BSA Virtual Annual Conference 2022: Building Equality and Justice Now
Wednesday 20 – Friday 22 April 2022, online (UK)
The BSA Virtual Annual Conference 2022 will take place from 20-22 April 2022 and the theme is Building Equality and Justice Now. A year in which the pandemic tightened its grip in so many parts of the world, the extent of extreme global inequality in its impact on Covid-19 mortality and vaccine inequity was thrown into sharp relief in 2021. Domestically as well as globally the long-term social, economic and political effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are becoming increasingly apparent – through worsening health outcomes for marginalised populations, deepening poverty and economic precarity, or the entrenchment of political and state corruption for financial gain.
Keynote Speakers
- Pei-Chia Lan
- Nasar Meer
- Sociology under Threat Keynote Panel (speakers to be confirmed)
Alongside the burgeoning climate crisis, increasing food insecurity, and ongoing global violence, conflict and state suppression, we ask a seminal question: how do we work towards building global equality and justice – practically and productively – in the here and now?
Sociology is, and should be, a global and historically-informed discipline rooted in a desire to understand, to explore, and to (self-)critique. Despite our myriad sub-disciplinary foci, we as sociologists are all fundamentally interested in routes to genuine, sustainable social progress, not only for wider society but at ‘home’.
Within our higher education institutions, social justice has been at the forefront of scholar-activism in multiple challenges. Our members have been working on exposing the colonial legacies of our discipline, lobbying against the ongoing injustices meted out to colleagues in an increasingly neo-liberalised sector, and speaking out against the maligning of academics who speak to the systemic nature of racial oppression. They have also been questioning other dynamics of marginalisation linked to class, gender, trans, sexuality and disability that interconnect with these legacies and work together to secure privilege. It is here where the very future of our discipline is at stake, and the commitment and solidarity of our academic community to equality and justice most apparent.
Building justice and equality is a multilevel project, and entails employing the sociological imagination to link local struggles to wider issues of domestic and global inequality, and to further orient our focus to dialogue with communities and wider publics. It thus requires us to think about what ‘public sociology’ means in the present time, particularly in a predominantly online space.
Our objective for this conference is to collectively think along the themes of ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, theoretically, practically, inter/transdisciplinarily, and critically, within our substantive areas of interest and action. Papers, as last year, need not address Covid-19 directly.
Find out more information and book you place here: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/bsa-annual-conference-2022-building-equality-and-justice-now/