193
The Sociology of Engagement in Dialogue
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC16 Sociological Theory (host committee)
Language: Spanish, French and English
Session Type: Oral
Since the seminal publication of On Justification in 1991, pragmatic sociology has developed in a number of directions. In particular, Laurent Thévenot’s work on regimes of engagement has given rise to numerous cross-cultural empirical studies carried out in societies across the globe, from Brazil to to Finland to Japan and from Russia to Switzerland to the United States, and on subjects ranging from protest movements to online computer games. These studies in turn have contributed to fine-tuning the conceptual apparatus of pragmatic sociology, helping to identify multiple regimes of engagement and flesh out how they are learned, experienced and combined and how they are associated with different temporalities, different modes of valuation and ways of formatting information and different ways of grounding collective action.
As pragmatic sociology is becoming more established well beyond its original setting in France and its theoretical apparatus is refined, the time has come to explore how it can be brought into a productive dialogue with other recent theoretical developments and new fields of sociological inquiry. Thus we invite proposals that reflect upon how pragmatic sociology can be combined with advances in fields such as the sociology of emotions and the body, visual sociology or social movements theory to yield a richer theoretical understanding of how we engage with the world. We also welcome proposals that point to constructive ways of conjoining pragmatic approaches with those usually seen as rival or unrelated, such as Bourdieusian critical sociology or social network theory.