Register for SAANZ2024 Here

The convenors of the SAANZ Annual Conference 2024: The Sociology to Come, are pleased to call for submissions for conference papers. Paper presentations will be 15 minutes each, with 5 minutes for questions. This call for paper proposals closes 15 September 2024 (EXTENDED TO 30 SEPTEMBER). All proposals will be reviewed and included at the discretion of the conference organizing committee. This process will be completed by 30 September (EXTENDED TO 10 OCTOBER).

This conference will be entirely in-person, and all participants whose papers are accepted must register for the conference by 8 November 2024 at the latest. Presenters who register after this date will be included in the conference programme at the discretion of the conference organisers.

Should you have any questions about this call for papers, please do not hesitate to contact the convenors of the conference committee, Fairleigh Gilmour and Chris Brickell, at SAANZ@otago.ac.nz

Queries regarding the Critical Social Work stream should be directed to Liz Beddoe: e.beddoe@auckland.ac.nz or Donna Baines: dbaines@mail.ubc.ca.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Abstracts must be emailed through to SAANZ@otago.ac.nz Abstracts must include the name(s), institutional affiliation, and email contacts of the paper presenter(s), a paper title, and a 200-word abstract. Please specify if you are submitting for consideration in a named stream (Gender and Sexuality, Criminology, Sociology outside the Academy or Critical Social Work).

Instructions for Formatting Text Abstracts:

• Format: doc or docx only
• Length: 200 words max

Note: please refer to specific calls (e.g., calls for panels, submissions to the Critical Social Work stream) for any requirements related to that call.

There are many threats to social work’s espoused mission and values, including ongoing structural inequities and hyper-managerialist approaches to social work and social services. These forces reinforce social work as an individualistic practice rather than a discipline that engages simultaneously at the micro, meso and macro levels. New technologies, AI, education paradigms and contexts, accountability processes and organisational constraints all delimit the boundaries of social work practice towards a new conservatism. This provokes serious questions about the growing disjuncture between values and reality. The continuing downgrading of social work’s social justice agenda alongside increasing (limited) professionalisation has led to debates about the future of social work in its current form. At the same time, we see practitioners and academics building new practices and knowledge aimed at equity and social justice. This complex moment presents us with the opportunity to reimagine social work and how it can meet or respond to its own social justice agenda in new ways. In these fast-changing times, how can social work keep up? We invite papers that grapple with this theme in any field of social work or social policy.

Please send abstracts to: saanz@otago.ac.nz by 15 September.

Queries regarding the Critical Social Work stream should be directed to Liz Beddoe: e.beddoe@auckland.ac.nz Donna Baines: dbaines@mail.ubc.ca or Emily Keddell emily.keddell@otago.ac.nz

Call coming soon. 

Affordable accommodation is available at the conference venue, St Margaret’s College:

$120 per night: Bed and Breakfast, single room
$140 per night: Bed and Breakfast, double room

Bookings can be made directly through St Margaret’s college here.

The conference dinner will be held at the conference location – St Margaret’s College.

Cost:

Student/Unwaged: $50
Waged: $80

You can add a dinner ticket when you register here.

Dr Emma Tseris: The proliferation of trauma across the human services: Unpacking a ‘progressive’ concept.  

Trauma-informed practices are proliferating in social work, and across the human services more broadly. Such practices are usually positioned as unproblematically positive and progressive, and they have been commended for offering a shift away from pathologising approaches. However, there is growing critical scholarship highlighting the limitations of trauma-informed practices in enacting social justice, instead illuminating the symptom-oriented and individual-focused discourses that permeate trauma-informed practices, and an increasingly amorphous understanding of the meaning of trauma-informed practice. This sits alongside a limited critical interrogation of the rise of neuro-centric perspectives that seek to predict the impacts of violence across the lifecourse. In this paper, I will argue that trauma-informed practices have become a popular approach to demonstrating a rhetorical engagement with ‘social justice’, while reinstating the professional power and expertise of psy-professionals. This is achieved by constructing victim-survivors of violence as ‘risky’ and ‘dysfunctional’, which justifies a range of oppressive practices, including paternalism, surveillance, and diverse forms of coercion. Such practices are wrapped up in notions of benevolence, leaving little room for critique. Consequently, there is an urgent need to consider whether the feminist and activist roots of the trauma paradigm can be re-discovered, or whether it is necessary to take a different direction in addressing and preventing interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence.

Jathan Sadowski: A Ruthless Criticism of AI and Technology

In 2021, science fiction Ted Chiang observed that, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us.” The sudden boom of interest in artificial intelligence—driven by torrents of cash and threats to transform society from top to bottom—has clarified this relationship between technology and capitalism even further. People are more aware than ever of the power dynamics that drive systems like AI. It now common to see skeptical inquiry about how technologies are made, who decides their purpose, who uses them, and who are they used against? The impacts of AI are no longer merely abstract or distant concerns. The ecological, economic, and human costs are increasingly material and immediate. By expanding on Chiang’s sharp remarks about our anxieties of how capital forges technologies to then wield against us, this talk outlines three key concepts that are crucial for a political economic analysis—and a ruthless criticism—of AI and capitalism. First is innovation realism. Second is cheap data. Third is the perpetual value machine.

The conference programme is available through Sched: https://saanz2024.sched.com/  

There will be printed programmes available at the conference.

Our main campus and St Margaret’s College are in North Dunedin, adjacent to the city’s CBD. The conference venue is close to a range of motels, cafes, restaurants and bars, and the supermarket is a short walk away. The College is a half-hour drive from Dunedin airport.

If you have any questions, please email Conference Convenors Fairleigh Gilmour and Chris Brickell at SAANZ@otago.ac.nz