Call for Papers: Narrating the Social

The Sociology Students Association of the CUNY Graduate Center invites paper proposals from graduate students for the interdisciplinary conference:

 

Narrating the Social

Third Annual Graduate Student Conference

Friday, February 17th, 2012

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

The task of sociology is entirely bound with a project of narrative. Most sociologists tell stories that are based on the tales of others, but we are ensconced in and restrained by the limits of discourse. Indeed, the question of how sociology performs its role as narrator and narrative is complicated by a series of basic questions about the relationship between a human author, the objects of study, the ecology of environment, the web of language, the ocular gaze and the sonic register.

The question of narrative is one that troubles an easy set of assumptions as to sociologists’ capacities to reckon with any of these relationships. Relationships that are further complicated by the (controversial) assumption of the direct link from empirical to sociological knowledge, when the application of surveys, interviews, observation, and interpretation leads to inferences about the characteristics as well the construction of social reality. And yet narrative appears to be a necessary tool for making sense of the social.

The question, then, is of an encounter between narrative and method. On the one hand, it is through narrative that we are able to approach the world around us – the sociologist reads the social. On the other, we weave our quantitative, qualitative, positive and interpretative stories into webs of meaning that in their own right produce a world – the sociologist-author writes the social.

This conference will explore: the ways in which we understand our social through narrative, the way in which our narrative produces a specific dynamic of the social to be observed, and the ways that a discipline’s interpretation of narrative reconstructs the social.

• What kinds of narratives and mediums characterize today’s social?
• Are humans necessarily privileged in our narratives?
• What privileges a “voice”?
• What is the relationship between subject-author and sociologist-author?
• What is the relationship between narrative and knowledge, or fact?
• How does narrative produce, as much as illuminate, relationships between agency and structure?
• What objects complicate our narrative presumption of subjects and agency?
• What stories can we tell that illuminate a social, and what possibilities are foreclosed through this illumination?
• How has technology reshaped our understanding of narrative and what technologies might we bring to bear to understand it?
• What new methodological possibilities are opened through a reconsideration of the narrative?
• What methods must be rethought?

In addition to these questions, we welcome proposals addressing diverse sociological topics and employing a variety of methodologies from all disciplines.

Please submit an extended abstract of 250 words by December 15th. Applicants will be notified of final decisions for participation by December 31, 2011.

Accepted and presented papers may also be submitted for review by Formations, the SSA-sponsored multidisciplinary graduate student journal following the conference.

This event is free and open to the public