Séances de la conférence

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is increasingly important to explore how digital technologies shape the ways in which people connect with one another and form meaningful social relationships. As such, this session engages with questions about the role of online spaces in enabling access to instrumental and emotional communication channels, fostering inclusion, connectedness, and social support, and structuring opportunities for expressing agency, including through self-disclosure and civic participation. Presentations will address these questions from the following topics: democratic engagement among digitally marginalised groups in Nigeria, self-disclosure practices of Afghan women on social media platforms, social media support networks for female survivors of intimate partner violence, and the complex social dynamics of forming “digital intimacies” in online spaces.

The theme of the 2023 CSA annual conference is “Reckonings and Re-Imaginings.” In this session, scholars are invited to re-imagine our relationships with animals in myriad ways. The presenters address diverse roles of animals in the human-animal relationship, including as companions, partners in healing, and as victims themselves. Grounded in a space of hope, this session will engage the process of re-imagining, and offer ways to bring such re-imaginings to life via action.

The theme of the 2023 CSA annual conference is “Reckonings and Re-Imaginings.” Reckoning can be defined in a few ways: as a confrontation or settlement, or the process of calculation. In this session, scholars confront and analyze the ways in which the sometimes problematic and unjust relationships between animals and humans are rendered visible in areas such as lived experience, law, policy, and theory, along with the impacts of such unequal relationships. This session aims to move towards a reckoning of the harms to animals and humans, with the goal of moving forward in a more just and equal society.

Despite notable interventions to disrupt anti-Black racism in Canadian Universities, African Caribbean Black (ACB) students, faculty and staff encounter a white settler colonial social discourse, which negatively impedes on their academic development. The uncomfortable moment for ACB students, faculty and staff also leave many with a sense of unbelonging when entering academic spaces, as their experiences dealing with anti-Blackness is sometimes ignored by non-African descent student, faculty and staff. This social discourse does not recognize the intelligence or the need for ACB students to be educated, as it maintains and normalizes white undergraduate and graduate students as deservers of a "quality education." White settler Canada is rendered to be anti-Black. There is a grave misconception among non-African descent university community members that forms of discrimination based on race do not enter the academic communities. In actuality, the white settler Canadian colonial discourse knows no bounds and is very much associated with the university, creating how academic institutions function historically. What does it mean to be an ACB student, faculty or staff and experience forms of discrimination based on race in Canadian universities? Are Canadian universities purposely not acknowledging the white settler colonial discourse which serves to disrupt the academic achievements of ACB students? Despite the paucity of sustained empirical data, ACB students, faculty and staff are negatively impacted by racially charged stereotypes, which problematizes their academic experiences.

Violence research spans multiple scholarly disciplines and interconnects with knowledges of survivors, activists, legal professionals, policymakers, and service providers. As the recognition of structural dimensions of violence (and its various intersections) becomes increasingly prevalent across professional, political, and public discourses, sociologists are well positioned to contribute to the ongoing formation and mobilization of anti-violence projects. Efforts to integrate sociologically imaginative understandings violence with the experiences of survivors, advocates, and front-line practitioners provide exciting opportunities for the cross-pollination of critical insights on violence. This session invites papers concerned anti-violence “knowledge mobilization” in all its forms. These may include (but are not limited to): applied research projects; public sociologies of violence; communities of practice; trauma-informed research methods; anti-violence education; empowering survivors and/or engaging perpetrators; or theoretical and practical models for transformative justice, decolonization, and anti-oppression activism. Submissions reflecting cross-sector and/or interdisciplinary collaborations are especially encouraged.