Dear ~~first_name~~,
This year's TASA Conference, will once again provide the opportunity for a number of panel discussions to be part of the 2024 Program.
Panel submissions should speak to our conference theme, 'Living Now: Social Worlds & Political Landscapes'. Submissions, where possible, should transcend the focus of an individual thematic group.
Prior to submission, panel organisers are expected to source and confirm all abstracts and presenter information for their proposed panel session. Note, panel organisers will be expected to review panel abstracts and nominate a Chair for their session.
The panel title and description, along with the session titles and abstracts for each listed presenter, should be submitted prior to Friday 26 April 2024 via the button below:
TASA 2024 - Panel Submissions | The next TASA Book Club session will be on Thursday 28th March at 7pm (AEDT).
We invite you to join us as we explore this month's book: Open Minds: Academic freedom and freedom of speech in Australia by Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone, 2021, La Trobe University Press (Available on Kindle)
Event Details
Date: Thursday 28th March
Time: 7pm AEDT
Format: Zoom (login details will be provided upon registration)
Cost: Free
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
We also welcome book nominations that you believe fellow TASA members would enjoy exploring. Each month we shall focus upon works that have some form of societal reflective element that could be a work of fiction, non-fiction, or something in between.
If you have book suggestion that you would like to share, please send your ideas to Aisling aabailey@swin.edu.au.
We hope you can join us and look forward to seeing you soon.
Note, this event is for TASA members only.
| Join us on Thursday 21st March, for our TASA Thursday session presented by fellow member, and our 2023 Early Career Research Best Paper Prize winner, Lutfun Nahar Lata. Lata will be presenting on The production of counter-space: Informal labour, social networks and the production of urban space in Dhaka.
Event Details:
Date: Thursday 21st March
Time: 12:30pm - 1:30pm (AEDT)
Format: Zoom Webinar
Cost: complimentary
REGISTER HERE
|  | | We are pleased to announce our April TASA Thursdays presented by fellow member Stephanie Vasil. Stephanie will be presenting on Migration, precarity and family violence: Examining women's experiences in Australia.
Drawing on interviews with 18 victim-survivors with insecure migration status, and 23 professional stakeholders, this presentation examines precarity in relation to migrant women’s lives in Australia, focusing on the ways that their specific circumstances contribute to and are compounded by the experience of family violence (FV).
In doing so, it considers how precarity functions as a structural condition that has implications in terms of various forms or patterns of inequality that can heighten women’s vulnerability to FV and undermine their efforts to ensure their safety and survival.
The presentation draws from a qualitative study that sought to contribute to a growing body of feminist scholarship that considers how structural inequalities related to the status of non-citizenship impact the dynamics of FV and help-seeking options for migrant women in Western multicultural societies.
Event Details:
Date: Thursday 18th April 2024
Time: 12:30pm - 1:30pm (AEST)
Format: Zoom Webinar
Cost: complimentary
| | Thematic Groups - Call for New Convener/s | We are super pleased to report that a member stepped up since our last newsletter to convene Risk Societies so that thematic group will continue. For a few reasons, though, we are now seeking a convener for our Sociology of Media thematic group. If you have an interest in the Risk Societies group, but have doubts about your ability or your level of experience etc., or would like to know about what is involved, please contact Tom Barnes and/or Sally in TASA Admin asap.
| | Thematic Group Conveners: 2024/2025 | This week we are introducing you to the returning and new conveners for the Sociology of Youth Thematic Group; Cris Townley (returning) and Monique McKenzie:
|  | | Cris Townley is a Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, in the TeEACH research group, which undertakes research and translation across health and education to support families with children and young people who face adversity. Cris also teaches in the School of Medicine. Cris’ completed their PhD at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW, on parenting groups and identity. Cris’ research interests are: how we can better provide support and care to trans children and young people and their families; and how young people define school success, and what schools can do to take an intersectional approach to support young people to succeed. |  | | Monique McKenzie is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney in the Schools of Social and Political Sciences. In this role, Monique works across two ARC funded projects that looks at the role of wealth and asset inequality in Australia. Specifically, she looks at how asset inequality, particularly housing inequality, is shaping the lives of young adults in Australia. Monique also researches the platform economy, having completed her PhD thesis on the commercialisation and digitisation of labour in the platform economy. Monique’s research interests are: the asset economy and its reconfiguration of everyday life, new and emerging ways individuals build their income and wealth, the precariousness of young adults in neoliberal societies and the intersections between capitalism and technology. | | |
We are also introducing you to the new conveners for the Sociology of Emotions and Affect Thematic Group; Belinda Johnson, Tamara Borovica, Monique McKenzie & Nat Kamber.
|  | | Belinda Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the Social Science (Psychology) program and member of the Social Equity Research Centre in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. Her research interests explore intersections of social change, bodies, places, emotions and creative practice, with a specific interest in disability and Down syndrome. She is curious about the valuable insights that can be gleaned from less-considered lives. She draws from critical disability studies, emotion and affect studies and posthuman feminism. Her concerns often return to the politics of everyday and creative actions. Belinda has a lived experience perspective to her research through her child who has Down syndrome. This lived experience informs her understanding of the value of body diversity and her insight into the importance of creative work and creative participation for cultures of Down syndrome. She explores the activist and social change potential of these activities. In 2023, Belinda organised a group of dancers with Down syndrome to lead a Performance and Panel session at the TASA event, De-Centring Academic Expertise Symposium. |  | | Dr. Tamara Borovica (she/her) is a Research Fellow and creative artist working across School of Global, Urban and Social Studies and School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from Serbia where her work was in public pedagogy and education for community transformation and peace building, Tamara’s current research focuses on psycho-social approaches to trauma, mental distress and resilience. She is mostly interested in the intersection between participatory creative practice, embodiment and individual, societal and planetary health. Her expertise is in embodied and arts-based methods for transformative research and human-centric design. She is co-convenor of HASH Network Arts and Creative Practice for Wellbeing thematic group and a member of Social Equity Research Centre at RMIT. Tamara's creative practice is creative movement and dance which she sees as a portal to more-than-human experience of vulnerability, presence and interconnectedness. | | |
 | | Maddison Sideris (she/her) is a sociologist currently in the third year of their PhD at the Youth Research Collective, the University of Melbourne. At the heart of Maddison's doctoral research lies an exploration of how young Australians navigate their intimate relationships amidst the digital landscape. Through an examination of digital practices, Maddison sheds light on the nuanced ways in which technology shapes and influences contemporary notions of love, connection, and identity formation. With a passion for understanding the intricacies of human relationships in contemporary society, her work delves into the role of affect and emotion in unravelling the complexities inherent in our everyday relationships. Complementing their academic pursuits, Maddison contributes as a research assistant for the ARC funded Life Patterns Project, situated at the University of Melbourne and under the guidance of Redmond Barry Distinguished Prof. Johanna Wyn. This project delves into the multifaceted aspects of young Australians' lives, offering invaluable insights into the challenges and experiences they encounter during their transition to adulthood. Maddison serves as a sessional tutor at Deakin University, imparting knowledge and fostering critical thinking in the field of sociology. |  | | Natalie Kamber is a second-generation child of refugees and a PhD candidate whose project explores discourses of haunting, exile, long-distance, or ambiguous mourning and commemoration and their relationship to private subjectivities and the public domain amongst ethnic Albanians living in Albania, Kosovo, and the Australian diaspora. She is in the final year of her PhD, has worked as a teaching academic for a decade, and has also spent many years working with asylum seekers and refugees post-offshore detention who arrived in Australia after fleeing from war. Her scholarly interests focus on the relationship between affect, creative practice, and the revolutionary capacity of practices of commemoration and mourning of missing, unburied, and reburied dead bodies/bodily matter. Literature has largely ignored exhumation’s poetics: the symbolic weight of the corpse, ties to funeral rituals, and how exhumation is contextualised within longer histories of the dead body. The contribution her work seeks to make—via case studies of ethnic Albanians in various contexts—on the aspects of exhumation that exceed its rational functions by looking at the affective and necropolitical function that dead bodies still have within the community, and in resisting both private and state erasure. In this perspective, disappearance and ambiguous loss are not just a personal loss but a social wound of significant affective political power that should not be allowed to close but rather also involve creative making, the poesis of striving for meaning, processes of commemoration, and political resistance among the bare bones of those losses. | | |
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Hossain, Munshi Israil. (2023). Covid-19 and the Spectre of Rising Poverty: Is Bangladesh a Resilient State to Tackle Poverty? Journal of the Institute of Bangladesh Studies, vol. 45, pp.99-126.
| The nomination deadline for the below 2024 TASA Awards is July 17th:
Note, applications for TASA2024 bursaries will open on Monday July 22nd and close on Monday August 19th.
| Postdoctoral Fellow
University of New South Wales
As the Research Fellow, working with fellow member Emma Kirby, you will primarily work with academic and partner investigators on a project funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project Grant “When caring ends”
Application deadline: March 31st. Read on...
Assistant or Associate Professor
Hong Kong Shue Yan University, sociology department
Starting in September
Applications will remain open until the position is filled. Read on...
Visiting Professor
Seoul National University
Commencement of position: January – February 2025
| The Jobs Board enables you to view current employment opportunities. As a member, you can post opportunities to the Jobs Board directly from within your membership profile screen.
| | | PhD Scholarship
Swinburne University
A candidate is sought with an interest in exploring how housing instability and homelessness are drivers of youth justice involvement, and how housing might be an effective intervention for desistance from crime. While the candidate will be given the opportunity to develop their own research topic and proposal, it is expected that they will broadly align with the project: A place to call home: developing a sustainable housing intervention model for homeless young people involved with the justice system, led by Professor Wendy Stone and fellow member Dr Joel McGregor.
PhD Scholarship - Music making in Australia
Applications are invited for enrolment in a scholarship-supported doctoral study associated with an Australian Research Council Discovery project that explores digital music making in regional Australia. The PhD project topic is deliberately open to allow candidates to develop their own specific ideas and interests drawing on their existing skills and experience, subject to negotiation with supervisors. However, in order to align with the overall project, topics that focus on areas such as the following are particularly welcome:
• Music making in regional Australia
• The intersections of grassroots music making and government policy and infrastructure in urban or regional settings
• Musicians’ utilisation of ‘maker spaces’
• Social inequalities in digital music making.
The successful applicant will supervised by three of the Chief Investigators on the ARC project (all TASA members), Associate Professor Catherine Strong (RMIT), Professor Andy Bennett (Griffith) and Dr Ben Green (Griffith).
Please contact Catherine Strong for more information (catherine.strong@rmit.edu.au)
PhD Scholarship
University of Melbourne
Supervisor: fellow member Ash Barnwell
The proposed PhD project offers an original sociological study about how secrets and practices of secret-keeping around sexual lives have changed over time in Australian society.
For the full details, and to submit your expression of interest, read on...
| | The Scholarships Board enables you to view available scholarships that our members have posted. Like the Jobs Board, as a member, you can post scholarship opportunities directly from within your membership profile screen. | | | | In case you are not aware, you can add job and scholarship opportunities to our publicly searchable Jobs & Scholarships Board via your TASA membership profile, see image below: | | Other Events, News & Opportunities | Book Discussion - Meet the Author/s | New: Harmony Week 2024: Author Talk - Dr. Andrew Jakubowicz in conversation with Craig Foster AM
March 22nd, 10:30am - 12pm, AEDT, Maroubra, NSW
Join fellow member Andrew Jakubowicz in conversation with Craig Foster AM to discuss his newly released book 'Multicultural Arc: Making Multicultural Australia: Past, Present and Future'. 'Multicultural Arc' describes and analyses a half-century of multicultural action and policy in Australia.
For details, read on...
New: A Brill Meet the Authors virtual seminar on What are Social Imaginaries?
Johann Arnason (Latrobe University) and Suzi Adams (Flinders University). The seminar will be chaired by Paul Blokker (University of Bologna) and feature Peter Wagner (University of Barcelona) as discussant.
26th March Melbourne: 2am AEDT. Join via Teams.
| Call for Submissions - Journals
| Special issue focussed on Culturally Responsive Qualitative Health Research
Qualitative Health Research
Anticipated publication of Special Issue: March 2025
Deadline for submissions: July 1. Read on....
European Review of Applied Sociology
Issue no. 28/2024
Deadline for submissions: TOMORROW March 15, here.
Criminology in Post-Violence Transitions: Exploring the Intersections between Human Rights, Grassroots Activism, Transitional Justice, Memory, and Criminology
International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy
Deadline for initial submissions: April 1st. Read on...
Blood Ties and Politics: The Influence of Political Polarization upon Family Life
Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research Special Issue
Deadline for initial submissions: April 15. Read on...
| Aging Out of Out-of-Home Care
Collected Edition and Symposium
Editors: fellow members Joel McGregor and Ben Lohmeyer as well as Wendy Stone
Chapter proposals, of a maximum of 250 words, that showcase the work of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and advocates, are due by March 31. Read on...
| The Kohli Prize for Sociology
The Kohli Prize for Sociology honors exceptional achievement in and contributions to the field and profession of sociology. The Kohli Prize is rewarded with 50.000 EUR.
Nomination deadline: TOMORROW March 15. Read on...
| Second World Conference for Religious Dialogue and Cooperation
June 19-22, 2024 Strumica, North Macedonia (Hotel Sirius)
Abstract submission deadline: April 15th. Read on...
World Conference for Religious Dialogue and Cooperation
Strumica, North Macedonia from June 19 to 22
Abstract submission deadline: April 15th. Read on...
| New: WA Migration and Mobilities Update conference
Edith Cowan University Mount Lawley campus, Perth WA.
Wednesday 25 September
Full program and registration details to follow.
Social Sciences Week 2024
9-15 September 2024
SSW2024 promises to be even more fun, insightful and intelligent than ever before. So mark your calendars, spread the word and get ready for a week of activities.
| Gift memberships, for any membership category, can now be accessed at anytime via your membership profile screen. If you would like to gift a membership, to someone new or to a current member, please follow the steps below:
STEP 1: Click here and log in
STEP 2: Click on the drop down menu to the right of your name in the purple bar (RH) at the top of the website (see 1st image below)
STEP 3: Click on Profile (see 1st image below)
STEP 4: Click on the Gift Memberships menu item and complete the details, see yellow highlights in 2nd image below. | | Submitting Newsletter Items | | We encourage you to support your colleagues by sharing details of your latest publications with them via this newsletter. No publication is too big or too small. Any mention of sociology is of value to our association, and to the discipline, so please do send through details of your latest publication (fully referenced & with a link, where possible) for the next newsletter, to TASA Admin. Usually, the newsletter is disseminated every Thursday morning. | | Updating your Member Profile | Personal pronoun preferences can be added to your profile. There are 9 combination options to choose from. Please let Sally in TASA Admin know if your preference/s is not on the list and we will have them added.
| | TASA Documents and Policies | In case you are not aware, you can access details of TASA's current Executive Committee 2023 - 2024, and their respective portfolios, as well as documents and policies, including the Constitution, Values Statement, Statement on Academic Freedom, Code of Conduct, Grievance Procedures, Safe & Inclusive Events, Sustainable Events and TASA History.
| | Accessing Online Materials & Resources | | TASA members have access to over 90 peer-reviewed Sage Sociology full-text collection online journals encompassing over 63,000 articles. The image on the left shows you where to access those journals, as well as the Sage Research Methods Collection & the Taylor and Francis Full Text Collection, when logged in to TASAweb. If needed, here is a short instructive video on how to access the journals. | | | TASA Admin (Sally): admin@tasa.org.au
TASA Events (Penny): events@tasa.org.au | |