Joint Sessions between Research Networks

Joint session with RN01 Ageing in Europe and RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives

This session would like to reflect on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the confinement associated with it on families, and more broadly family networks. A particular attention is paid to older persons who have been one of the main groups marked as vulnerable. The session welcomes papers exploring new practices of ‘doing family’ that have emerged during this period. The partial or total confinement throughout Europe and the world have imposed new means and ways of staying in touch between younger and older family members. Simultaneously, the types of support and care received and provided by older persons within families has changed. In their turn, family ties have potentially continued to play a role for older persons’ well-being and feelings of loneliness during the pandemic. We welcome papers dealing with ‘doing family’ and family configurations in times of Covid-19 and its implications for older persons.

Joint session with the RN01 Ageing in Europe and RN21 Quantitative Methods

The availability of large national, cross-national and panel surveys, as well as register data, prompted the increased popularity of quantitative methods in ageing-related research. This Joint Session aims to discuss the applications, challenges and limitations of quantitative methods in ageing research, and to identify best-practices in this domain. We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical papers related to topics such as:

• Collecting quantitative data on ageing-related issues
• Measuring age and ageing: dimensions and approaches
• A life course view at late-life events and transitions: sequence analysis, event history models and other approaches
• Multilevel and longitudinal methods in ageing research
• Comparative analysis of cross-national surveys in ageing research
• Register-data and big data in ageing research
• Network Analysis in ageing research
• Age, period, cohort methods
• Microsimulation techniques in ageing research
• Methodological aspects of social indicators in ageing research
• Measuring transitions (e.g. retirement), stratification and inequalities in older age
• Issues related to missing data, retrospective data or attrition.

Other topics linked to the session topic are also welcome.

Joint session with RN01 Ageing in Europe and RN22 Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty

Risk and Dignity in Older Age

This joint session will explore the nature of risk and dignity in relation to older people. The management of risk is concerned with reducing the potential for harm to occur. Such considerations, however, must be balanced with recognition of the personal liberty and dignity of persons. Ageing intersects with such deliberations, as additional risks can be encountered by older people. For example, aspects of physical or mental decline in old age could increase the potential for accidents or injury. Nevertheless, it is vital also to avoid stereotypical generalisations: assumptions of decline could lead to a negative positioning and labelling of older people. A paternalistic and narrow perspective on safety could generate negative outcomes by diminishing personal autonomy and self-worth, which could themselves be encountered as a mode of harm. The evaluation of ageing in relation to risk and dignity can thus promote the need to balance potentially competing concerns, related to factors such as safety and liberty. Theoretical and empirical papers are welcomed. Moreover, an attentiveness to how older people actively handle, manage and take risks in everyday life helps underscore commonalities with other age groups and the creative subjectivities of older people.

Joint session with the RN01 Ageing in Europe and RN35 Sociology of Migration 

Transnational migration in old age

There has been much written on transnational practices and on transnationalism among older migrants. The literature has gone into detail discussing various forms of transnationalism such as maintaining contact through the use of information and communication technology, sending remittances, voting in home country elections, travelling to the home country, property ownership and so on.

This session would like to apply a transnational lens to the study of older populations more broadly, including those who have had a migration experience, but also those who did not have a direct experience of international migration, such as older persons who have not migrated during their life but whose adult children or friends experienced migration or were influenced by migration in a broad sense. Further, we would like to broaden our understanding of transnationalism by focusing on other locations than the home country, and include other places where one has family or friends, places of recurrent visiting, places where one accesses services and so on. Particularly, we are interested how the COVID-19 pandemic, having a special repercussion on older populations, has impacted their transnational practices.

Theoretical and empirical papers, with European relevance, are equally encouraged.

Joint session with RN01 Ageing in Europe and RN37 Urban Sociology 

Urban Ageing: Towards an enhanced spatial perspective

We kindly invite you to participate in the second joint session of Research Network on Ageing, and Research Network on Urban Sociology. The organizers welcome individual and team contributions which combine sociology of ageing, social gerontology, and urban sociology perspectives.

Many authors now point to the contemporary struggles over the representation of older age within and beyond the realm of the social sciences. Later life and older people are represented on one hand as a quiescent minority bearing multiple disadvantages within a social status of limited agency and increasing dependency, experiencing a loss of autonomy and so on. On the other hand, older people are also seen as a source of new political, economic, and cultural ‘grey’ power, as an influential actor in contemporary societies, shaping the contours of new policies and welfare regimes. These debates reflect the diversity of the experiences of ageing selves and the pluralities of life courses as well as of the institutional, political, and social changes with which the personal and individual experience is inseparably interlinked. These struggles lead also to the reformulation of the concepts of agency, autonomy, or power themselves and to the calling for their even more reflexive application in academic accounts of the human experience in later life.

We would like to particularly invite papers and sessions that will discuss ageing-related issues within (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Spatial aspects of ageing
• Age-friendly cities and communities
• Urban ageing
• Urban ageing policies.

Joint session with RN02 Sociology of Arts and RN09 Economic Sociology

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted all sectors of society, but it were the coping reactions on the part of actors involved in the arts and the cultural sphere that have been of major visibility to all of us (balcony concerts, joined online dance projects, club music streamings, etc.). The arts have proven of major significance in a time of existential crisis and have showed how they are able to develop specific new forms of economic activities, markets, and associations. These new and alternative developments are worth to be studied in inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. The session seeks to bring together experts specialized in cultural policy, art sociology, economics and market sociology, to discuss what changes are happening in the arts and the cultural sector on macro, meso, and micro levels and how these are and can be related to broader economic developments.

Joint session with RN03 Biographical Perspectives on European Societies and RN23 Sexuality

As key aspects of social life, sexuality and intimacy shape individuals’ psychodynamics, subjectivities, relationships, socio-political engagements and more. This session is open to scholars, who wish to explore how biographies and identities are made sense of through the lens of sexuality and sexual experiences. We also wish to look at how these dynamics can be researched by social scientists and methodological opportunities and challenges of these investigations.

Joint session with RN04 Sociology of Children and Childhood and RN16 Sociology of Health & Illness

This session intends to explore the impact that the Covid-19 crisis is having on the life of children and young people in Europe and beyond. Children and young people have been affected by the mitigation measures implemented by governments, such as the closure of schools, the confinement at home and the diminishing of social contacts. But they have actively participated and contributed to the functioning of households and communities. There is a need to understand the short-term impact and long-term effect of the Covid-19 crisis on the life of children and young people. For all these reasons, it is extremely important to gather sociological knowledge on this matter, namely studies giving children a voice and visibility to their perspectives on the subject. We invite colleagues to submit papers, theoretical and/or empirical, to this joint session between RN16 and RN04.

Joint session with RN05 Sociology of Consumption and RN09 Economic Sociology

The notion of circular economy is presented as an alternative to current linear and resource intensive economic models. It proposes to extend the life of products through practices such as repair, re-use, up- and recycling and to diminish obsolescence through technical, legal or informational means. This joint session seeks to discuss sociological perspectives on the circular economy understanding it as an emerging vision of economic and social change and a response to the multiple crisis modern societies are confronted with.

We invite contributions which address but are not limited to questions such as: Which are the main actors and ideas of a circular economy? Which power-relations contribute or hinder circular production, market organisation and innovation? How is “waste” re-valuated and how do associated value-chains change? What are the practices, prerequisites, and political instruments to change current linear production and consumption patterns? Which may be the macroeconomic outcomes of circular models?

Joint session with RN05 Sociology of Consumption and RN09 Economic Sociology

Consumption is often linked with contested societal issues such as climate crisis, environmental sustainability, or social justice. Normative concerns in consumption are embedded in moral structures and institutional dynamics that are associated with capitalist economies, policies, and societies at large. This joint session is interested in the interplay of consumption moralities mutually shaped by institutional frameworks and everyday activity.

We invite contributions which address, but are not limited to questions such as: How are consumption practices shaped by moral and political orientations? What alternatives exist to capitalist profit maximising moralities? What are key actors, e.g. consumers, activists, social movements, politicians? How do economic practices shape what is understood as good or evil? What kind of positions in mundane normativities and moral judgements advance alternative economic activity? What are key economic moralities of evaluating and legitimising? How do actors deal with contradictory moral concerns or hierarchies of moralities?

Joint session with RN05 Sociology of Consumption and RN12 Environment & Society

Unpacking the role of consumption in relation to environmental and social justice issues is a critical area of study, which relates to how we apprehend ‘consumption’ and social change. As part of this endeavour, the notion of a consumer-citizen is a rather ambiguous one. On the one hand, consumption can be seen as a political act – through boycotts and buycotts for example (Micheletti 2003), but ‘green consumerism’ has also been likened to forms of consumer scapegoatism rather than transformative change (Akenji 2014). This suggests that more attention could be placed on the political implications of consumption, whether through shopping sustainably, reducing consumption in a sufficiency perspective, or re-appropriating the means of production. The empirical study of consumption and citizenship towards the normative goal of ‘sustainability’ also merits further inquiry, as it could open up fields of research beyond the individual and the home, to other spaces of consumption and forms of political action – including collective ways of living and engaging in social change initiatives. How consumers can imagine themselves as citizens in a future, more sustainable world is also a promising field of reflection. This joint session will invite contributions from sociologists making the links between consumption, environmental constraints, and different forms of political action, bringing together scholars from RN05: Consumption and RN12: Environment and Society.

Joint session with RN05 Sociology of Consumption and RN24 Science and Technology

Contemporary consumer cultures are increasingly being shaped by (and shaping) the digital. Online shopping websites, social media, mobile apps, smartphones, QR codes, data streams, algorithms user and programming interfaces, business models and terms of service form part of a complex ecology of devices, platforms, infrastructures and systems that shape consumer activities such as product searches, comparing, and examining goods, and evaluating services. Activists are using social media to spread information and mobilize in the fight for consumer rights, social justice, and ethical consumerism. There are growing critiques on the ability of digital technologies to enable the surveillance of consumers, to infringe on privacy through data collection, to discriminate between users based on opaque algorithms, and to manipulate customers through big data analytics and targeted advertising. Celebratory accounts are being produced on the ability of digital tools to alleviate information asymmetry and to reverse the power imbalance between companies and consumers. In response to the call for sociological knowledge on consumption, citizen agency, participation, inequalities, and economic models, this session focuses on the digital ‘devicification’ of consumer culture (Cochoy et al. 2020), and the “materiality” of consumption technologies. This session will invite contributions from scholars who examine the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of the developing ecology of devices, platforms, infrastructures, and systems on contemporary consumer cultures.

Joint session with RN07 Sociology of Culture and RN15 Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology

How can we create a truly global sociology of culture(s) or a profoundly global cultural sociology? This session welcomes contributions that consider various ontological, epistemological, and institutional opportunities and challenges arising as a result of an increasingly globalised and hybrid social world. The session seeks to understand how global and transnational phenomena are cultural, how globalised cultures are hybrid and contested, and how sociologists should make sense of such contradictions.

Joint session with RN07 Sociology of Culture and RN30 Youth & Generation

The aging of European societies prompts debates about inter-generational conflicts and policies – coming from European youth themselves – concerning intergenerational solidarities and the possibilities and limits of youth as drivers of social change. With the appearance of the Covid-19 pandemic, such discourses have become part of popular culture, involving ideas of young people as actors who can protect the most vulnerable, including older people, operating as a minority which acts on behalf of the majority. Such demographic issues also animate many political debates concerning the sustainability of social security systems and national health systems. Yet cultural values, and future orientations both across generations and among cohorts, are not exhausted by demographics. Generations do not live separately from each other. From Black Lives Matter to MeToo and climate change activism, there are many examples of how the “generation gap” of the 1980s may be overcome. This session seeks to widen sociological discussion of generation-related futures, by bringing together experts from the sociology of youth and cultural sociology. New possibilities are explored as to how to understand the roles and significance of projected and imagined futures on both young people and wider populations. Specific topics to be considered include how different age groups and generations conceive of the future, how powerful groups define the future for youth, how different sectors of youth act for their, and older people’s, futures, and how sociology may make distinctive and novel contributions to future-oriented analyses.

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN10 Sociology of Education

The spring of 2020 saw prolonged lockdowns of schools in OECD countries. As a result, academic performance became increasingly dependent on home schooling and the ability and technological capacity and enablement to exploit opportunities provided by online education. This joint session aims to serve as a meeting point for those social researchers conducting their work on the consequences of the lockdown on education performance, and/or on the long term consequences on future educational and professional trajectories of pupils who have suffered the lockdown and/or the future organisation of conventional and online education.

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness

Health care markets are undergoing crucial change due to increasing self-medication and use of non-prescription medicines (OTC) such as analgesics, cold or cough drugs. Although there is a liberalization trend in pharmacy markets, most OTC´s are still pharmacy-only drugs. Pharmacists more and more challenge practitioners as the central health care intermediaries and OTC have become an alternative to prescription drugs. This joint session is interested in the social processes underlying growing self-medication and OTC use and their consequences on pharmacy markets and health care professions. We invite contributions that address but are not limited to questions such as: Which political, institutional or cultural factors contribute to growing self-medication and use of OTC? Which are the consequences of increasing OTC use for public health care systems and professions? Which social processes influence OTC pricing and valuation? Which factors influence OTC recommendations and preferences of branded vs. generic OTC (e.g. trust, professionalism)?

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN17 Work, Employment and Industrial Relations

Many businesses adjusted to the economic crisis provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic by implementing remote work practices amongst their employees. Firms are quickly drawing lessons from this large-scale experiment and the potential gains that remote work can offer to employers and employees are likely to become more evident than ever. Thus, expectations are that remote work will continue expanding even after the pandemic crises is over. In fact, differences between better-educated and less skilled employees may amplify under such context, leading to increasing inequalities. This session is open to researchers who would like to share their findings on how the expansion of remote work can affect productivity at firm and individual levels, increase or decrease job-satisfaction and amplify or reduce inequalities in the labour markets.

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN17 Work, Employment and Industrial Relations

The economic crisis provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic is having a deep impact on the functioning of labour markets all over the world. Recent evidence suggests that income loss and exposure to risk of being infected is not affecting all workers equally. The younger precariat is being especially affected by the crisis, deepening even more their current and future social and economic insecurity and risk. That might have important consequences for the way in which varied economic and social institutions, including markets, operate.

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN20 Qualitative Methods and RN32 Political Sociology

The widespread use of digital techniques and big data are changing and threatening nearly every part of economic and social life. One of the most exciting and challenging results of digitalization is the rise of new forms of surveillance. This joint session asks for contributions dealing with such topics and offering new insights.

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN21 Quantitative Methods

A lot has happened when it comes to quantitative methods and empirical research especially within new economic sociology. There are experiments, mixed-methods, statistics, simulations, historical research to name only a few. This joint session asks for new developments in empirical research with reference to particular challenges in studying economic topics from a sociological perspective.

Joint session with RN09 Economic Sociology and RN23 Sexuality

The relationship between sexuality and economic life is often ignored in economic analyses and sexuality studies. This joint session encourages fruitful explorations of the intersection of sexuality and economy. Some of the questions we wish to address are: under what conditions, and with what consequences do people combine economic transactions with intimate and sexual relations? How can we make sense of the social anxieties that surround the mixing of economic activity and sexual relations? How can economic practices and beliefs help us understand homo and heteronormativities and the exclusions that they foreground? Do financial institutions operate as arbiters of morality to regulate the sexual lives of individuals? How are fiscal and other economic policies reinforcing hierarchies based on normative understandings of sexuality and sexual behaviours?

Joint session with RN11 Sociology of Emotions and RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives

We call for papers that advance theoretical understanding of the lived experience of the intersections of emotional life of families and personal relationships with global issues. These include the Covid-19 pandemic, economic globalisation, disruption of political structures, wars, refugees, terrorism, environmental problems and political responses to climate change. How are emotionally infused interpersonal relationships implicated in political movements, in empathy with or antipathy toward strangers and neighbours, cosmopolitanism, racism, humanitarian values, sympathy for non-human animals and activism on behalf of the environment or other causes?

Joint session with RN11 Sociology of Emotions and RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives and RN33 Women’s and Gender Studies

The capitalistic dynamics embedded into people’s family, work and emotional life appear as new intersectional tensions and divisions. In societies which are partially dominated by populistic or right-wing extremist leaders, fears of people and their families are instrumentalized, and anti-feminist tendencies come up into force. For preventing sociology from the danger of producing knowledge in hegemonic ways, the aim of the session is to discuss possible recipes for alternative futures that incorporate emotionality, affects, and feminist perspectives, and to search for relevant analytical tools providing knowledge on the role of emotions in nowadays social world.

Joint session with RN11 Sociology of Emotions and RN32 Political Sociology

The goal of this panel is to shed light on the latest trends in emotional political narratives and engagement. In times of multiple crises in Europe (austerity measures, cultural and value conflicts, migration, Covid pandemics) expression of outrage seems to become a normal practice if not a new display rule. This moral anger against those who allegedly or actually inflicted damage on someone we care about has been amplified thanks to social networking sites and ranting media that provide platforms for limitless emotional ventilation. Communicating frustration, however, not necessarily motivates collective action for social or political changes. Political engagement and mobilization need narratives of hope, empathy, pride, and feeling of being part of a group as well. Therefore, we invite contributions to map the complexity of affections in politics that includes the simultaneous expression of mixed emotions as well as dynamics of emotion transformation in time. We are open for submissions of empirical research and theoretical contributions aiming to understand emotional political narratives and engagement. We especially welcome methodologically innovative papers expanding our knowledge on the interplay between the cultivation of outrage and positive emotions in the context of contemporary contentious politics.

Joint session with RN12 Environment & Society RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness

We expect research and presentations related to the overlapping aspects of the health crisis (Covid-19) and climate crisis. We are also interested in explorations of the trade-offs Europeans had to make between safety during the Covid-19 and environmentally friendly behaviours (disposable masks, etc.). Presentations on the environmental benefits or impacts of the Covid-19 lockdown are also welcome.

Joint session with RN12 Environment & Society and RN21 Quantitative Methods

Joint session with RN12 Environment & Society and RN22 Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty 

Joint session with RN12 Environment & Society and RN25 Social Movements

Mitigating, or adapting to, global warming is probably the most consequential political issue of the 21st century. While the world as we know it is increasingly threatened, political action to deal with climate change has been slow and, as yet, far from sufficient. The climate movement continues to struggle and but is faced with numerous challenges, recently including the Covid-19 pandemic. This joint session welcomes research on climate mobilizations not only in Europe and the Global North, but also in the Global South. Priority is given to contributions that address broader issues of relevance to the climate movement as a whole, including conditions affecting mobilization and movement outcomes, movement strategizing as well as fundamental challenges common to climate mobilizations over the world.

Joint session with RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives and RN21 Quantitative Methods

In the last decades, quantitative approaches have been sometimes criticized for their relative inability to document in-depth family research targeting the diversity of families and intimate lives. In this context, scholars in Europe worked on the development of quantitative instruments drawing for instance from the Eliasean configurational perspective (e.g., network data, life history calendar, and sequence data). Such instruments are increasingly used in survey data collection. The goal of the session is to identify and/or to discuss novel quantitative research methods and techniques aiming at better capturing emerging or less visible patterns of family arrangements. The session is particularly interested in advances in survey studies on the topic of family research.

Joint session with RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives and RN22 Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty

The Covid-19 pandemic and related constructions of risks have been spreading rapidly across the world in the past year. As a 'super-spreading' process, this pandemic and an array of government policies have had important effects on social life. In many national contexts people have been limited to their family homes in lockdown situations, resulting in spending much more time with their close relatives in the household. At the same time, working from home, home-schooling and limited interactions with persons outside of the household have posed new and distinctive challenges to different family members. The aim of this session is to consider and analyse the positive and negative impacts of the risks and uncertainties which have emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in terms of how policies interact with family life.

Joint session with RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives and RN33 Women’s and Gender Studies

The personal, private, and familial relations have been, and continue to be encroached by powerful, inflexible institutions such as the workplace, or by the relentless forces of commodification that now operates on a global scale. The aim of the session is to discuss the meanings of interrelation between care, housework and work outside the household, the adaption of the labor market to the needs of female workers and the willingness of male partners to take up a more equitable share of childcare and household production. The key problematic question is how to secure for the future a stable social equilibrium between welfare and family?

Joint session with RN15 Global, transnational and cosmopolitan sociology and RN28 Society and Sports

Joint session with RN15 Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology and RN34 Sociology of Religion

Joint session with RN15 Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology and RN37 Urban Sociology

Joint session with RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness and RN22 Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty

There is a well-established interdisciplinary literature on the role of trust in mediating the effectiveness of risk communication messages and risk governance more widely. Whereas some have claimed that public health and other risk governance regimes must now function in a ‘post-trust’ society, others have suggested that we have seen a change in the nature of trust – from blind to more critical – rather than a decline in trust per se. Recent debates on low vaccination rates among particular groups within national contexts, alongside differing outcomes between countries with similar approaches to national Corona virus containment, have highlighted the importance of (dis)trust dynamics for public health risk prevention. In this session we welcome distinctively sociological contributions to the existing body of work. Submissions may be based on empirical research, theoretical studies, or ideally a combination of the two.

Joint session with RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness and RN26 Sociology of Social Policy and Social Welfare

CSOs have been operating under the powerful forces of marketization and state co-optation in many European societies today. In recent years, while the contribution of civil society organizations (CSOs) and of the so-called ‘third sector’ to welfare systems has been recognized and at times promoted through legal, administrative and financial means, the implications of this trend for the very nature of the CSOs and their roles in welfare systems are yet to be sufficiently explored. The purpose of this session is to explore how far this process has gone in various European countries and, consequently, what role the CSOs are playing in changing the nature of the future European welfare systems themselves. The session aims to provide a platform to discuss questions including but not limited to the following: Is the traditional clear-cut separation of market-based, state-based and civil society/third sector-based social service-units still valid? Or the notion of hybridization should now be applied in the changing historical configuration of markets, welfare states and civil society? How does this new trend affect the advocacy roles of CSOs? Theoretical and empirical contributions are welcomed.

Joint session with RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness and RN28 Society and Sports

This session will focus on the many social factors that influence sports participation and physical activity. Critical attention will be applied to the promotion of health through sports and physical activities with consideration given to the complex social relations at play and the appropriateness and effectiveness of this strategy.

Joint session with RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness and RN32 Political Sociology

The Covid-19 outbreak impacts all aspects of societies. The emergency policies adopted by European states significantly affected daily life, particularly during 'lockdown' phases but also well beyond. National level political responses to the pandemic varied greatly across European countries, both in terms of the different types of emergency measures adopted and their degree of enforcement. Did this imply a renewed central role for the State and its policies in the neoliberal era? Degrees of centralization/decentralization among the policies adopted also varied greatly according to various types of governance; this is the case for differing levels of importance assigned to health policies (at both the primary and secondary care levels) and with measures adopted in other sectors beyond the immediate scope of the health system (economic and fiscal measures, travel restrictions, school closures, etc.). In addition, the crisis situation shed light on different forms of the politicization of science and medicine, as made evident, for example, in street protests against the use of face masks and lockdowns. The aim of this joint session is to explore the political and the medical implications of the emergency policies adopted by European countries both theoretically and empirically, focusing specifically on the types of governance pursued in relation to both healthcare and other societal subsystems.

Joint session with RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness and RN33 Women’s and Gender Studies

This joint session will explore the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of gender. We will invite the submission of papers which explore the interaction of biological and social vulnerability as they impact men and women. This will include vulnerability to mortality (which appears higher in men) and the unequal impacts of the pandemic on the life experiences (e.g in the family, caring, employment, intimate relationships). We will also be interested in how these impacts vary by factors such as age, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Joint session with RN16 Sociology of Health and Illness and RN35 Sociology of Migration

This joint session addresses the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on migrants and explores how pandemic and lockdown affect migrants’ lives. Because social distancing, hospital policies and settlements of emergency units all over the Europe affect European healthcare strategies, the intention is to highlight both migrant conditions such as difficulties in becoming part of local communities and deficits in European healthcare systems. Theoretical or empirical papers are welcome, with reference to: the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on migrants’ lives, heath and healthcare of forced migrants, migration and health inequalities, migration and care work, migration and health between vulnerability and victimization, EU health policies for migrants.

Joint session with RN18 Sociology of Communications and Media Research and RN23 Sexuality

Media are fundamentally important for the understanding of sexuality and the experience of sexual lives. At the same time, ways of thinking about sexuality, living sexuality, and activism around sexuality influence media formats and media communication. What is more, the digitalization of media, communication, and sexuality has generated a whole new set of questions and concerns as for example discussions of social media’s role in elections or in sexual exploitation. Simultaneously though, the mediatization of society and intimacy has also brought forth new liberating dimensions, new forms and possibilities of critique, and not least new possibilities to experience sexuality. This joint session wants to explore these and related dimensions through empirical, methodological, and theoretical discussions of the sexuality and mediatized society.

Joint session with RN18 Sociology of Communications and Media Research and RN34 Sociology of Religion

Joint session with RN20 Qualitative Methods and RN21 Quantitative Methods

Joint session with RN20 Qualitative Methods and RN28 Society and Sports

The exploration of embodied (sports) skills – skills that are partially non-verbalised – remains a challenge for sociological research. The aim of this joint session is to present and discuss qualitative research and the corresponding qualitative methods and methodologies that try to overcome the barriers and limitations related to the tacit nature of transmitted and acquired knowledge

Joint session with RN20 Qualitative Methods and RN29 Social Theory

The session will elaborate on the interrelation of qualitative research and social theory. It will ask which social theory can be derived from research practices. And, vice versa, it will study the assumptions in social theory that underpin qualitative methods.

Joint session with RN21 Quantitative Methods and RN28 Society and Sports

Joint session with RN21 Quantitative Methods and RN31 Ethnic Relations, Racism and Antisemitism

Joint session with RN23 Sexuality and RN28 Society and Sports

Being expressions of cultural embodiment, sexualities, on the one hand, and sports, on the other can be analyzed as a mirror of societies’ transformations. For this reason, the analysis of sports and sexuality can be a key to analyze changes in contemporary developments, processes, practices, representations, and subjectivities. In order to contribute to these streams of research and to open new horizons for further investigation, we invite papers aimed at both understanding the relationships between sports and sexualities and using them as a tool to analyse broader sociocultural transformations

Joint session with RN23 Sexuality and RN34 Sociology of Religion 

Joint session with RN27 Regional Network on Southern European Societies and RN30 Youth & Generation

European media and political attention towards refugees can be particularly identified from 2015 onwards, after visualizing the image of a dead child on an European beach, and after surpassing the 1 million’ peak of entries mainly through Italy and Greece — and, due to the asylum regulation, with a high number of asylum seekers remaining in these countries. The political contours of subsequent debates, particularly in Southern European countries, included national and European reception responsibilities and administrative frameworks, namely regarding unaccompanied refugee minors. The number of these minors’ asylum applications in the European Union has grown substantially between 2013 and 2015, year in which it surpassed 95 000 applications, thereafter, reducing to nearly 20 000 in 2018 and less than 14 000 in 2019 (EUROSTAT). Considering these last two years, nearly 90% of these minors were males, aged between 14 and 17 years old, over half came from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Guinea and Iraq, and nearly a half applied for asylum in Greece and Germany. In this context, we invite presentations that analyse reception, protection, and integration policies for unaccompanied minors in the Mediterranean area and especially in Southern Europe. It is particularly encouraged to reflect on how these policies and correlated practices influence the experiences of youth, and how they may reflect specific traits related to the social construction of childhood, youth, and asylum.

Joint session with RN27 Regional Network Southern European Societies and RN37 Urban Sociology

Southern European cities, in the present pandemic and in previous crisis contexts, have seen the aggravation of the number of cases and conditions in which homeless people live. The lockdown particularly affected people without home and diminished the response from related social services (shelters, food support, social work). The higher vulnerability of homeless people in this situation constitutes a big challenge for Southern European cities, and in many of them important emergency responses arose not only from public entities (like pandemic-related temporary accommodation) but also from community-level groups and self-organized solidarity networks (relieving, for example, food needs that stopped being addressed by usual social service providers). On the other hand, already existing “punitive” political approaches to homelessness combined with stricter/blinder readings of “Covid-safe” street avoidance led to homeless people being blamed and fined for staying in the street, and previous highly precarious life conditions (particularly in concentrated spaces and in situations of socioeconomic and citizenship deprivation) quickly gave rise to new highly critical conditions of homelessness (as in the case of the thousands of people that were in Lesbos’ Moria refugee camp before the devastating fires). Beyond the current context, for many decades homelessness situations have received mainly charity-assisting responses, lacking a deeper public answer that was replaced by (often unregulated) private social services. In this session we welcome presentations that put these issues into perspective, offering insights on policies and approaches focusing on the different dimensions of urban homelessness in Southern Europe, namely in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Joint session with RN33 Women’s and Gender Studies and RN35 Sociology of Migration

Joint session with RN35 Sociology of Migration and RN37 Urban Sociology