On Friday, 5 November 2010, the Sociology Students Association at the CUNY Graduate Center is hosting its second annual graduate student conference. We are currently soliciting abstracts for presentations from graduate students in all disciplines and schools.

• Call for Papers
• Submit an abstract

For this year’s workshop, we will build on the theme from last year when we discussed how to bridge the gap between activists and academics. This year, we will step back and rethink what that would mean. While implicitly rethinking what academia means, this year’s theme will be “What is Activism”?

How do we address the changing nature of activism and its relation to changing ideas of what a politics is or could be? What is the activism involved in a politics of refusal? Where can we find spaces for creativity and how can creativity be activism in itself? How can we be activists while rejecting mainstream political goals and thinking beyond the state? How do we resist the commodification of revolutionary paradigms that end up being reformist at best? As academics, what are the methodologies we can employ to answer these questions? What is an activist methodology, that perhaps goes beyond “representing” or “giving back” to the community?

Our distinguished participants include Patricia Clough, Valerie Francisco, Sarah Hanks, Demond Mullins, Jasbir Puar, Amit Rai, and Jerry Watts.

Professor Safri will tell us about her recent work with Jersey Shore Haitian and Latino community members who are in the midst of mapping the “solidarity economy” projects that are either already in existence or in the process of materializing. She argues that simultaneously theorizing and constituting a new object of policy and politics allows us to reconfigure the imaginary of economic transformation.

Professor Safri has been working in the areas of political economy, immigration, and subjectivity. She is a member of the Solidarity Economy Network and the Center for Popular Economics. Professor Safri is also associate editor of the Routledge journal Rethinking Marxism.

Update: Our flyer is now online.