CALL FOR PROPOSALS
CRITICAL STUDIES NETWORK
SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY ASSOCIATION
2024 Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada
The Critical Studies Network, the latest network of the Social Science History Association, invites you to submit panels, papers, and book session proposals for the SSHA annual conference. The Critical Studies Network provides meeting space for all scholars interested in critical social science, broadly defined. By “critical social science,” we mean scholarly work in the social sciences oriented toward deepening our knowledge of various relations of social domination, exploitation, and extraction, both transparent and hidden, and pointing the way to emancipatory alternatives. We believe that comparative and historical work is uniquely positioned to contribute to this critical vocation of the social sciences because of its ability to denaturalize and historicize the social world. The network’s aim will be to cultivate and promote scholarship that not only self-consciously recognizes this critical vocation, but also draws out and reflects upon the political implications of scholarly work. The network is especially interested in work that engages with a diverse range of critical theories, including but not limited to postcolonial and decolonial theories, Marxism, feminist theories, queer theory, and the Black Radical Tradition. We draw together various historical strands of “critical” thinking (e.g., critical theory, critical race theory, etc.) that have developed in different disciplines and that can be brought forward to the future. Our network will rethink assumptions and challenge disciplinary orthodoxies about social science and theory. We welcome quantitative and qualitative methods, empirical and theoretical work oriented toward concept building, and causal social analysis that is speculative and future-oriented.
The conference will take place from October 31-November 3, 2024, at the Westin Harbour Castle, Toronto, ON, Canada. For more information on the SSHA and the conference, please visit the association’s website at https://ssha.org/ and the conference website at https://ssha2024.ssha.org/. The theme of the 2024 conference is “Trust and Distrust of Historical Sources in the Digital Age.”
We welcome proposals on this theme, as well as on any other topic that falls within the broad scope of the Critical Studies Network. Individual paper submissions should include the paper title, a brief abstract (300-500 words), and contact information. We will then group the papers into thematic panels. We hope to find a panel to host every paper proposal. In addition to individual papers, we also welcome full panel proposals, which should include 1) three to four papers with titles, abstracts, and presenter information, 2) a chair and their contact information, and (optionally) 3) a discussant. Finally, proposals for book sessions (“Author Meets Critics”) should include the title of the book, names of participants, and the name and contact information for the organizer(s).
The deadline for proposals is February 23, 2024. To submit a proposal, log in using your credentials if you have made a submission in the last 3 years, or register an account at http://ssha2024.ssha.org/. The SSHA also offers support for graduate students to attend the conference through the Richard Sutch Graduate Student Travel Grant, the details of which are on https://ssha.org/.
If you have any questions, please contact one of the Critical Studies Network representatives: Rebecca Jean Emigh (Emigh@soc.ucla.edu), Fatma Müge Göçek (gocek@umich.edu), Sadia Saeed (ssaeed3@usfca.edu), and Nabila Islam (nabila_islam@brown.edu).
Published: 02/16/2024