Session Organizer: Emily Erikson (Yale University), email: emily.erikson@yale.edu
Relational sociology provides a large-scale theoretical framework for the social sciences. This panel is will address the following types of questions: How do you practice a relational sociology? Are some methods inherently more relational? What is the pay-off to using relational concepts, theory, or methods in empirical research -- particularly relative to other theoretically driven research programs? What makes research relational?
Open Paper Session 2: Abduction and the Craft of Theorizing
Session Organizer: Iddo Tavory (New York University), email: iddo.tavory@nyu.edu
The past few years have seen increasing attention to early pragmatism, and a resurgent interest in abduction: the imaginative recasting of the world in terms of surprising observations. We invite papers that develop or critically assess this move, linking it to explanation, causality, and the craft of theorizing.
Open Paper Session 3: Theorizing Perception
Session Organizers: Joseph Klett (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Terence McDonnell (University of Notre Dame), email: jklett@ucsc.edu
This session welcomes research that builds theory for the sociological study of sense perception. Cognition and materiality are hot topics in theory these days. New research on the sociology of perception and sensory experience can bring these important theoretical contributions into conversation. To further close this gap, this panel seeks papers that push forward sociological theorizing on perception, including papers that consider perception beyond the visual to hearing, taste, smell, and touch. How are the senses made and remade in everyday life? What does perception "do" to interaction and interpretation? And how might we test these theories using qualitative methods? We encourage authors to submit papers that address the social production and reproduction of perception, the roles of perception in interaction, and/or the methods which researchers might use to study perception. We welcome a broad range of perspectives including but not limited to theories of culture, cognition, embodiment, and practice. Of particular interest are papers that contribute to material-semiotic or hermeneutic analysis, papers that critically engage affordance theory/ecological psychology and/or cognitive science, and papers that address perception at work in collective action.
Theory Section Refereed Roundtables
Session Organizer: Achim Edelmann (University of Bern), email: achim.edelmann@soz.unibe.ch