Call for Papers 2025

REALITY LOST? HOW TO RECAPTURE AN INCREASINGLY ELUSIVE WORLD
Although many societies today still share many features and are developing in similar directions, it is indisputable that patterns of social change in societies have been taking hold that are diverging in several different regards and along trajectories that would have been unimaginable and inconceivable during the decades following the end of World War II.  The common denominator that used to inform and coordinate actions, decisions, strategies, and public policies, as well as efforts to theorize modern societies, across actors, scholars, and decision-makers in many countries, such a common denominator no longer exists.  Along with this denominator, what also has been disappearing is a commitment to peace as the necessary precondition for rational and reasonable goals and concurrent approaches to pursuing them.
Presenters are encouraged to explicitly consider, acknowledge, and explicate the social, cultural, political, or national contexts of their theoretical endeavors and commitments, and to convey to audiences how "context" may promote, inhibit, or necessitate the formulation and pursuit of specific theoretical challenges, projects, and agendas.  Have theorists been been asking the most important questions?  Should we continue to try to answer established questions, or instead turn our attention to novel questions and concerns that out to inform our work, potentially in innovative and collaborative forms?
Presenters may advocate theoretical interventions in the form of concepts or tools that promise to enhance the ability of scholars in the social sciences and humanities be more successful and effective at capturing changing social, culture, or political forms, institutions, or processes, e.g., in order to be in a better position to reconstruct how we arrived in present circumstances, to provide increasingly important and indispensable diagnoses of perplexing developments, and to extrapolate from recent trends into likely futures, especially if those threaten to be disheartening or disturbing.