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Organizing Committee
Siamak
Movahedi, Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Professor of Sociology, University
of Massachusetts Boston; Professor of Psychoanalysis and the director of
the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, Boston Graduate
School of Psychoanalysis.
Samuel Binkley,
Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Sociology, Emerson College
Neal Bruss, Ph.D. Associate
Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston
Patricia Clough,
Ph.D. Professor of Sociology and Women Studies, CUNY
Graduate Center
Jorge Capetillo,
Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts Boston
Lewis Kirshner, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School;
Faculty Boston Psychoanalytic Institute
Glenn Jacobs, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts Boston
Murray Schwartz,
Ph.D. Professor of Psychoanalysis and Literature, Emerson
College; Scholar Member, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute
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This
year’s conference in April 7th & 8th of 2010 at the University of
Massachusetts Boston will explore the relationship between psychoanalysis
and critical social theory. From its very beginning Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis
has walked the border as a kind of fugitive discipline in academia yet one
multifarious in its influence on the mainstream. Surely the welter of
hostile and critical responses accompanying its trajectory in the history
of ideas bears a kind of testimony to its rich intellectual
underpinning. In sociology it has had a creative influence on
critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, and others of
the Frankfurt School, and now has engaged feminist theorists, post-structuralists
and other sociologists interested in the way in which unconscious processes
figure in the construction of hierarchical social relations. Jacque Lacan’s
French reading of Freud comes particularly close to the sociological
imagination. His theory of the symbolic order and the linguistic precursors
of the unconscious have added additional dimensions to the discourse of
social theory. His notion of the decentered and alienated self rooted
in the intellectual culture of Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault find its corollaries in the writings
of sociologists and philosophers such as George Herbert Mead, Charles
Horton Cooley, and Erving Goffman. This year’s Social Theory Forum provides
an opportunity for a re-examination and discussion of these fertile
intellectual domains for a new cross-disciplinary pursuit of scholarship in
social theory. The conference organizers seek papers that employ rigorous
analyses and interpretations of the past and present of these intellectual
engagements that form the foundation of modern social theory.
Papers
in psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, queer theory, literary
criticism, social linguistics, conversational analysis, philosophy of mind,
etc. that engage and interrogate Freud or Lacan are all welcomed.
The
conference will feature both invited and submitted papers and
presentations. We welcome submissions
from psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic scholars, from scholars and graduate
students in humanities and social scientists, as well as from scholars in
allied disciplines. We ask that authors submit a one-page abstract as
email attachment (MS Word Format) to SocialTheo...@libraryofsocialscience.com
no later than February 9, 2010. Upon selection and notification of approval
by the organizing committee, submitters must send completed presentation
paper manuscripts (around 12-15 pages, preferably double-spaced in Times 12
typeface) by March 15, 2010. We are in the process of securing a
publishing venue for selected papers. As in prior years, the papers will be
peer-reviewed by anonymous referees for possible publication. Details will
be announced before the conference.
About
the Social Theory Forum
Department of
Sociology
University of
Massachusetts Boston
The
Social Theory Forum (STF) is an annual conference organized jointly by the
sociology, other departments, institutions, interested faculty and students
at University of Massachusetts Boston in order to creatively explore,
develop, promote, and publish cross-disciplinary social theory in a
critical framework. STF offers faculty and students of UMass Boston and
other area colleges and universities an interactive medium to discuss
various aspects of the way in which particular theoretical traditions can
be relevant to present everyday issues, as well as to the current state and
the future of social theory.
STF’s
goals are:
- To critically engage with and
evaluate classical and contemporary social theories in a cross-disciplinary
and comparative cross-cultural framework in order to develop new
integrative theoretical structures and practices;
- To foster individual and collective
self-reflexivity in exploring social theories in global and
world-historical contexts to aid people effectively address social
problems;
- To foster an interactive and
dialogical learning experience and research in theory within and
across faculty, students, and community divides on and off campus; and
- To foster exchange of ideas open to
constructive and integrative exploration of diverse and conflicting
viewpoints, modes of thinking, and world-views.
_______________________________________
Correspondence address
Attn.: Social Theory
Forum
Department of
Sociology
University of Massachusetts
Boston
100 Morrissey
Boulevard
Boston, MA 02125
www.umb.edu
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