Mini-conference of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section

The 2018 Mini-Conference of the Comparative and Historical Section: “The Crisis of History and the History of Crisis”

August 10, 2018

University of Pennsylvania campus, Philadelphia

We are living in an era of crises in political economy, state-society relationships, geopolitics, and academia. The 2018 mini-conference of the Comparative and Historical Section of the ASA beckons sociologists and fellow travelers at all career stages to submit papers dealing with crises of capitalism, empires, the state and other social institutions, authoritarianism, social unrest,imperialism, and knowledge production from historical, comparative and critical-theoretical perspectives broadly understood.

The miniconference will be held at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia on August 10, the day before the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association.  The title of the conference, suggested by earlier chairs of the section, is “The Crisis of History and the History of Crisis.”

This conference is being organized by Kim Voss and George Steinmetz, together with Baris Büyükokutan, Luis Flores, Robert Jansen, Simeon Newman, Tasleem Padamsee, Melissa Wilde, and several others.

The conference will include two plenary sessions. The first, on “The Crisis of the American University in Comparative and Historical Perspective,” will include talks by Michael Bérubé, Clyde W. Barrow, and Kim Voss. Michael Bérubé (Pennsylvania State University) serves on the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and is the author of ten books including The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments.Clyde W. Barrow (University of Texas) is the author of the classic Universities and the capitalist state: corporate liberalism and the reconstruction of American higher education, 1894-1928 (1990), of The Postindustrial University: Fiscal Crisis and the Changing Structure of Academic Labour (1992), and most recently of The Entrepreneurial Intellectual in the Corporate University  (2018).

The second plenary session will be on crisis in general–social, political, cultural, and historical. Confirmed speakers are Elisabeth S. Clemens, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Isaac Reed, and George Steinmetz.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words through the electronic abstract submission form: HERE. The extended deadline for paper submission is February 28, 2018 March 15, 2018.

You can access the mini-conference flyer from HERE.