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TASA 2023: Submissions
Note, submissions have closed.
The Panel & Abstract Process
Given the shorter event and absence of a local organising team, we are keeping the administration of the program as straightforward as possible, focusing our energy on delivering an inclusive, slower and friendly colloquium. We also plan for a moderate number of parallel sessions in keeping with an emphasis on thematic coherence and intellectual engagement.
Participants who wish to deliver a paper can either;
Option 1: Submit an abstract to the general paper sessions relevant to a TASA thematic group
or
Option 2: Submit to one of ten focused panel-based sessions listed below:
1. Young people, financialization and new technologies
The financialization of everyday life is ubiquitous for contemporary young adults. They are the vanguard of new financial technologies including (but not limited to) digitally mediated loans, buy now pay later services, cryptocurrencies and the platforms on which they are traded, NFTs, and gambling apps. This panel invites speakers to consider the implications of the financialization of everyday life and the proliferation of new financial technologies for young adults who form the primary target market for many forms of "fintech". Speakers may like to address the relationship between financialization and subjectivities, the relationship between financialization and various dynamics of inequality, the technological mediation of young people's financial practices, the targeting of young people as consumers of new financial technologies, or the wellbeing implications of financialization and engagement with financial technologies. The panel will contribute to the wider theme of the conference by addressing the financialization of everyday life as a process that is inherently tied to social disintegration, and by inviting participants to imagine how social connection and cohesion could be remade in a de-financialized world.
2. The politics of the climate crisis
A day after TASA2023, world leaders, NGOs, industry representatives and environmental groups gather in Dubai for the United Nations COP28 meeting. Amid growing lobbying by fossil fuel industries and green capitalists, and divisions between global North and South over responsibilities for, and funding of, climate action, COP28 faces an uphill battle to get climate commitments back on track. Against this backcloth, and with TASA2023's focus on contestation, participation and continuance in the social, it is appropriate to take stock of the social, economic and political voices and tensions surrounding the anthropogenic climate crisis. This panel will use its sociological imagination to examine the politics of climate change; assess how sociology can help cut through increasingly polarised views on climate targets and deliver solutions that are both effective and socially just. We invite papers that address aspects of climate change politics or policy, including: Climate change and conflict. Interests, ideology and the climate crisis. Tensions or barriers in environmental policy development/implementation. Climate change and technologies or infrastructures. Community, micro-level or everyday responses to the climate crisis. Contested understandings of sustainable development. Convergences/divergences in climate change policy. Cultural, geographical or national contexts. Environmental policy-making at any scale.
3. The social life of pandemics within and beyond health systems
Pandemics prompt reconfigurations of lifeworlds. Citizens may be called upon to comply with public health orders or health advice to change how they relate to other people and spaces, and health workers (doubly burdened also as citizens) are tasked with responding amidst apathy, uncertainty, resource constraints, and professional boundaries - all of which are blurred under crisis conditions. In response to disease outbreaks, the health sector assumes a significant role in responding to the emergency of an unprecedented global health crisis while also adapting work practices to ensure continuation of care in local contexts. At the same time, such outbreaks (re)make publics, with the crises of pandemics stretching across different geographic scales, populations, and temporal modalities. For example, while COVID-19 was an all-encompassing pandemic, its prominence in the public sphere appears to have diminished while infection remains high, compared to the 2022 mpox (formerly monkeypox virus) outbreak that heralded a short-lived emergency. Conversely, bloodborne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C have involved periods of crisis entangled with specific biosocial communities and biomedical advances over multiple decades. This panel invites abstracts that examine the social life of pandemics, including their entangled affective, embodied, temporal, and relational aspects within and beyond health systems.
4. Sustaining care across species and scales
How, for whom and at what scale can we, and should we, care in relation to the key challenges we face as a society today? Care is often taken to mean an expression of concern or act of provision at the interpersonal level. But how care is socially organised across species and scales profoundly structures our individual and collective experiences of flourishing and/or decline. Moving beyond typical interpersonal characterisations of care to think across species and scales instead, allows us to reflect on care as it is entangled within its social, political, economic and environmental contexts. This perspective brings into focus the wide-ranging ramifications of care (or its absence) for the wellbeing of humans, other species and the planet. Building on this year's conference theme of ˜Sustaining the Social", we examine how care features in the ‘current foreboding about the state of the social, exploring how it both contributes and might serve as a corrective to social (and environmental) disintegration. In this way, we hope to envision more caring futures that transcend neoliberal models of care that individualise, responsibilise, and ultimately marginalise different populations, and work towards more caring and more careful collective futures instead.
5. Supporting diverse families in times of crisis
While the covid pandemic dominated our attention over the past few years, other crises have raged in the background: The climate crisis and associated extreme weather events. The cost-of-living crisis. The housing crisis. The crisis of domestic and family violence. Experience suggests that state actors give little thought to how families will manage under such unprecedented circumstances. This lack of thought is surely underpinned by a raft of assumptions about families - their structure, material circumstances, affective characteristics, capacity to undertake care work and so on. Yet for many families these assumptions are not only misplaced they may be harmful. What do families need before, during and after crisis? What role should state actors play in meeting those needs? How can sociologists encourage state actors to think in more complex ways about families? This panel will build on the conversation begun at the ISA-aligned event in June with a focus on the impact of these multiple crises on families. Studies that consider families outside the normative nuclear model, such as single parent, same-sex couple, multigenerational, and co-parenting families, are especially welcome.
6. Dynamics of the asset economy
Assets have become the essential financial instrument through which wealth and inequality is structured. Two decades of low-interest rates coupled with low and stable inflation created an economic context that encouraged wealth accumulation and financial security through debt-funded asset acquisition. Life chances and household security within this context has come to be defined through asset ownership, both in its ability to appreciate the financial position of asset owners and through the impacts that debt repayments have on the everyday finances of asset-owning households. Not only do assets determine the financial positions of households they are also activated as channels through which governments and monetary policy can shape the social and economic outcomes of their populations. Governments have eroded welfare in favour of private provisioning through assets and central banks are increasingly using debt obligations to speed up or slow down the economy. Reflecting on this condition, this panel asks the question of how asset ownership manifests itself in the everyday practices of households and the decisions made by policymakers and technocrats? What assets are households drawn to and what assets can they access? How do policy makers use asset ownership to achieve their social and monetary policy goals? And what does the asset economy look like in the present context of high inflation and rising interest rates?
7. Dangerous diasporas? Finding space for diaspora engagement in multicultural Australia
The role and place of diasporas in Australia has been problematised and obscured in public policy by a mainstream approach that focuses on settlement and multiculturalism with an emphasis on social cohesion. There is however growing attention on the politicisation of diaspora, witness public statements questioning the so-called 'commitment' of migrants to Australia and the security implications of diaspora activities, demonstrating a lack of understanding of the role and place of diaspora in Australia's multicultural landscape. Given the breadth of diverse communities in Australia which will only increase through migration in coming years, there is an opportunity to consider the strong transnational links that can be expressed through diasporic communities that have a role in their social, economic and political lives here in Australia and in countries of origin. This panel invites contributions from sociologists interested in issues related to belonging and participation around themes of ethnicity, race, culture and activism.
8. Live music, heritage, and sociality: Post-pandemic urban cultural citizenship
The pandemic and accompanying policy failures have highlighted changes in urban cultural citizenship. Grassroots cultural production spaces are increasingly under threat as the property crisis forces producers and participants out of inner urban areas. Live music venues and their communities are at the forefront of this change. Often run as for-profit small businesses in the Australian metropoles, they are impacted by increasing overheads, a squeeze on audiences, and a generational shift towards digital cultural participation. Elsewhere these issues are being met with campaigns advocating the collective ownership of the means of cultural production, such as the Music Venue Trust movement in the UK. At home, a crowdfunding effort to Save the Tote - partly relying on its heritage value - has delivered an uncertain outcome, and governments continue to defer most provision of cultural experiences to free enterprise. This panel seeks to explore the tension currently playing out in our cities between markets, communities, music cultures, and governments. - How are cultural workers, audiences and employers struggling to adapt to the post-pandemic environment? - How are old and new power relations, structures and inequalities involved in questions of urban cultural citizenship? - What roles might sociologists, policymakers and governments play in addressing these struggles? - How do cultural citizens deploy the concept of heritage to maintain their communities?
9. Towards a more convivial academia
Academia faces neoliberal erosion to prioritise productivity, profitability, and projectification over quality T&L, creativity, and belonging. Often hindered by excessive workloads, casualisation, institutional expectations, inadequate support and resources (including time), academics and research students often have no choice but internalise values and norms of a corporatised academia (Hawkins et al., 2014). The amplification of inequities and the collective experiences of burnout since COVID has further threatened the collegiality and collaboration, leaving limited room for care-full engagement (Baker & Burke, forthcoming), and convivial time (Barnett, 2015) to discuss shared plans, ambitions, and aspirations to envision a better academia. Taking up Connell's (2019) challenge in The Good University, this panel offers a safe space to imagine alternative futures for a more convivial academia. Welcoming diverse voices from academic professionals (e.g., HDRs, ECRs, Teaching/Research-focused/independent academics, etc.), this panel aims to foster discussions about existing models and approaches academics employ to position themselves and their work under institutional and structural limitations. We welcome theoretical and pragmatic contributions that focus on 1) academic culture, identity, 2) affective and emotional aspects of academic lived experiences, 3) creative pedagogical approaches to convivial academic practices (e.g., T&L, quality supervision, interprofessional learning), and 4) re-crafting institutional expectations.
10. The future of work and care: practices, tensions and ways forward
The intersections and regimes of work and care have been significantly disrupted by
COVID-19. With recent technological development and artificial intelligence, the
world of work and personal life are more complex to manage and blend, and
individuals face many challenges. As we recover and imagine how to rebuild our
economies, industries and communities, it seems timely to consider the practices,
tensions and ways forward in the future of work and care.
This panel concerns research progressing and debating policy, the conceptual and
lived-experience of work and care in Australia. It is energised by questions: Who will
we be in years to come? What approaches to ‘care’ should we consider? How can
we create an equitable future of work and care?
Note, if you submit to a panel session, we will also ask you to select a relevant thematic group in case your abstract is not selected for inclusion in a panel session.
Abstract Submission Guidelines
Abstract Submissions
Abstracts are required for all presentations to be considered for TASA 2023. Given we are hosting a limited number of concurrent sessions, we will only be accepting 1 abstract per delegate.
The abstract limit is 200 words and must be submitted by Friday 4 August 2023, via the orange button below, keeping in mind that all abstracts must connect with the broad colloquium theme.
Please note, we will not be accepting written papers for TASA 2023.
All abstracts will undergo a review process with notification of results sent via email by September 7th, 2023.
Accepted abstracts will be allocated 15 minutes presentation time and 5 minutes for questions.
Authors of accepted abstracts are expected to register and attend the colloquium. All expenses associated with travel, accommodation and colloquium registration are to be covered by the presenter.