The VII Annual SOCIAL THEORY
FORUM |
Sponsors Sigmund Freud Foundation Museum
& Library, Vienna 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. 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 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 scholars and graduate students in humanities and social
sciences and as well as from writers in allied disciplines. We ask that
authors submit a one-page abstract as email attachment (MS Word Format) to [log in to unmask]
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 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. ———————————————————— |