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9th
Annual Conference
Sociological Imagination Group
Call for Abstracts, "Confronting Fundamental Social Problems," Sociological Imagination Group's 9th Annual Conference, Westin Copley Place Hotel, 10 Huntington Ave., Boston, July 31st and August 1st, 8 AM-7 PM. Everyone is invited.
Granting that we sociologists have unearthed serious problems in society, we generally have failed to take a next step of suggesting directions for solving them. Are we, then, hiding behind a mantra of value neutrality--that is no longer tenable among philosophers of social science, following Harold Kincaid's edited volume, Value-Free Science? (2007--while failing to take responsibility for confronting escalating world problems along with lesser social problems that affect us all? The website of the Sociological Imagination Group www.sociological-imagination.org contains material from our five published and in-press monographs that--following Mills' The Sociological Imagination--attempt to apply a broad approach to the scientific method to fundamental social problems. We believe that at this time in history we sociologists have no more than a small window of opportunity for coming up with directions for solving the problems that threaten all of us. Yet we also believe that a scientific method that follows the breadth of Mills' vision can in fact penetrate the complexity of our basic problems and yield directions for solutions.
If you wish to present a paper at our Boston conference, please send a one-page abstract--including some references--to Bernie Phillips at bernieflps@aol.com no later than March 30th, 2008. We should be able to respond by mid-April. Since we--Bernie Phillips and David Knottnerus--are co-editors of "Advancing the Sociological Imagination," a series with Paradigm Publishers, we will be looking to some of the papers as first steps toward developing books in our series. For those not wishing to present a paper this year, we would be delighted to see you at the conference. If you examine the outline on the website of our 2007 New York conference, you will note that we allowed substantial time for each paper, including discussion, and we will continue that practice. More than this, we believe that the Sociological Imagination Group is not just another specialized group but rather the beginning of a movement throughout the social sciences. We are moving toward integrating the bits and pieces of knowledge presently buried in our libraries--with the aid of a broad scientific method that systematizes Mills' vision of the sociological imagination--so as to provide a direction for confronting ever more effectively the problems that increasingly threaten the very existence of the human race. We are not only convinced that these problems are highly threatening, but also that it is we social scientists--more than any other group--who bear the greatest burden of responsibility for discovering their nature and measures for solving them ever more effectively. As a result, we are asking for your help.