Dear All,

The below call for papers may be of interest to members.


Call for Papers

Empirical Investigation of Social Space II

The objective of this international conference is to bring together social scientists interested in
both traditional and modern methods for the construction of social space, in line with the
work of Pierre Bourdieu. This event follows the spirit of a conference organized by Henry
Rouanet (1931-2008), Brigitte Le Roux, and Jörg Blasius with Bourdieu’s participation, in
Cologne, Germany, in 1998.

The conference will take place at the University of Bonn, Germany, from
October 12th-14th, 2015

A dozen years after his passing, Pierre Bourdieu has emerged as the sole twentieth-century
sociologist who has entered the canon of social sciences. His impact is evidenced not only by
the fact that he is the most quoted sociologist of our times: his work is cited, deployed, and
elaborated across the disciplines that make up the social sciences and the humanities, as well
as in the arts and many professional disciplines (architecture, business, nursing, accounting
and forestry, for example). Scientists engage his central concepts, such as “capital”, “field”,
“social space”, “habitus” and “symbolic power”. They also challenge and extend his empirical
findings, for example those regarding the patterning of fields or the correspondences of
lifestyles and social classes.

A core methodological element of Bourdieu’s relationalism lies in geometric data analysis
(analyse des données), with its underlying philosophy that, as stated by the mathematician
Jean-Paul Benzécri, “the model should follow the data and not the reverse.”

The purpose of this conference is to explicate and extend Bourdieu’s relationalism in social
analysis by elaborating his core concepts and amplifying the methodological precepts and
techniques of their deployment. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which his
habitus/field theory might be extended. Themes of the conference include (but are not limited
to):

 Formal construction and empirical observation of habitus
 The formation, accumulation, differentiation of and conversion between different
forms of capital
 The theory and methodology for the construction of “social spaces”
 The relation between various “fields” and “the field of power”
 Mechanisms of production and deployment of symbolic capital
 Concepts of causality in geometric data analysis
 What benefits do modern variants of geometric data analysis have for a Bourdieusian
approach to social phenomena?
 Other methods for elaborating, extending and testing Bourdieu’s theories, such as
network analysis, content analysis, or discourse analysis; regression analysis, panel
analysis, latent class analysis in the framework of geometric data analysis.
 We also call for contributions regarding particular applications of Bourdieu’s
methodology to traditional and new areas of research, such as the analysis of
institutional, international and transnational fields, the workings of hybrid habitus, the
variants of symbolic power, etc.

Deadline for abstract submission: 1st of June, 2015, notification of acceptance of conference
paper: 29th of June, 2015

For further information, please contact: [log in to unmask]
Scientific committee

Jörg Blasius, University of Bonn
Frédéric Lebaron, University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Brigitte Le Roux, University Paris Descartes
Andreas Schmitz, University of Bonn
In cooperation with Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley,
and Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris