Your Perspectives Editors know you experience inevitable sadness when you get to the end of another amazing issue of Perspectives. So, to tide you over until the Spring 2016 issue, please enjoy these eCards for Social Theorists to meet all your secular commercialized festive occasions this Winter. 

Read on to see the great newly published books, articles, and other significant events from the members of the section.

Seattle, Washington, August 19, 2016
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 22, 2016
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We invite submissions of extended abstracts for the 10th Junior Theorists Symposium (JTS), to be held in Seattle, WA on August 19th, 2016, the day before the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The JTS is a one-day conference featuring the work of up-and-coming sociologists, affiliated with the Theory Section of the ASA. Since 2005, the conference has brought together early career-stage sociologists who engage in theoretical work, broadly defined.

​We are pleased to announce that Mounira Charrad (UT Austin), Ann Mische (Notre Dame), and Tukufu Zuberi (UPenn) will serve as discussants for this year's symposium. In addition, we are pleased to announce an after-panel on the relationship between theory and method featuring Christopher Bail (Duke), Tey Meadow (Harvard), Ashley Mears (Boston University), and Frederick Wherry (Yale).   
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Open Paper Session 1: Directions in Relational Sociology: Theory, Method and Practice
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?
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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

This post contains information about how to submit for the prizes of the Theory Section, including the Theory Prize (Book in 2016), the Junior Theorist Award, the The Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper, and Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting.