CFP: New Social Pragmatism: Politics of Engagements, Conventions and (E)valuations

University of Helsinki, May 8-9, 2025

 

In a world increasingly torn apart by mistrust, polarization, and tensions between and within nations, local contexts and groups, it becomes pertinent to ask how societies are made possible. How to build commonality, solve conflicts and adjust different ways of relating and belonging to the world? How to create and maintain mutual understanding and build common ground without excluding or taming down differing voices? How to create, change, and maintain societies based on multiple modes of valuation and plural conceptions of the common good?

 

These questions open avenues for analysing key cultural and political trends in today’s societies including processes of politicization, participation, and marginalization. Understanding the processes in which common ground is found – or lost – requires an approach that is anchored in situations, chains of events, and processes. It also emphasizes the material world not only as an immobile context, but a dynamic, and mobilizable, part of people’s efforts to live together. 

 

The Centre for Sociology of Democracy (CSD) organizes the New Social Pragmatism Conference to bring together theoretical and empirical analyses that build on and develop pragmatist approaches on societal and political action. These approaches focus on practices, habits and patterns of action that build communities, societies and through those, our democracies.

 

Keynote speakers:

Rachel Brahy is University Lecturer at the University of Liège, Belgium. 

Her approach expands from her work on the socio-anthropology of experience and public spaces towards building further theoretical tools to address sensitive, often non-discursive experiences. Brahy draws from the pragmatist theorizing by Laurent Thévenot, Laura Centemeri, and others, and has recently addressed the concept of resonance by Hartmut Rosa and to discuss the questions of presence and enchantment.

 

Isaac Ariail Reed is Professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, US. He is a historical and cultural sociologist whose recent work has concentrated on power and transitions to modernity. He draws on Arendt and American pragmatism to theorize the questions of agency, signification, authority, delegation, and modernity. He is one the authors and editors of New Pragmatist Sociology (2022). 

 

We invite both theoretical and empirical presentation drawing from pragmatist, pragmatic, and cultural sociology. Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

 

• Research on political participation and social movements
• Theory development within pragmatist, neopragmatist and pragmatic sociology on how to build commonalities and solve conflicts
• Novel theoretical combinations
• Sociology of (e)valuation, and its potential and existing connections with neighbouring intellectual movements
• Urban questions and broader role of material environments 
• Commonalities between humans and nonhumans
• Theoretical and empirical approaches to environmental questions and activism

 

Submit your 200-word abstract by March 21, 2025 here: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/133731/lomakkeet.html

We also welcome panel suggestions.

 

We aim to have the notification of acceptance of papers by March 15th. Conference attendees will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation. Conference fee including lunches is 40 eur for PhD candidates and 60 eur for others. If you have any difficulties to cover these expenses, do not hesitate to contact us. Further information such as practical details will be updated in coming weeks.

 

Further information:

Professor Eeva Luhtakallio

Coordinator Jutta Juvenius

email addresses firstname.lastname (a) helsinki.fi

 

Conference is supported by Kone Foundation, Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities and University of Helsinki.