Midday Specials

The goal of this session is to celebrate the life and work of Robert Fine (1945-2018) by looking at his idea of critical social theory and re-visiting the three areas of research to which he devoted most attention. The first is how political ideas and the political world are mutually shaped. From the enlightenment of the 18th century to humanitarian interventions in the 21st, Fine was concerned with how politics and political ideas inform one another so that politics without ideas is potentially totalitarian but ideas with no politics can become rather conservative. A second research area was the extent to which different forms of social and political exclusions, such as classism, racism and antisemitism, have to navigate a difficult dialectics between universality and particularity. Thirdly, the idea of critical theory itself deserves scrutiny as Fine’s notion of critique chose openness over dogmatism, historical struggles over teleological progress, and immanent justifications over transcendental foundations. From Hobbes to Arendt, Fine construed a heterodox canon of critical social theory that is guided by the substantive quest for understanding the social world.

Robert Fine was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. He played a leading role at ESA: sitting on its Executive Committee (2011-2015), serving as board member Research Networks 29 and 15, and playing a pivotal role in the founding and running of Research Network 31. He authored 6 books and published over 100 articles. He supervised over 30 doctoral students who now work all over the world.

with

Christine Achinger | University of Warwick, UK

Biographical Note
Christine Achinger is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). Her research interests are in critical social theory, literary studies, history and theories of antisemitism, and constructions of gender, race, Jewishness and national identity and their interrelations as responses to capitalist modernity. Her publications include Distorted Faces of Modernity: Racism, Antisemitism and Islamophobia, New York: Routledge, 2015 (ed. with Robert Fine); Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben - Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild [Split Modernity: Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit – Nation, Gender and the Image of the Jew], 2007.

Daniel Chernilo | Universidad Diego Portales, Chile

Biographical Note
Daniel Chernilo obtained his PhD at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Robert Fine. He has been a Lecturer in Sociology at Warwick, a Professor of Social and Political Thought at Loughborough University and is now a Full Professor in the Institute of Philosophy at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. He has written widely on the history of social thought, humanism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Some of his books are: Debating Humanity. Towards a Philosophical Sociology (CUP, 2017), The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory (CUP, 2013) and A Social Theory of the Nation-State (Routledge, 2007). He is currently writing a new monograph on the contemporary university.

For more than ten years, the European Research Council has been supporting excellent, investigator-driven frontier research across all fields of science through a competitive peer review process based on scientific excellence as the only selection criterion. Without predetermined thematic priorities, the ERC encourages proposals that cross disciplinary boundaries, address new and emerging fields, and introduce unconventional, innovative approaches.
Researchers of any career stage are offered flexible, long-term funding for up to five years (six years in the Synergy grant call). ERC calls for proposals are open to researchers from around the world who plan to carry out their research project at a host institution in an EU Member State or in a country associated to the current EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. In the case of the Synergy grant call, one of the Principal Investigators can be based outside the EU/associated countries permanently.
There are currently 25 scientific panels to which researchers can submit proposals, spanning from the life sciences to engineering and physics to the social sciences and humanities.

with

Michel Wieviorka | European Scientific Council Member

Abstract
In the first part of the session, Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and European Research Council Member, Michel Wieviorka will talk about the objectives and principles of the ERC and say a few words on the ERC Funding Programme in the next European Commission Research and Innovation Framework Programme, Horizon Europe (note that he is also one of the Plenary speakers at the Opening).

Biographical Note
Michel Wieviorka, Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, is the President of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH). From 2006 to 2010, he was President of the International Association of Sociology AIS / ISA, where he created the encyclopedia on line Sociopedia, and has been a member of the ERC (European Research Council) Scientific Council since 2014. He heads SOCIO (with Laetitia Atlani-Duault), which he launched in 2013. His research has focused on conflict, terrorism and violence, racism, anti-Semitism, social movements, democracy and the phenomena of cultural difference. His more recent books include Evil (Polity Press), Retour au sens (éd. Robert Laffont), Antiracistes (éd. Robert Laffont), Face au mal (éd. Textuel). He is currently leading an international and multidisciplinary scientific program on violence and exiting violence.

Anne Nielsen | Project Adviser, European Research Council Executive Agency

Abstract
In the second part of the session, Anne Nielsen, Scientific Officer at the ERC Executive Agency, will present the ERC funding schemes and their main features, with focus on the panel entitled: "The Social World, Diversity, Population", which covers sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, demography, education, and communication. She will also briefly talk about the Synergy Grant that provides funding opportunities for synergistic collaborative projects with up to 4 principle investigators.

Biographical Note
Anne Nielsen is Scientific Officer in the European Research Council's Executive Agency where she has been working since 2017. Before this she was a Policy Officer in the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. She holds a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence and subsequently did a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. She has worked for a migration think-tank in Washington D.C. and subsequently an NGO in Brussels, where she was working on women's and children' rights.

Sevasti-Melissa Nolas | Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Abstract
In the third part of the session, ERC grantee and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, will present her ERC project "Connectors – an international study into the development of children’s everyday practices of participation in circuits of social action" and talk about her experience as an ERC grant holder (note that she is also a Semi-Plenary speaker in SP12).

Biographical Note
Sevasti-Melissa Nolas is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research areas include: human agency and lived experience, childhood, youth and family lives, civic and political practices across the life course, and publics creating methodologies. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded Connectors Study and the co-editor of entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

Subsequently participants will have the opportunity to ask the panellists questions about any aspect related to the ERC and its funding opportunities for which they seek further clarification.

Research will always be assessed before resources are allocated; but how should this best be done? Alongside the more traditional forms of funding for specific research projects, funding models have emerged based on national reviews of research by specific disciplines. The methods used in these assessments include publications, the research environment and research impact; with utilization of a variety of metrics. These co-exist with assessments based on citations of publications, and more rounded evaluation of CVs. In this Midday session we will discuss the various forms of national and international evaluation of research output and impact in Europe. In the UK, there have been regular national research assessments every seven or so years for over 30 years, whereas other countries across Europe have developed these processes more recently. In the last two reviews in the UK, the impact of research on society has been included alongside academic impact, an approach that is already being fostered by the new EC framework research programme Horizon Europe. The panel will discuss these review exercises and the various forms that they take. We will invite consideration of the variety of funding models and research environments across Europe, including their implications for ‘permanent’ academic posts and academic work patterns and careers. We will focus especially on whether and to what extent such reviews impact particularly on Sociology as a discipline.

with

Ramon Flecha | University of Barcelona, Spain

Biographical Note
Ramon Flecha is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona and Doctor Honoris Causa by Vest Timisoara University. He coordinated the FP7 project IMPACT-EV and was Chair of the European Commission’s expert group on Evaluation Methodologies for the interim and ex-post evaluations of H2020. He is co-author of the EC publication Monitoring the impact of EU Framework Programmes that has informed the evaluation system of FP9 Horizon Europe. His publications include journals such as PlosOne, Nature-Palgrave Communications, Journal of Mixed Methods Research and Current Sociology. Results of some of his research have been approved by the European Parliament and other relevant stakeholders, leading to political and social impacts.

Sylvia Walby | City University of London, UK

Biographical Note
Professor Sylvia Walby has worked at City University of London as Professor of Sociology and Director of the interdisciplinary Violence and Society Centre since 1 March 2019. She was previously at Lancaster University where she was Distinguished Professor of Sociology, held the UNESCO Chair in Gender Research, and was Director of the Violence and Society UNESCO Centre. Sylvia was the founding President of the European Sociological Association, elected after chairing the steering committee to establish the association. She has been President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee RC02 on Economy and Society. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Professor Walby was awarded an OBE for services to equal opportunities and diversity. She is Chair of the REF Sub-Panel for Sociology.

chaired by:

Sue Scott | Newcastle University and University of Helsinki (ESA President)

Biographical Note
Sue Scott is the current President of the European Sociological Association (2017-2019). She was President of the British Sociological Association 2007-2009. She is a sociologist primarily of gender and sexuality. Sue has been a Professor at a number of UK Universities, as well as a Dean and a Pro Vice Chancellor, and is now a Visiting Professor at Newcastle and Helsinki. She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and adviser to the Academy on Open Access. She is on the Board of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Sue is a founding and managing editor of Discover Society, discoversociety.org.

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Ricca Edmondson | European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

Biographical Note
Ricca Edmondson (DPhil Oxon) is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Visiting Professor at Tampere University, Finland, and editor of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, a journal of the European Sociological Association. Her publications cover rhetoric and the theory of argument, the life-course and ageing, and intercultural approaches to environmental theory. These research areas converge in her work on the theory of wisdom and methods of investigating it.

Michalis Lianos | European Societies

Biographical Note
Michalis Lianos is Professor at the University of Rouen and the editor of European Societies, a journal of the European Sociological Association. Michalis writes in English, French and Greek and is the author of The New Social Control (2012) and numerous other publications in the domain of late modern sociality. His most recent publication in English is Conflict and the Social Bond (Routledge 2019). He has conducted several international research projects in the areas of risk, uncertainty, insecurity and conflict, and has taught in various European countries. Michalis has served as member of the editorial boards of many journals.

Marta Soler | International Sociology

Biographical Note
Marta Soler-Gallart, Harvard PhD, is Professor of Sociology and Director of CREA Research at the University of Barcelona. She is currently ESA Vice-President and co-Chair of the ESA 2019 Conference Committee. She has been Chair of RN29 and is also member of RN33. President of the Catalan Sociological Association and Governing Board member of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities. Involved in the ISA as the Editor of the journal International Sociology. She coordinated the H2020 research SOLIDUS, was knowledge management coordinator of the FP7 IMPACT-EV project and has been involved in the Interim Evaluation of H2020 for the European Commission. Author of the book Achieving Social Impact. Sociology in the Public Sphere (Springer), and of articles in journals such as Current Sociology and Qualitative Inquiry. She was the first social sciences researcher serving at the ORCID Board of Directors (2014-2016), contributing to this organization’s global expansion.

chaired by

Lena Näre | University of Helsinki, Finland

Biographical Note
Lena Näre is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Nordic Journal of Migration Research and Vice-President of the European Sociological Association (2017-2019). Her research focuses on migration, asylum seekers, families, transnationalism, gender, work, ageing and care. She is currently leading a four-year Kone Foundation funded research project on asylum seekers’ political activism and struggles for home and belonging. Her work has been published in Identities, Men and Masculinities, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is the co-editor with Katie Walsh of Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age (Routledge: London).

In this panel, we focus on making sociology matter beyond the strictures of the academic journal. The session offers a collaboration between Discover Society (https://discoversociety.org) – an online platform aimed at making academic research about society accessible to an informed, interested general reader – and The Sociological Review (https://thesociologicalreview.com) – a digital platform centred on Britain’s oldest journal of sociological enquiry and extending its longstanding commitment to making sociology matter.
Loosely organised around the theme of Public Sociology, it brings together speakers who have taken the lead on initiatives to make sociology matter beyond the academic journal, and have experimented with different forms of making sociology public in their own research practice. As they discuss, this is far more than a way of communicating research differently, it is political, offering critical and creative interventions that makes visible the production of the social world and questioning inequalities and social divisions. The conversation between the contributors will focus on the urgency and importance of making sociology matter, the prospects for this, the value for individual sociologists in the context of their own research, what this brings to the discipline (and why we need this now more than ever), alongside the pitfalls and opportunities. They draw on their experience of curating digital platforms that showcase the research of academics from across the social sciences, of podcasting, exhibiting and working with print and broadcast media in their examination of contemporary and future landscapes of Public Sociology.

with

Gurminder K. Bhambra | Discover Society

Biographical Note
Gurminder K. Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Her current project is on epistemological justice and reparations. She is Series Editor of the Theory for a Global Age series, set up by Bloomsbury Academic and now published by Manchester University Press and, in 2015, she set up the Global Social Theory website to support students and academics interested in social theory in global perspective. She is also co-editor of the online magazine, Discover Society and Trustee at the Sociological Review Foundation.

Luke de Noronha | The Sociological Review

Biographical Note
Luke de Noronha recently completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Oxford and is currently the Sociological Review Fellow for 2019, while teaching at Birkbeck College in Psychosocial Studies. His main research interest is in deportation – as is his political activism – and he is concerned with theorising the relationship between racism and immigration control. He has written blogs and journalistic pieces for several online publications – including The Guardian, Verso Books, VICE News, Open Democracy, Discover Society, Ceasefire Magazine, Border Criminologies and Red Pepper.

chaired by
Michaela Benson | Goldsmiths, UK

Biographical Note
Michaela Benson is an ethnographer and sociologist based at Goldsmiths. Her current research is focused on Brexit and what this means to and for British citizens living in the EU-27 (https://brexitbritsabroad.com), a project that includes the ambition to communicate research in real time through podcasting, writing for print media and blogs, working with journalists and ThinkTanks. As Managing Editor of the Sociological Review, she is responsible for editorial vision and strategy for a journal that seeks to renew the critical and creative appeal of sociology in times of dramatic economic and political changes in many parts of the world.

During this Midday session, we will discuss questions and outcomes steaming from the research of social transformations in the region of Eastern and Central Europe. Are generational and technological factors in this respect decisive? Does political governance lead to new barriers and boundaries? Do the changes lead to a convergence or a gap between the East and West in Europe? Or are the barriers and boundaries that we talk about maybe illusive? What are the new divides arising and new types of belonging emerging?
The book The Routledge International Handbook of European Social Transformations (edited by Peeter Vihalemm, Anu Masso, Signe Opermann in the Routledge International Handbooks series, 2018) examines the social, institutional, spatial and temporal dimensions of social transformation as they are experienced in Eastern Europe and the European Union. The contributing authors address aspects of social transformations, link them to social theory and to global processes of transformation and provide empirical evidences. Those participating in the Midday session are: Veronica Kalmus, Marju Lauristin, Matej Makarovic, Zenonas Norkus, Triin Vihalemm.

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Tomaš Kostelecký | Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Biographical Note
Tomáš Kostelecký is the Director of the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and is a senior researcher in the Department of Local and Regional Studies. He was a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC; a Marie-Curie Fellow at Science Po Bordeaux, and a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Key interests are: the analysis of spatial aspects of human behaviour, socio-spatial inequalities and the process of (non)convergence between “old” and “new” Europe. Recent publications: The political ecology of the metropolis: Metropolitan sources of electoral behaviour in eleven countries (ECPR Press) and “Food self-provisioning in Czechia: Beyond coping strategy of the poor” in Social Indicators Research. He was the Chair of the Local Organizing Committee of the 12th ESA Conference in Prague in 2015 and elected member of the ESA Executive Committee 2015-2017.

Marju Lauristin | University of Tartu, Estonia

Biographical Note
Marju Lauristin is a professor of social communication in the Institute of Social Studies of Tartu University, where she is teaching political culture and critical analysis of political communication. Her main research areas are media and society, post-communist transformation and the emerging digital society in Europe. Professor Lauristin had also been active in Estonian and European politics. In 2014-2017 she has been a member of the European Parliament, where she was appointed as a rapporteur on e-privacy regulation. 

Chaired by

Elena Danilova | Institute of Sociology, FCTAS, Russian Academy of Sciences

Biographical Note
Elena Danilova is Head of the Research Centre in the Institute of Sociology, FCTAS of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Recent interests and publications lie at the intersection of the sociology of transformations – in particular those that are taking place in post-socialist societies – and of critical sociology. Her latest publications are: “Transformations of Welfare Policy and Discourse on Social Justice in Russia” in Social Sciences, 2018; “Actual and perceptual social inequality under transformative change in Russia and China” in Europe Asia Studies, 2017; “Neoliberal Hegemony and Narratives of ‘Losers’ and ‘Winners’ in Post-Socialist Transformations” in Journal of Narrative Theory, 2014. Within the ESA, she served as member of the Executive Committee (2009-2013), as Vice-President (2011-2013), and was again elected for the terms in 2015 and 2017. She initiated the ESA RN36 “Sociology of Transformations: East and West” and is its current coordinator.

The session presents how the research funding landscape is changing, as well as the interplay of a class of professionals in the design of science policy. Although a political agenda lies behind funding for research, researchers are gathering together to show critical mass and contribute to the co-design of the future instruments and tools for research. The European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH) is the largest umbrella organisation of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe and advocates for an important redefinition of science funding which can harvest the best research in Europe, with a particular attention to human and social research. The European Sociological Association is a member of EASSH, endorses its work and collaborates on its position papers.

with

Gabi Lombardo | Director, European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities

Biographical Note
Gabi Lombardo PhD is the Director of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (www.eassh.eu), the largest advocacy and science policy organization for social sciences and humanities in Europe. She is an expert in both higher education and global research policy, and has extensive high-level experience operating at the interface of strategy, science policy, research support and funding. Gabi holds a senior level experience in strategic and ‘foresight’ planning in elite higher education institutions, international research funders and associations as she worked with the London School of Economics (LSE), the European Research Council (ERC) and Science Europe (SE).
As Director of EASSH, Gabi advocates also for the need of a strong evidence-based approach to policy-making, and the inclusion of researchers in science policy development for strategic and broad-based research funding. In November 2018, Gabi received the Young Academy of Europe Annual Prize.

chaired by

Marta Soler-Gallart | University of Barcelona, Spain

Biographical Note
Marta Soler-Gallart, Harvard PhD, is Professor of Sociology and Director of CREA Research at the University of Barcelona. She is currently ESA Vice-President and co-Chair of the ESA 2019 Conference Committee. She has been Chair of RN29 and is also member of RN33. President of the Catalan Sociological Association and Governing Board member of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities. Involved in the ISA as the Editor of the journal International Sociology. She coordinated the H2020 research SOLIDUS, was knowledge management coordinator of the FP7 IMPACT-EV project and has been involved in the Interim Evaluation of H2020 for the European Commission. Author of the book Achieving Social Impact. Sociology in the Public Sphere (Springer), and of articles in journals such as Current Sociology and Qualitative Inquiry. She was the first social sciences researcher serving at the ORCID Board of Directors (2014-2016), contributing to this organization’s global expansion.

Lately, big data became a topic in sociological discussions. “Big data” means large datasets that are often collected outside the academic context, for example from Facebook users. It provides rich information that opens up new research opportunities. However, it also raises concerns about privacy and analytical challenges.
In a first presentation, Andreas Diekmann discusses the opportunities that big data provides for sociological research. He starts from the insight that big data is not necessarily better than small data, meaning survey data. The advantages of big data lie in its different character. It is unobtrusive and often more valid than data on self-reported behavior. Moreover, it is often relational and informs about structures of large social networks. Geo-coded data open new routes to account for spatial context and there is the possibility to combine survey data with other sources of digital data. Problems and opportunities are illustrated with examples from social science research.
In a second presentation, Kathrin Komp-Leukkunen reflects on how big data affects the job chances of sociologists. Companies increasingly use big data to make business decisions. Consequently, their demand for researchers who can analyze this data increases. Because many sociologists have solid analytical skills, they are potential employees. However, handling big data often also requires some programming skills, which are less common among sociologists. Statistics on sociologists working in big data analysis are presented. Interview data are used to frame and discuss these statistics. The findings suggest several possible new directions in sociology study programmes.

with

Andreas Diekmann | ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Biographical Note
Andreas Diekmann is Professor em. of Sociology at the ETH Zurich (2003 – 2016), currently head of the Environmental Research Group at the ETH Department of Humanities and seniorprofessor at the University of Leipzig. He was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin (2017-2018). His areas of research are social cooperation and experimental game theory, environmental and population sociology, and methods of empirical social research. He serves as a chairman of the section “Economics and Empirical Social Sciences” of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He is also a fellow of the European Academy of Sociology and co-editor and board member of several professional journals and research institutions. Present research activities focus on experimental research on the emergence of social norms, energy consumption, and the analysis of the environmental burden of metropolitan areas with geo-referenced panel data (supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation).

Kathrin Komp-Leukkunen | University of Helsinki, Finland

Biographical Note
Kathrin Komp-Leukkunen is associate professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focusses on population ageing, life-courses, comparative welfare research, work and retirement, and research methods. Moreover, she studies the situation of sociology as a scientific discipline. Recent publications include the articles “The commercialization of sociological research: On the how and why (not)” (European Societies, 2018) and “Capturing the diversity of working age life-courses: A European perspective on cohorts born before 1945” (PLoS ONE, 2019). Komp-Leukkunen is a former Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow, member of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association, and former coordinator of Research Network 01 “Ageing in Europe”.

chaired by

Jolanta Perek-Bialas | Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

Biographical Note
Jolanta Perek-Białas is associate professor at the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow and at the Institute of Statistics and Demography, Warsaw School of Economics, Poland where besides of teaching (data analysis, survey design), she is mainly a researcher in the field of ageing/gerontology. She co-/authored many papers in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in books on the topics of sociology of ageing, social indicators, quantitative methods applied for socio-economic analysis. She is active as co-coordinator of RN21 on Quantitative Methods of the ESA (from 2015) and she organized the Mid-Term Conference of this RN in Cracow (2018). She is also a member of the Expert Group on Active Ageing Index (EC and UNECE). Since October 2018, she is the Director of the Center of Evaluation and Public Policy Analysis at the Jagiellonian University.

This Midday session will address Plan-S (see https://www.coalition-s.org/about/) and its mandate to achieve open access for all publicly-funded European science, including social science, by January 2020 – ‘making open access a reality’. The scope of the mandate varies by country, as do the means of making it happen (whether by incentives or by sanctions). We will assume that it will happen and that its application will be comprehensive, in order to assess the risks and opportunities for sociologists. We will consider the drivers of the policy – high subscription costs of journals – as well as problems of the new business models that are emerging (pay-to-publish, read-and-publish), revenue risks to professional associations as well as alternative ways of maintaining publication by associations. We will also consider the special circumstances of monograph publication.

with

John Holmwood | University of Nottingham, UK

Biographical Note
John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and a former President of the British Sociological Association and former member of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association. He was a member of the Higher Education Funding Council of England Expert Reference Group for its Monographs and Open Access Project. He is co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University and joint founder of the free online magazine of social research and commentary, Discover Society. He is a critic of the commercialisation of open access (‘Commercial enclosure: Whatever happened to open access?’, Radical Philosophy, 181, 2013).

Alison Shaw | CEO, Policy Press

Biographical Note
Alison Shaw is founder and CEO of Policy Press, a major not-for-profit publisher of sociology and social policy in the UK, awarded Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year 2016. In 2016 she founded Bristol University Press, incorporating Policy Press as an imprint within it. She was named by The Bookseller magazine in its list of the top 100 most influential people in the book trade. This recognises influence and leadership across a wide range of publishers, retailers, authors and members of the media. Alison was one of only eight scholarly publishers on the list and Bristol is the only University Press outside of Oxford and Cambridge to have been included.

Julia Mortimer | Journals Director, Bristol University Press/Policy Press

Biographical Note
Julia Mortimer is Journals Director and Head of Open Access at Bristol University Press and Policy Press. She was Assistant Director of Policy Press and has played a key role in developing both presses. Julia has been involved in many of the policy discussions around Open Access in the UK including the current Society Publishers Accelerating Open Access and Plan S (SPA-OPS) project initiated by ALPSP, Wellcome Trust and UKRI and the current UKRI Review into Open Access.

chaired by:

Sue Scott | Newcastle University and University of Helsinki (ESA President)

Biographical Note
Sue Scott is the current President of the European Sociological Association (2017-2019). She was President of the British Sociological Association 2007-2009. She is a sociologist primarily of gender and sexuality. Sue has been a Professor at a number of UK Universities, as well as a Dean and a Pro Vice Chancellor, and is now a Visiting Professor at Newcastle and Helsinki. She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and adviser to the Academy on Open Access. She is on the Board of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Sue is a founding and managing editor of Discover Society, discoversociety.org.

Refugees, Civil Society and the State. European Experiences and Global Challenges
by Ludger Pries (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)

In 2015 one and a half million forced migrants entered the European Union. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers, groups and organisations offered food or shelter. There also rose xenophobic protest, and EU-member states reacted between hostility and “we will make it”. Based on primary and secondary data analysis this book provides a social science insight into the dynamics of the so called refugee crisis, the origin of refugees and the responses of civil society. It characterises the politics of member states’ governments as organised non-responsibility and analyses the long term challenges of European refugee protection.

with

Ludger Pries | Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

Biographical Note
Prof. Dr. Ludger Pries is Chair of Sociology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. His fields of expertise are Sociology of Work, Organizations and Migration in a comparative perspective, transnationalism and globalisation research. He has published 10 monographs and more than 70 articles in scientific journals. His latest book from 2019 is an edited collection with Margit Feischmidt and Celine Cantat entitled Refugee Protection and Civil Society in Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave). He is the author of Refugees, Civil Society and the State. European Experiences and Global Challenges from 2018 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).

discussed by

Lena Näre | University of Helsinki, Finland

Biographical Note
Lena Näre is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Nordic Journal of Migration Research and Vice-President of the European Sociological Association (2017-2019). Her research focuses on migration, asylum seekers, families, transnationalism, gender, work, ageing and care. She is currently leading a four-year Kone Foundation funded research project on asylum seekers’ political activism and struggles for home and belonging. Her work has been published in Identities, Men and Masculinities, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is the co-editor with Katie Walsh of Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age (Routledge: London).

Monica Massari | University of Milan, Italy

Biographical Note
Monica Massari is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of International Relations of the University of Milan, after several years spent at the University of Naples. Her main research interests are related to the relationships between globalization and violence, including complex forms of crime and illegal markets, migration studies, especially from a gender perspective, and new forms of racism and discrimination in Europe. During the past ten years, her research activities have been focussing on irregular migration across the Mediterranean, migrants’ self-narrations and traumatic memories of desert and sea crossings through the use of biographical methods. She has recently co-edited the book Mafia Violence. Political, Symbolic, and Economic Forms of Violence in Camorra Clans (with Vittorio Martone, Routledge 2019), the special issue on “Biography and Society” of Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia (with Roswitha Breckner, 1/2019) and the special issue on “Emancipatory Social Science Today” of Quaderni di Teoria Sociale (with Vincenza Pellegrino, 1/2019). Her latest book is Il corpo degli altri. Migrazioni, memorie, identità (Orthotes, 2017). She is in her second mandate as member of the ESA Executive Committee.

This session aims at exploring the interface of disciplinary boundaries and addressing the issue(s) of inter/cross-disciplinarity in relation to sociology which feels defeated or threatened because of the disruption of disciplinary boundaries. It is common knowledge that inter/cross-disciplinarity is easier to be said than accomplished due to the sovereignty of disciplinary boundaries and the impact of theories reinforcing them. The Midday session will address the main challenges accompanying the various attempts – at the level of particular research themes domains and/or funding institutions – to establish inter/cross-disciplinarity along with the prerequisites for achieving such a target. Those who work within disciplinary boundaries will value the virtue(s) of sociological theory and analysis against more ‘synthetic’ approaches.
However, on the other hand, there will be a discussion of the forces that drive sociologists to work in interdisciplinary contexts. Specific reference will be made to the complexity of organizational fields as the main cause for demanding a variety of skills that are spread over several professional groups. In this connection, a targeted discussion will refer to the skills and abilities required for interdisciplinary work in contrast to traditional academic practices. Finally, the available data from a survey of sociologists will be utilised to illustrate experiences with and perceptions of opportunities and challenges when working with professionals from other disciplines.

with

Manuel Fernández-Esquinas | Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC)

Biographical Note
Manuel Fernández-Esquinas holds a PhD. in Sociology and Political Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid. He is a research scientist at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and director of the Joint Research Unit on Knowledge Transfer and Innovation (CSIC and University of Córdoba). His main fields of research are sociology of innovation, sociology of science, innovation policies, knowledge transfer and the uses of the social sciences. He has published about these subjects in European Planning Studies, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Regional Studies, Industry and Innovation and Higher Education, among others. His latest edited book is titled Innovation in SMEs and Micro Firms: Culture, Entrepreneurial Dynamics and Regional Development (Routledge, 2018, with van Oostrom and Pinto). Currently he is serving as President of the Spanish Sociological Federation and Coordinator of the Research Network 27 “Regional Network Southern European Societies” of the European Sociological Association.

David Inglis | University of Helsinki, Finland

Biographical Note
David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Before that, he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen. He holds degrees in sociology from the Universities of Cambridge and York. He writes in the areas of cultural sociology, the sociology of globalization, historical sociology, the sociology of food and drink, and social theory, both modern and classical. He has written and edited various books in these areas, most recently The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology and The Routledge International Handbook of Veils and Veiling Practices (both with Anna-Mari Almila), and An Invitation to Social Theory (Polity). He is founding editor of the Sage/BSA journal Cultural Sociology. His current research concerns the sociological analysis of wine and wine world globalization.

chaired by

Apostolos G. Papadopoulos | Harokopio University Athens, Greece

Biographical Note
Apostolos G. Papadopoulos is Professor of Rural Sociology and Geography in Harokopio University Athens. He has worked as principal investigator and project leader in numerous research projects funded by Greek National Agencies, the European Commission and the McArthur Foundation (USA). He has research experience on socio-spatial transformations in rural areas, social class and stratification, rural development policy, return to the countryside, international migration, migration and local labour markets, inequalities in the labour market, and civil society. He has significant experience in the administration and management of academic institutions as Vice-Rector of Economic Affairs and Development in Harokopio University (2011-2015). He was President (2016-2018) of the Hellenic Sociological Society (HSS) and Chair of the LOC for the organisation of the 13th ESA Conference in Athens. Currently, he is Vice-President of the European Sociological Association and new co-Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley/ESRS journal Sociologia Ruralis.