5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

While sociology shows continued interest in its impact on the real world, which is also presented through research within clinical sociology, there is virtually no research on its impact on one of the major recent and still ongoing transformations, namely the post-socialist one in Central and Eastern Europe. Aiming to fill this void, this session invites contributions on the conceptual and analytical framework required to explore this topic, as well as case studies on the role of sociologies in specific national environments.

We suggest the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as the starting point, with a view to focus on how sociologies (re) create social, political, and economic imaginaries and thus formulate a particular conception of society, economy and politics. CPE provides the tools to explore both evolutionary mechanisms, as well as structural, discursive, technological and agential selectivities that produce hegemonic discourses. This framework thereby enables the analysis of how the intellectual forces can redefine the imaginaries and influence societal transformations in a profound way, which touches the very core of our research interest.

The authors can analyse impact of sociology both on its emergent level, observing it as a science and specific expertise communicating with other disciplines and social systems, as a national disciplinary community, as well as on individual level, studying the impact of individual sociologists through their diverse roles as academics, educators, public intellectuals, experts, politicians, civil society activists, as well as their hybrid roles or shifting between different roles.