Programme full

Stream Plenaries and Special Sessions
WEDNESDAY 15 APRIL 2015 17:45-18:45
advanced capitalism, heavily digitized forms of violence and war, and so on, open up new vistas for sociologists are to
think about the kinds of societies, and the forms of transition, that they want to bring into being?
This plenary features leading speakers on these questions: Professor Lucy Suchman (Sociology, University of
Lancaster), Professor Emerita Hilary Rose (Social Policy, University of Bradford), Professor Steven Yearley
(Sociology, University of Edinburgh) and Professor Donald Mackenzie (both Sociology, Edinburgh).
James, D.
(Cardiff University)
Sociology of Education
M137, GEORGE MOORE BUILDING
WHEN STANDARDS TRUMP OPPORTUNITY: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
This paper considers transitions in secondary educational provision in England and the impact on equality using a
Bourdieusian analytical framework.
The paper uses snippets of analysis from three different projects, all concerned with secondary schools in England,
which collectively suggest that curricula and pedagogic innovation, however carefully done, is distorted or destroyed
by the imperative to maximise GCSE passes at grade C and above.
This fits neatly with the theme of ‘Societies in Transition: Progression or Regression’ as the paper will consider the
ways in which apparent progress within educational policy can be hampered or militated against by contradictory
parallel polices. In this way progress can sometimes lead to regression.
Chair: Nicola Ingram (University of Bath)
Sociology Special Issue 2014 Event
W622, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
SOCIOLOGY AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS
This plenary aims to introduce and elaborate on the articles, and the theoretical framing developed within the 2014
special issue of the journal Sociology. The special issue relates directly and indirectly to the theme of the 2015 BSA
conference. It is focussed on challenging the coordinates of the debate on what constitutes a crisis and it therefore
interrogates the contemporary sociological understandings of those categories linked to crises such as recoveries,
transitions and social or cultural transformations. There is thus a clear connection between the central problem of
‘crisis’ and that of ‘transition’; defined in the Annual Conference brief as a sociologically informed, progressive
response to the anxieties, divisions, injustices and deprivations of contemporary society. The themes of this plenary
respond to the call for an ‘informed and critical’ response to the ‘powerful discourses that support the status
quo.’ Specifically, the papers in the panel show how societies that are experiencing fundamental challenges to
established norms, institutions and orders, require sociologists to provide a social critique, rather than purely a
sociological perspective, on such transformations.
But, what would it mean to deconstruct and interrogate the ongoing global economic crisis as sociologists? In an
important sense, as papers in the panel will illustrate, it is to move beyond criticism of how sociology has failed
adequately to understand the crisis towards a critique of the very concept of crisis. This is based on the presupposition
that the development of a sociological imagination that engages more incisively with economic phenomena, and
thereby produces a ‘sociological perspective’ on the economy, would only go part of the way to interrogating the
formulation of ‘global economic crisis’ as a particular kind of transition. Indeed, sociologists have already
demonstrated how economic crises are precipitated through the social construction of markets, and the problem of
socially produced nature of knowledge that performs ‘the economy’. We have seen criticisms of the institutional
and cultural configurations of late capitalism, accounts of the embeddedness and political constitution of markets and
the need to think of alternatives beyond the politics-economics matrix. A critical approach to the crisis is necessarily
beyond empiricism and hermeneutics and methodologically beyond the confines of disciplinary insularity. It involves
challenging the coordinates of the debate on what constitutes a crisis by offering a critique of the ‘metanarrative’ of
crisis. Specifically, this metanarrative has externalised and objectified the economy as separate domain from society.
It has (re)produced a fundamental disjunction between economy and society as different domains of life.
31 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University