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

The evisceration of life and space in Gaza has arrested planetary attention. Knowing what is going on has enabled a plethora of emotions and solidarities to emerge. Encampments, protests, boycotts and calls for divestment, have brought together disparate actors as sites of social love with the potential to affect justice. Yet justice appears a distant dream, with the road to it blocked by bureaucratic, legal and ideological hurdles that threaten to de-centre the human, in an Anthropocene beholden to the mechanistic manoeuvrings of supra national agencies and states. This panel invites submissions that address the challenges of knowing when presented by its limits in the form of rationality and mechanistic processes, and which effect possibilities for achieving justice in the now. Where now is a moment filled with visceral and emotional affect that has potential to move us toward justice already. How might social love, born from the horrors experienced in Gaza real time, precipitate knowing beyond what is seen or witnessed by the mind, and incorporate what is felt by sentient beings comprising the Anthropocene? In other words, what forms of affective labour can be mobilised that expand our capacities to know, and how might an expanded sense of knowing enable achieving justice more urgently? We invite contributions from researchers, activists, artists, and cultural producers that help expand the ways we come to know about injustice (such as racism, sexism and Islamophobia) and, which help affect a more urgent sense of justice realisation through both novel and conventional means.