CALL FOR PAPERS
2009 ANNUAL MEETING: SAN FRANCISCO, CA, AUGUST 9-11
The 2009 annual meeting of the SSSI will be held in San Francisco. There will be an opening reception on the evening of August 9th, followed by two days of sessions on August 10th and 11th. Below, please find a list of session organizers and their proposed topics. The deadline for submission of paper proposals is April 15th, 2009. However, participants are encouraged to submit proposals at their earliest convenience to assist with our planning. Please direct your paper proposal to the appropriate session chair. General inquiries may be directed to this year’s Program Chair, Michael Coyle: mjcoyle@csuchico.edu
Please recognize the following format in your submissions:
Full Name
Email address
University Affiliation
Address (University or Residence)
Telephone numbers
Faculty Title/Graduate Student/Other Title
Title for your paper
Abstract (300 word limit)
Submission Deadline: April 15th, 2009
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Proposed Sessions
Digital Media, Culture and Interaction: from Youtube to World of Warcraft and Beyond
Patrick Williams
subcultures@gmail.com
Digital media scholarship is extending beyond the first generation of sociological studies of internet culture. Sociologists, social psychologists, communication scholars and others are now investigating "Web 2.0," massively multiplayer online games, portable digital technologies, and other new-media. This session is intended to showcase empirical and theoretical work on recent digital technologies and their use, as well as innovative work on now-classic digital media such as the internet. Studies of social networking, user-generated culture, roles, identity, selfhood, and other interactional dimensions of digital media are welcome.
Symbolic Interaction Theory and Qualitative Research in Second Life
Simon Gottschalk
karma@unlv.nevada.edu
As the most popular and multifaceted virtual space, Second Life presents us with unique opportunities to revisit symbolic interactionist thought and to radically transform the conduct of qualitative research. For this session, we are particularly interested in (a) theoretical papers that explore the fate of symbolic interactionist concepts and models in Second Life, and (b) papers presenting findings of qualitative research conducted in Second Life, and which contribute both qualitative methodology and symbolic interaction theory.
Studies of Tolerance and Conformity
Alex Dennis
A.Dennis@salford.ac.uk
If some sociologists are right, our world is increasingly monitored, homogeneous and intolerant of difference. Others argue that 'mainstream' culture has dissolved and society is now made up exclusively of 'alternative' subcultures. Is either of these positions true or useful? We are seeking theoretical presentations in the pragmatist and interactionist traditions that might address these issues, but more importantly studies of groups and activities that could provide an insight into how social rules and norms are applied, in particular domains, and if that application has changed over time.
Interpreting Community
Scott Grills
grills@brandonu.ca
Papers are invited that attend to notions of community within the extended interpretive traditions. Of particular interest are papers that attend to the development of the concept of community, or examine community in relation to notions of “urban,” “rural,” “agriculture” and “environment.”
Studies in Deviant Behavior
Leslie Wasson
lesliewasson@usa.net
This session examines deviance in a community context. Papers that attend to the social processes that accompany the accomplishment of deviance (e.g., the designation of deviance, sub-cultural deviance, solitary deviance, careers in deviance and the regulation of deviance) are particularly welcome.
Gender at Play
Leon Anderson
andersoe@ohio.edu
In contemporary society leisure activities offer an enormous variety of different sites for expressing and re-creating gender identities and relations. Ethnographic studies of leisure hold tremendous promise for expanding our understanding of diversity in gender identities and relations. The “Gender at Play” session is intended to highlight ethnographies at the cutting edge of gender studies. What are some of the (many) gender identities with which we play? How does gender at play reproduce and/or transgress hegemonic gender regimes? How does it differ across race, class, and age groups? Who are we—and others—as gendered actors when we play? And who might we become?
Identity Work
Jennifer Dunn
jldunn@siu.edu
"Identity Work" is a term first used by Snow and Anderson in 1987 to describe the kind of talk they heard homeless people using to "salvage" selves in a society disinclined to grant them personhood, a Goffmanian form of "identity management" in response to stigma. This term can also encompass the employment of "aligning activities" (e.g., accounts and vocabularies of motive), as deviance scholars have shown. We can extend the term more broadly though, in that it offers conceptual leverage for understanding what happens in social movements when collective identities, as well as individual identities, are at stake. And, the term could likely be used appropriately to capture what Holstein and Miller have called "social problems work," in which actors seek to claim and attribute identities consistent with typifications of harm and victimization as part of determining eligibility for services or sympathy. What each of these levels of social construction of identity have in common is that the work takes place in situations of potential or actual identity contestation. Theoretical papers that develop or critique the concept and/or empirical papers that illuminate these kinds of processes are encouraged
Negotiating Identity: Emotions and Trauma
Lori Holyfield
lholyfie@uark.edu
This session seeks papers or research-in-progress reports that apply symbolic interactionist concepts to the social construction of self as informed by trauma related experiences, broadly defined. Discourse and narrative framing of experienced trauma that influence identities may include collective events such as natural disasters and war or individually experienced events such as violence, mental illness, or disease. Examinations of disruption to self, experienced emotions, identity narratives and or discourse that inform the process of self construction post-trauma are invited.
Animals in the Workplace
Arnold Arluke
profarluke@aol.com
Although non-human animals have long been a common, if not essential, feature in the human workplace, sociologists have only recently started to explore the complicated nature and significance of their interaction with humans in various occupational and professional settings. Regardless of the type of occupation or the role of animals in it, interactionists have identified two broad themes to characterize human-animal relations in the workplace. On the one hand, some interactionists have described the ability and interest of humans in these settings to define non-human animals in multiple ways, each of which carries very different consequences for how animals are viewed and treated. They may be treated as companions and best friends, as with service animals, or regarded as little more than objects, as with lab animals. On the other hand, interactionists have also suggested the reverse; namely, that the presence of non-human animals in the workplace can influence how workers think of themselves and are regarded by others.
Rembering Leonard Schatzman
Marvin T. Prosono
mprosono@missouristate.edu
In late November of 2008, Dr. Leonard Schatzman, one of the seminal figures in the development of symbolic interaction, passed away in San Francisco. Dr. Schatzman was a colleague and close personal friend of Anselm Strauss at the University of California, San Francisco. This session is organized to celebrate the memory and work of Leonard Schatzman, a tireless professional who dedicated himself to his students and his Pragmatist vision.
Symbolic Interaction and Emotions
Martha Copp
coppm@etsu.edu
Paper submissions are welcomed that analyze emotions from an interactionist perspective, explore the contributions of symbolic interactionist theory to the sociology of emotions (or vice versa), examine the role of emotions in everyday interactions, share findings from ethnographic studies of emotions, promote new methodologies for researching emotions in social life, or analyze the social consequences of emotional experiences.
Disabilities and Interactionism
Carol Brooks Gardner
cgardne@sbcglobal.net
This session builds on a strong interactionist tradition, suggested by work such as Goffman's Stigma and Asylums, of examining the situation of people with various disabilities and those who interact with them in private and in public: people who are Deaf, Little People, people who are low-vision or blind; people who have had diagnoses of mental illness, invisible or visible disabilities, or mental retardation; people who have disabilities requiring the use of assistive devices like wheelchairs. The session welcomes all qualitative work describing and theorizing about this population.
Music and Interaction
Rob Gardner
rgardne@linfield.edu
Music is a vital form of meaning making in contemporary society. Building upon the already rich tradition of studying music as symbolic interaction (e.g., Kotarba and Vannini 2009) this panel will feature qualitative studies of music that follow Tia DeNora’s (2003) broad call to explore and theorize the formative roles of music and music practices in shaping individuals and societies. This session welcomes innovative qualitative and ethnographic approaches to the study of music and music subcultures, especially those engaging issues of identity, community, or technology.
Mass Media and Propaganda
David Altheide
David.Altheide@asu.edu
Papers are welcome that examine media logic and all aspects of the mass media and information construction, manipulation, uses and consequences, including the new forms of propaganda involving product placement, rhetorical shifting and framing (e.g., “tax relief”), as well as counter-propaganda strategies, (e.g., web blogs, Daily Show, Colbert Report, etc.).
Language and Symbolic Interaction
Michael J. Coyle
mjcoyle@sbcglobal.net
Sociologists and others interested in the broader study of justice have long argued for the importance of language, rhetoric, and the study of discourse as tools for constructing, deconstructing and imagining justice. Such scholars have frequently argued that justice meanings are in large part built, maintained and changed by the language labor of moral entrepreneurs and by the habits of language they produce. This session invites papers that consider language as an aspect of past and current research, or papers that consider language as a primary study. In part, this session is a call for interactionists to publicly consider language in the context of their research: what is the language encountered? Who is making what language labor acts (who’s defining the terms used? who’s doing what discourse control?)? What habits of language are present, dominant or missing (what’s normative language? what’s cliché language? what’s deviant language?)? What do all these demonstrate about produced realities, ideologies, hegemonies, or suppressed, colonized and subjugated others? When the language is denaturalized, what can be seen about the construction of everyday meanings in what you study?
Urban Imagery and the Future of Cities
Mark Hutter
Hutter@rowan.edu
This session seeks papers that address the topic of urban imagery and its impact on policies that affect the future of cities. Papers would pick-up on the theme articulated by Robert Park that the city is a "state of mind," and latter by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City and Anselm Strauss, that given objects of the city become symbolically representative of the city as a whole. Thus the New York skyline and the French Quarter of New Orleans have become identification symbols of their respective cities and serve as a source of personal identification for the inhabitants. Going beyond Park, Lynch, and Strauss, the session seeks papers that recognize that the image of the city is not based solely on the ease of perceptual readings of the city, but influenced by underlying political, economic, and social factors. Further, these underlying factors play a role in shaping the future of cities. For example, the popular image of New Orleans that sees that city solely in terms of the French Quarter and other tourist sites has become a significant contributory factor in political and economic decisions that are being made regarding the future of that city. Similarly political and economic decisions were made with respect to Beijing, China based in part on the image that it tried to project in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics.
Empirical Studies
John Johnson
jjustice@asu.edu
This session is devoted to empirical papers which do not readily fit into other more specialized sessions.
New Developments in SI Theory
Lonnie Athens
athenslo@shu.edu
This session is devoted to papers which investigate SI theory. Papers may revisit classical SI theory in a novel way, explore new SI theoretical applications, or make the case for new developments in SI theory.
Ethnographic Research on Leisure
Bob Stebbins
stebbins@ucalgary.ca
Leisure activities vary enormously, running from the casual (e.g., strolling in a park, viewing entertainment television, dabbling on a musical instrument) to the serious (e.g., amateur golf, hobbyist collecting, skilled volunteering) including, outside this rough scale, the activities that constitute leisure projects (e.g., volunteering at an arts festival, building a home patio, helping with a political campaign). All complex leisure – the serious activities and the more involved projects – warrant careful ethnographic scrutiny. Such research is, however, rather uncommon. Hence the goals of this session are to encourage ethnographic research in this area and offer an outlet for reporting it.
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We look forward to a lively set of meetings that represent the diversity of perspectives and research that is to be found within our tradition.
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While there are no registration fees for the annual meetings, it is expected that all presenters (or at least one of the co-authors of multiple authored papers) will be members of SSSI. Membership includes a year’s subscription to the journal Symbolic Interaction and the “SSSI Notes” Newsletter.
The cost of membership varies:
* Student memberships: $28 US Dollars
* Other individual memberships are proportional to income, as follows:
If your income is,
Under $30,000: $35.00 US Dollars
$30,000 to 39,999: $40.00
$40,000 to 54,999: $45.00
$55,000 to 69,999: $50.00
Over $70,000: $55.00
You may join SSSI (and obtain the journal Symbolic Interaction) by contacting the University of California Press at: http://ucpressjournals.com/journalJoin.asp?j=si
