in recognition of past and present service - Society for the Study of ...

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
The Society for the Study of Social Problems
63rd Annual Meeting
August 9-11, 2013
The Westin New York at Times Square
270 West 43rd Street
2013 Theme: Re-imagining Social Problems: Moving Beyond Social Constructionism
R.A. Dello Buono, SSSP President 2012-2013
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‘The question is not whether we should take sides,
since we inevitably will, but rather whose side we are on.’
Howard S. Becker, SSSP Presidential Address, 1966
‘However inadvertently, the societal reaction school purged
the elemental dialectic of resistance from social life.’
Francis Fox Piven, SSSP Presidential Address, 1980
‘How might we - as social scientists concerned with social
justice - also reinscribe and, thereby, also partially subvert
the networks of liquid CAPITAList power that engulf us daily?’
Stephen J. Pfohl, SSSP Presidential Address, 1992
‘Sociologists and other social scientists must quickly seize the day.
Our research and writings must move beyond criticizing new
privatization. We must imagine alternatives.’
Nancy C. Jurik, SSSP Presidential Address, 2003
As C. Wright Mills once wrote in a letter to E. P. Thompson: "I have to do it: it's my god-damned duty, because nobody else will
stand up and say shit out loud." Scarcely six decades have passed since Mills’ iconic voice fell silent. But his spirit lives on in the
SSSP and his insights have never been timelier. In 2013, the SSSP returns to New York City, the intellectual home of Mills and yes,
to Wall Street, one of the pillars he identified of the power elite that “characterizes the structure of our epoch.”
The unprecedented global crisis that has unfolded since Mills was “saying his shit out loud” now demands that we re-imagine the
way we understand the very nature of social problems. The sometimes subtle and always complex interrelationships between
personal troubles, public issues and global dilemmas have become re-arranged as substantially as have the structures of the
“power elite.” Problems rooted in the inadequacies of the Fordist welfare state were exacerbated by those based in the harsh
realities of the neoliberal life-cycle. This neoliberal system now finds itself rife with contradictions in the search for a postneoliberal
mode of global capitalist expansion. Social movements all around the world have mounted resistance to this
restructuring. Novel forms of protest like “Occupy Wall Street” help illustrate a broader trend towards transnationalized social
movement mobilization. From the Arab Spring and the leftist upsurge in Latin America to the anti-austerity trade union and
student movements stretching all across the global North, popular movements have engaged and impacted the structural path
of global development. Right-wing “populism” and Islamic fundamentalism have also shaped the broader political landscape,
putting forth conservative and reactionary platforms that pose as “solutions” to the everyday problems confronting poor and
working people.
We might recall an important insight of our founders, Al and Betty Lee, that social scientists have too often been caught running
behind the curve of social change. This thought was echoed by C.W. Mills in one of his earliest works where he was sharply critical
of “social pathologists” whose social problems textbooks dealt “in a fragmentary way with scattered problems and were not
focused on larger stratifications or upon structured whole… failing to consider whether or not certain groups or individuals
caught in economically underprivileged situations can possibly obtain the current goals without drastic shifts in the basic
institutions which channel and promote them.” This kind of structural, political economy approach put forward by Mills and
further developed by Gouldner and many other critical sociologists spawned important contributions just as it questioned our
own professional positioning as teachers, researchers and/or social practitioners. Meanwhile, social constructionist approaches
emerged and developed in a parallel trajectory during the later decades of the 20 th Century, offering their own powerful critiques
of the sociological mainstream.