Due to the continuing pandemic and the fragility of international relations,
we will be holding this year's conference in online form only.
June 9-11, 2022
NAVIGATING THE EMERGING NEW WORLD:
SOCIAL DYNAMICS BETWEEN HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIGITALIZED POWER
As human civilization and modern societies are undergoing rapid changes, orienting oneself is becoming ever more difficult, both as individuals in everyday life and as social theorists. Trying to make sense of increasingly confusing and disturbing conditions and processes that at an accelerating pace have been subverting established ideas and relied-upon notions about how to retain at least a modicum of control over our circumstances is becoming more and more difficult. Efforts to grasp the highly tense, contradictory, complex, and contingent social and societal dynamics that have been reconfiguring social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental realities at all levels are fraught with proliferating number of tangible and imagined pitfalls. In many ways, "facing facts" is becoming so challenging that growing segments of national and global populations are turning away from fear-inducing prospects. Indeed, many persons appear to be determined to ignore facets of an overwhelming world that are in conflict with "common sense" precepts and preferences. In this context, we will try to use the notion of human rights and the seeming digitalizing of everything existing as the foil for probing analyses and discussions.
Session Topics Include:
- Marxism, Classes, Populations
- Democracy and Digital Technology
- Frontiers of Political Theory
- Critical Theory Past and Present
- 2023: What Must Be Done?
- Democracy under Threat
- Human Rights
- The Reactionary Right/Political Violence/Authoritarianism
- Empirical Studies of Politics and Political Process
- Social Movements and Positive Change
- Artificial Intelligence, Technology, the Future
- The Ontology of the Social
- The Great Reset/Post Pandemic Society
Keynote Topics:
- Robert Antonio (University of Kansas): Capitalism, Climate, and the Earth System: A “Safe Operating Space” or Catastrophic “Hothouse Pathway”
- Adele Bianco (Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti Pescara): The Sixth Continent: Space Exploration and Exploitation and the Role of New Technologies
- Tony Smith (Iowa State University): The Role of (Quasi) Money in Socialism
- Stephen Turner (University of South Florida): Curation: The Digital World of Manipulated Experience