Dear ~~first_name~~,
As promised in yesterday's newsletter, please find details of TASA 2023 below. On TASAweb, you will find the Key Dates and Registration fees. We will post further details on the site as it comes to hand and get back to you when the call for abstracts is opened. The important deadline to note now is May 29th for the panel submissions.
The Gathering
This year, TASA’s annual event sees a change of format due to the ISA World Congress of Sociology being held in Melbourne in June. TASA’s 2023 November event will be run as a colloquium. This three-day gathering, rather than the usual five-day conference, provides the opportunity to host a less jam-packed program, placing emphasis on the panel-based delivery of papers, on discussion and social connection, and on broader regional and remote participation through both offline and online engagement.
Held, once again, in conjunction with the Council of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Congress of HASS, TASA 2023 will kick-off with a half-day postgraduate event (Monday 27 November), followed by two further days (Tuesday 28 - Wednesday 29 November) involving 20 panel sessions (80 papers), two afternoon plenaries, social events, and TASA’s AGM and awards presentation. While we recognise that this offers fewer than usual chances to deliver a paper, it will potentially increase audience levels and thematic coherence.
The Theme
There is, unmistakably, current foreboding about the state of the social. Struck by the tragedy of pandemic (and accompanying shifts in work, sociality, and life course), marked by heightened political polarisation, and plagued by the exigencies of a myopic carbon economy, the social terrains we inhabit are in trouble. Right now, voices are in heightened contention, cultures are apparently at war, and our environments are roaring back at us in protest.
All this goes beyond the perennial lament for unachieved ‘social cohesion’. In face of climate change, escalating inequalities and resurgent fascisms, few of us will now be resting unconcerned. Yet the social, of course, survives; it can do nothing else. Wherever social relations seem to be disintegrating they are lived vibrantly elsewhere; wherever social belonging and social participation seem to be under siege, they are in other places being sustained or remade.
TASA 2023’s theme takes up this sense of social disintegration and remaking in the context of the increasing imperative to live well with other voices, diverse cultural frames, and the many environments that sustain us. The theme is deliberately a broad one but with a central focus on what it is to constitute, contest, and participate in societies and social relations in current times. There are many sociologies that can speak here; sociologies of class, ethnicity, Indigeneity; of body, disability, genders and sexualities; of inequality, health, education, regionality; of culture, religion, emotion; and of economy, environment and activism. We invite sociologists from all sectors – urban, regional and remote – to share their research insights and to connect their work to ways of sustaining the social.
The Panel & Paper Process
Given the shorter event and absence of a local organising team, TASA wants to keep the administration of the program as straightforward as possible, focusing our energy on delivering an inclusive and friendly colloquium.
Call for panels
There will be an open call for proposed panel sessions, relevant to the broad conference theme, from April 21st to May 29th 2023. Each panel proposal (150-200 words) is to be put forward by a team of two or more panel convenors (at least one of whom should be a TASA member).
Click here to submit a Panel Proposal
Panel selection
Panel proposals will be selected by a team from TASA’s Executive, and then announced by June 12th.
Call for panel papers
While we recognise that some panel convenors may have speakers already in mind, we want to ensure that a range of people, especially HDR students and early and mid-career academics, have a chance to participate. Given this, an open call for abstracts of proposed papers for the selected panel sessions will run from June 13th to July 24th.
Paper selection
Paper selection will then take place in August through consultation with each team of panel convenors and TASA’s colloquium convenor – with authors notified in early September.
We do hope you can join us for TASA's 2023 Colloquium in Sydney or online.
Regards,
Kim Humphery,
Vice-President of TASA and Convener of TASA 2023.
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