in a critical and comprehensive perspective. After taking an interest in the place of this experience and DIY praxis and ethics within the Parisian and Berlin counter-cultural scenes (anarchist/Antifascist/underground) during his Ph.D., his work now focuses on the transformation of the social-musical experience into a digital regime, particularly via the study of streaming platforms.
Ganaele Langloisis Associate Professor in Communication Studies at York University, and Associate Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media (www.infoscapelab.ca). Her research interests lie in media theory and critical theory, particularly with regards to the shaping of subjectivity and agency through and with media technologies. She published a book entitled Meaning in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave, 2014). Professor Langlois is currently co-principal investigator on a SSHRC Standard Research Grant to study the politics of social media platforms. She has co-edited a book on the topic entitled Compromised Data? From Social Media to Big Data(Bloomsbury, 2015). She is currently working on a research project about textile as communication. Her research has been published in New Media and Society, Culture Machine, Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies, Television and New Media, and Fibreculture.
Dawn Mooreis an Associate Professor in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. Moore is current PI on two SSHRC projects. Prison Transparency Project is a Partnership Development Grant that sets up the methods to study human rights abuses in Canadian prisons. Along with Dr. Rashmee Singh, Moore is also working on ‘Seeing Crime’, a SSHRC funded investigation into collection of visual evidence in GB violent crime. Moore’s interests include, gender based violence, subjectivity, prisoners and prisons, medicine and law, addictions, drug regulation, sexual assault and processes of ‘Indigenization’. Moore is author of two books and has published widely in British Journal Criminology, Theoretical Criminology,Economy and Society, New Criminal Law Review and Critical Criminology. Currently, Moore is exploring new feminist methods through the nascent establishment of an international working group of feminist method and GBV as well as in her upcoming paper, that takes academic concerns into the realm of conversation with a survivor based on her emotional relationship to photos turned evidence of her injuries.
Rashmee Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on gender-based violence, feminist legal theory, criminology and governance, and specialized prostitution courts in the United States. She is the author of articles published in The British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, and Law and Social Inquiry.
Eleanor Townsleyis Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Sociology and Director of NEXUS at Mount Holyoke College. Her research examines the possibilities of intellectual life in contemporary societies, with a focus on the institutional contexts and political consequences of intellectual practices. She is particularly interested trope theory and has analyzed tropes surrounding the “1960s,” “public intellectuals,” and “interdisciplinary.” Townsley’s early work focused on social science professionalization in the United States during the 1960s and the role of the intelligentsia in transitions from socialism in Central Europe. Still interested in the role of intellectuals and ideas in social change, she is currently examining the nature and influence of media intellectuals in the contemporary United States. Townsley's research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Theory & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, Gender and Society, Thesis Eleven, and New Left Review. She is a contributor to the Handbook of Economic Sociologyand coauthor of Making Capitalism without Capitalists(Verso, 2001).
Lesley Woodis Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at York University. She is the co-author, with Charles Tilly, of Social Movements 1768-2008(Paradigm Publishers, 2008) and Social Movements 1768-2012(Paradigm Publishers, 2012), and the author of Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle(Cambridge University Press, 2012) and of Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing(Pluto, 2014). She is interested in how ideas travel, how power operates, how institutions change, how conversations influence practices, how people resist and how conflict starts, transforms and ends.
Hila Zabanis currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Prior to arriving at Warwick, she was a postdoctoral fellow at SOAS, University of London for two years. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed her PhD at the Ben Gurion University in Israel. Her research interests centre on privileged lifestyle migration, urban transformation, gentrification, housing, heritage, belonging and sense of place. She previously ethnographically studied a Jerusalem neighbourhood undergoing changed due to gentrification processes combined with high status immigration of Jews from Western countries.
ORGANIZERS
Fuyuki Kurasawais Associate Professor and York Research Chair in the Department of Sociology at York University, where he is Director of the Global Digital Citizenship Lab. Kurasawa is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity(Minnesota, 2004) The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices(Cambridge, 2007), and Perilous Light: On the Visual Economy of Humanitarianism(Chicago, forthcoming), as well as editor of Interrogating the Social: A Critical Sociology for the 21st Century(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). His current research examines the ways in which digital culture is fuelling epistemic struggles and public controversies about global problems, such as climate change and gender-based online abuse, through which evidence is becoming a contested cultural and political artifact.
Matthew Hayesis Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Global and International Studies at St. Thomas University. His work on the lifestyle migration of North Americans to Ecuador has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies,Mobilities, and the Journal of Latin American Geography. His book Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalismis being published this fall with the University of Minnesota Press. His current research compares cultures of transnationalism and understandings of global inequality between North Americans in Ecuador and French Europeans in Morocco.
Marcia Oliveris an Associate Professor in Law and Society and Research Fellow at the Tshepo Institute for the Study of Contemporary Africa at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research focuses on global governance and development, gender-based violence and rape culture on university campuses, and humanitarian responses to protracted refugee situations. Her work has been published in Refugee Survey Quarterly, Studies in Social Justice, and International Feminist Journal of Politics.