EMERGING FORMS OF SOCIALITY
Second International Graduate Conference in Frankfurt/Main
30 September – 2 October, 2010
Call for Papers
At present, diagnoses about the erosion of the foundations of sociality are booming. They
culminate in the assumption that we are faced with a fundamental crisis of social
institutions. Evidence for this crisis can be found in phenomena such as an increasing
individualization, economization and naturalization of life and ways of life; the
fragmentation of statehood; the dissemination of cyber and reproductive technologies; the
decay of the heterosexual nuclear family; the blurring of traditional gender roles; and the
questioning of cultural self-conceptions as a result of migration. However, it seems that it is
precisely when Eurocentric, patriarchal and heteronormative, and bourgeois-capitalistic
epistemologies and social orders are challenged that new forms of subjectivity, community,
and society emerge. In order to make these coming forms of sociality visible and
perceptible, new paradigms of social research are called for. The graduate conference
“Emerging Forms of Sociality” will seek to explore understandings of what sociality is,
what it was and what it could be in the future. Sociality will be examined from a diverse
range of disciplinary approaches and critical perspectives. The analysis and reconstruction
of emerging social forms not only contains possibilities for actualizing the basic ideas of
critical theory – this undertaking also opens new paths of emancipatory practice and an
alternative understanding of justice and solidarity through a novel take on the politics of
difference and inequality. Pivotal to this project are both normative perspectives and various
methods of social research.
Contributions may include – but need not be limited to – the following themes:
__What is sociality? Social ontology or historical ontology of the social, society and
community, equality and difference
__Ways of life: how can ways of life, social contexts, cultural milieus, political associations
be evaluated, criticized, created and initiated, represented or transformed? Socratic
maieutics, Aristotelian virtue, Humeian sentiments, Foucauldian aesthetics of existence
__Part of – aside from – against it: scenes, milieus, subcultures, religions, queer,
polyamory, feminisms, fundamentalisms, autonomy of migration, diasporas, hybridity, new
social movements, dandies and bohemians, dadaists and situationists, punks and hippies
__Theories of life, nature and technology: bare life, human-animal, naturalization of the
social, and socialization of nature, cyborgs/virtuality/simulation, contagion, biocapitalism,
global epidemics, ecology
__Perspectives and diagnoses: network society, society of control, society of risk, death of
the social, imagined communities, social imaginaries, actor-network-theory, assemblage
theory, theory of recognition
__Acclamation, reclamation and accumulation of capital: neoliberalism in the aftermath
of the financial crisis, casualization of precarious labour, feminization of work, global
market, immaterial and affective work, sex work, project based polis, new commons, real
emerging socialisms
__Forms of relationships: elective affinities, relationships, friendships, narcissism, self-
culture, affective liaisons, intimacy, privacy, sex-love-gender, contract-gift-exchange,
relationship building, care, body, psyche, feelings, emotions, economy of desire, crisis of
masculinity, web 2.0
__Transformation of the political: fragmentation of state sovereignty, biopolitics, state of
emergency, camps, end of nation state, transnational agencies, transnational juridification,
transnational publics, legal pluralism, cosmopolitanism beyond male, white, bourgeois
hegemony
__Dis/orientation – times and spaces of sociality: genealogies, spectres of the past and
generations of the future, post-imperialist geographies, urban/rural, North/South, postcolony,
transversality, globality, social space and spatialization of the social
Submission Information
This call for papers addresses graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty members.
Please submit abstracts of a maximum of 300 words to the following e-mail address:
info@graduateconferencefrankfurt.de We explicitly invite you to also submit work-in-
progress or cooperative works. The deadline for submission is 15 April 2010. Candidates
will be informed by 31 May 2010 whether their paper has been accepted for presentation.
For groups of graduates that apply from countries out of West Europe or North America we
can make a request for travel compensation.
Papers will be selected through a blind review process. Therefore, please do not include
your name or other references to the author on abstracts and make sure to clearly state the
title of your proposal in the email. Attention will be paid that at least 50% of the
presentations will be assigned to women. Conference languages will be German and
English, abstracts can be submitted in either language. Presentations at the conference
should not be longer than twenty minutes and will be followed by discussion.
Keynote Speakers
Keynote speakers are Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt-University, Berlin) and Sasha Roseneil
(Birkbeck College London) and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (University of California,
Berkeley).
Contact
For further information see: www.graduateconferencefrankfurt.de