Third ISA Forum of Sociology (Web), Session organizers: Anna Schober, Justus Liebig University Giessen and Regev Nathansohn, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Time: July 10-14, 2016
Venue: Vienna
Abstract until 30 September 2015; Read the full CfP as PDF

Everyday life usually goes unnoticed. It has to do with repetition, with the usual and the regular, but also with consummation and continuance. Visual culture is involved in the constitution and maintenance of everyday life as well as in creating meaning in respect to it. As such it testifies to everyday and to ordinary processes which often escape our attention. This ordinary, everyday life, however, is also a site from which rupture, change and even upheaval or revolution might arise. And since the ordinary and the everyday are also linked to commonality, i.e. to a notion of society rather than to the monadic individual, visual culture also testifies to transformations of our ways of being in common.

At the same time, however, visual culture can trigger identification and adoption processes as well as conflict, and in this way itself becomes an agent transforming everyday life. Continue reading →

Special issue of the journal Gender, rovné príležitosti, výzkum / Gender, Equal Opportunities, Research (Web), Guest editors Jitka Gelnarová and Marie Fousková

Abstracts by 30 September 2015

The topic of women’s political agency in Czech, Slovak and Central European history provides rich research opportunities. Central Europe itself represents an interesting area for comparative study. Besides its shared communist past and the post-communist transformation, it is both connected and divided by the deeper history of the multinational Habsburg monarchy, which bestowed unequal power status upon its nations.

The dominant notions of political agency and political actor are deeply gendered. While history textbooks and museum exhibitions are permeated by the image of the masculine political actor, women are often shown as objects or victims of politics, rather than actors in their own right. Writing about women as actors in political history thus takes two basic forms. The first one uncovers women’s political activities in the conventional sense of the word, long neglected by the mainstream political science and history. The second form follows the motto “personal is political” and assigns political status to activities which have been traditionally represented as apolitical, thus redefining the very concepts of political action, political sphere and space, and politics itself. Continue reading →

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich (Web)

Date: 26–28 February 2016
Location: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
Proposal by 1 September 2015

• Conveners: Sherilyn MacGregor (Keele University, UK) and Nicole Seymour (California State University, Fullerton, USA)

“Gender,” in the environmental humanities and social sciences, has long been synonymous with “women.” Feminist and ecofeminist scholars have produced a great deal of work on the links between femininities and environments and on women’s involvement in environmental politics and practices. More recently, the emerging field of queer ecology has troubled the binary construction of gender that traditionally has informed (eco)feminist research. What remains under-addressed are the myriad ways in which masculinities and masculinized roles, identities, and practices shape human relationships with the more-than-human world. Indeed, the few available scholarly articles that do interrogate masculinity and environment begin with the recognition (and a lament) that there is so little research available. Read more … (Web)

Special Issue of Girlhood Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal (Web), Guest Editor April R. Mandrona

Please send expressions of interest and abstracts by 1 September 2015.

For this themed issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood,” we invite submissions from transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives that investigate how the constructs of girlhood and ethics might inform each other. We are interested in work that explores, disrupts, or otherwise complicates the notion of girlhood studies as an ethical space. As of yet, the relationship between girlhood studies and the field of ethics remains under-articulated and under-researched. While there is a range of research that takes up questions of feminist ethics, childhood ethics, and to a lesser extent feminist girl-centred interventions, ethics in girlhood studies is a new nexus of inquiry. Persistent forms of marginalization and ongoing concerns about the physical and mental wellbeing of girls around the world necessitate the development of girl-responsive ethical frameworks. Ethical considerations may also allow probing into the taken-for-granted aspects of what it means to be a girl. The aim of this themed issue is to produce new imaginings and understandings of ethical being, rights, otherness, power, agency, and responsibility in relation to the study of girlhoods. Continue reading →