Conference Sessions

"Therapy-speak” and its various underlying assumptions increasingly inform how we think about ourselves and our relationships, while also shaping various institutional practices. These developments attest to the power and influence of the “psy” professions and the self-help and happiness industries; they also suggest that happiness and wellbeing elude us much of the time. This session addresses what has been variously described as therapeutic culture, the “emotionalisation” of culture, or the therapeutic society. The papers in this session explore various aspects of therapeutic culture and society, from the way medico-therapeutic vocabularies are used in the construction of social problems, including childhood trauma, to the medicalization (and commodification) of social support, emotional regulation, meditation, and psychedelic practices for therapeutic purposes, to the limits of therapeutic directives about “healthy” relationships that are made evident when people choose to maintain difficult friendships.

This session will feature new empirical and theoretical contributions to the sociology of music. Researchers featured in this session will present work on musicians, listeners, and mediums of consumption.

This session presents papers that develop culturally informed perspectives on social inequality. While the discipline of sociology has had a longstanding interest in understanding the interplay of culture and individual, interactional, and institutional processes of inequality, there remains much to understand and debate regarding the influences social inequality has on culture and the influences culture has on social inequality. The papers represent diverse methodological and substantive areas, including empirically driven or theoretically oriented contributions. They address a range of topics, including: representations of wealth and privilege in Hollywood; comedy and critical discourse; the cultural repertoires that people draw on to evaluate policing; as well as the culture of failure and societal critique.

This session presents papers that develop culturally informed perspectives on social inequality. While the discipline of sociology has had a longstanding interest in understanding the interplay of culture and individual, interactional, and institutional processes of inequality, there remains much to understand and debate regarding the influences social inequality has on culture and the influences culture has on social inequality. The papers represent diverse methodological and substantive areas, including empirically driven or theoretically oriented contributions. They address a range of topics, including cultural inequalities in employment and recruitment, as well as representations of women’s academic careers in fiction.

Presentations in this session will explore the production and circulation of cultural goods from a sociological perspective. Researchers featured in this session will present work that spans methodological approaches to the sociology of culture while theorizing creative work, arts funding, market emergence, and traditions.