Conference Sessions

Gender inequality in land ownership, access, and control is a significant issue in many Asian and Sub-Saharan African countries. For instance, in Asia, women constitute only 10% of landholders, and they usually own smaller plots of land than men. Similarly, in Sub-Saharan Africa, women are often excluded from land ownership and control due to customary laws and practices that favor men. This situation has adverse effects on agricultural and rural development, as women play a crucial role in food production and security. To address these issues, many countries have developed legal frameworks that enhance women's rights to land, including Rwanda's land policy, which recognizes women's equal rights to inherit, own, and control land. In India, the Hindu Succession Act was amended to give women equal rights to ancestral property. Whereas, in Bangladesh, the government is implementing a policy that allows widows and unmarried daughters to inherit land. Moreover, community-based approaches to land policy decisions have been adopted in several countries, such as Tanzania, where land committees comprising men and women are responsible for managing land disputes and making decisions on land use. However, much remains to be done to ensure gender-responsive land policies in Asia and Africa. Therefore, this session will focus on the future implications and possible research directions for the development and implementation of policies that foster sustainable development and gender equality on the continents. This session's objective is also to fill in knowledge gaps by highlighting recent issues on gender and land policy. This session invites papers from academics and non-academics working in these thematic and regional areas.

Rural communities are simultaneously on the front lines of myriad significant societal changes and left behind by or left out of many others. This session invited papers that consider how rural societies are implicated in the social, economic, environmental, and/or technological changes referenced in this year's conference theme.

Sociology has always attempted to establish a space of order, a set of commonplaces, or a framework of experience that present themselves as the acceptable, ordinary, statistically average, normal, and even ideal reference point to which one must relate in order to define what is meant by “ordinary social life.” The delineation of the boundaries of the “same,” which could be termed “homotopic,” leads to a series of debates from various sociological perspectives to define heterotopias, dystopias, utopias, etc., which attempt to capture differences, dysfunctions, exemplarity, pathologies, etc. How can these debates be updated in the context of the study of contemporary sociality? How can these sociological distinctions be made in contemporary sociality where diversity, individualization, and difference set the tone for the homotopic social fabric? To do so, this session invites its participants to examine how the concepts of “x-topies” interact and reflect social and political realities, while considering possible futures. They may draw on works of fiction to analyze the utopian and dystopian ideas emerging from sociological thought and popular culture while examining heterotopic spaces that challenge established norms. Such a task can also involve studying how these concepts interact with real or imaginary social spaces and shape our understanding of the world, culture, and collective imagination. Furthermore, they can explore how these concepts can feed sociological imagination and knowledge. By employing various theoretical frameworks or resorting to empirical studies, participants in this thematic session can thus explore what might be homotopic, dystopian, utopian, or heterotopic in matters of sociality, solidarity, diversity, inclusion, work, social control, suffering, sexuality, love, hate, discrimination, technology, technoscience, environment, science, knowledge, and more in today’s context.

Social processes occur in space and over time (Maritn and Miler, 2003). Thus, social processes are intertwined with spatiality and temporality. Everything we study is emplaced ... place is not merely a setting or backdrop, but an agentic player in the game (Gieryn, 2000). In this session, we explore a diverse body of research that intersects with the sociology of space, place, and time. We encouraged submissions from various theoretical and methodological approaches that place an emphasis on the spatiality or temporality of social processes.

Civil sphere has become a central theme in cultural sociology, mainly due to Jeffrey Alexander’s efforts at situating it as the core of political activities in a societal perspective (Alexander, 2006, 2019). Since the concept of the civil sphere is the main locus of participation to, and mediation for, social life, it covers in principle a wide span of everyone’s existence. Moreover, emphasizing the performative dimension of symbolic expressions emanating from political discourses in general to social movements in particular, cultural sociology presents an overall picture of the civil sphere as a dramatic representation of social life constantly dealing with the binaries of its normative definition (good vs bad, civil vs non-civil, democratic vs anti-democratic, etc.). Yet are there limits to the extension of the civil sphere as a concept? How do less ‘spectacular’ aspects (such as day to day interaction, digital media interactions, buried historical symbolic structures, etc.) contribute to the development and sustainment of a civil sphere? Are there some aspects of this collective civility which are neglected when one comes to think about the civil sphere? Questions like these, either based on theoretical interrogations or empirical investigations, will be addressed in this thematic panel. The aim is to pose these questions or respond to them through contributions that can encompass internal assessments, interpretations, or revisions of the concept or theory of the civil sphere, as well as external critiques directed at them (emphasizing, for example, the perspective of a competing theoretical, empirical, or conceptual approach to social life).