Issues:

These are some of the issues we will address:

1. Facing the hegemony of northern sociologies, and assessing alternatives that have emerged in different parts of the world (including the north itself) in response to that hegemony.

2. The significance of the global concentration of material resources (journals, research funds, etc.) and symbolic resources (language, intellectual traditions, etc.)

3. The ascendancy of audit culture and international evaluation of academic work and institutions

4. The increasing pressures for policy relevant research and its implications for sociology.

5. Teaching sociology in a globalizing world -- who are our students and what should we teach them, and how?

6. How inter-national inequalities shape intra-national inequalities and thereby pose specific challenges to the practice and development of robust national sociologies?

7. The possibility of sociologies-from-below based on local, national and regional specificities as well as those based on gender, class and ethnicity.





The Conference will approach these challenges with concrete practices and experiences of different countries, rather than with broad normative statements.