International Conference: Social Pathologies: Developmental and Processual Perspectives on Contemporary Malaises
Wednesday 2 – Saturday 5 December 2026, Cork, Ireland
This in-person conference is a joint endeavour between University College Cork, the Norbert Elias Foundation, RC56 Historical Sociology of the International Sociological Association, and the Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization Research Network.
The conference will address the historical dynamics of social pathologies. It is concerned with disease in a broad sense, of disorders of development, function and structure, expressed in symptoms that indicate an underlying condition. These result in a lack of ease, or pathos – suffering. History is marked by concrete socially driven diseases, from plagues, to social epidemics of chronic conditions, addiction and mental health problems. There are also the discontents of civilisation –disorders such as melancholy, anxiety and insatiability that seem to be baked into social development. Social pathology is not limited narrowly to health and well-being, but rather to a wider spectrum of social problems such as violence, mass incarceration, injustice, exclusion, and failures to provide for people’s needs, that are systemic and that produce social suffering. While social pathologies can be seen as concrete, where the suffering involved is all too real, its scale all too apparent, and the causal links to historically shaped political and social organisation all too clear, they can also be primarily symbolic. The social problems that are deemed pathological, are frequently political constructions, public dramas, or scapegoating exercises where behaviours and people once considered unremarkable become pathologised as sick, infectious, subversive, and to be corrected. Thus, civilising offensives, projects of normalisation, the construction of folk devils and the secondary harms caused by these processes, are an equal concern of the conference.
Crucially, the goal is to challenge a-social and a-historical biomedical and psychological perspectives that view conditions and syndromes as individual cases, reducing issues to the body, psyche or the self, conceptualised in disconnected professional discourses, with individual treatments and forms of self-help. Rather, they are seen as rooted in collectively experienced conditions of historical development and social transformation, and their shape can only be adequately drawn through delineating their origins and processual nature.
You can pose questions and enquiries about the conference to: information@socialpathologies2026.com
Conference Organising Committee
- Dr John O’Brien, University College Cork
- Dr Gema Kloppe-Santamaria, University College Cork
- Professor Jason Hughes, University of Leicester
- Dr. Paddy Dolan, Technological University Dublin
- Dr. Domonkos Sik, Eötvös Loránd University
- Professor Kieran Keohane, University College Cork
- Professor Marta Bucholc, University of Warsaw
- Dr. Lucy Brown, Charles University Prague
- Prof Robert Van Krieken, University of Sydney
- Dr. John Connolly, Dublin City University
- Prof Stephen Mennell, University College Dublin
Find more information here: https://socialpathologies2026comdomainonly.wpcomstaging.com/
This event will be held at University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.