Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

181

Contemporary Communication Issues. Part B

RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)

Language: English

When the war on terror (WOT) was declared after Al Qaeda’s spectacular 2001 attacks some predicted that it would lead to several dystopian effects. This session is devoted to paper presentations that assess these predictions and the possibilities of more favorable outcomes. 
Potential topics: 

• Critique of the WOT as a mode of power and domination, as Western hegemony, as US dominance; 
• Cultural analysis of the WOT as biopolitics, neoliberalism, and elite political communication; 
• Outcomes such as endless war, more frequent interventions around the world, more frequent campaigns of high-tech homicide bombings and drone warfare; 
• More cycles of “terror” and “counter-terrorism” and the emergence of police-states; an intensification of surveillance and securitization, of individuals and populations, oppositional groups, domestic threats to democracy; 
• Perversion of the social and psychological sciences and the abandonment of its critical function, the reduction of social scientists to an adjunctive, auxiliary role in the WOT as “terrorism” or “counterterrorism” experts, narrowing the objects of knowledge, stigmatizing the enemies of Empire; 
• More utopian consequences; a radical intensification of democracy, a new birth of emancipatory politics, a reduction in political violence, new forms of democracy, etc. Posters: