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

We are interested in empirical research (qualitative or interpretative, figurational and biographical) and in discussing the extent to which careful reconstruction of the past is necessary to understand social realities in the present. While many researchers pursuing a biographical or, more generally, an interpretative approach, know that their studies need to be historically informed, this often does not go beyond lip service. Adopting a long-term, multi-generation perspective has been established practice for a number of decades among sociologists engaged in biographical research, and yet there is still a tendency to stay on the level of the specific familial or individual history. On the other hand, studies based on sound research into the historical background frequently do not take into account a sociological approach to analysing the rules governing which phases and parts of the collective past (and thus also which “parts” of an individual life history) are presented, reinterpreted, reinvented or dethematized in social discourses in the present and at earlier points in time, and what effects this has had on the members of different groupings, or which groupings have an effective voice in these discourses.

For this session we invite papers based on empirical research which seek to do justice to the notion of a historically informed interpretative sociology.