Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction – European Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
2024 ANNUAL MEETING
IDENTITIES, BOUNDARIES AND SOCIAL DIVISIONS. RECONCILING COMPETING FRAMES
June 5th-7th, 2024 – University of Pisa, Italy
Combined event: Course on Grounded Theory and Qualitative Methods | June 3rd-4th, 2024 – University of Pisa, Italy
The Center for Advanced Studies in Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded Theory – Department of Political Science, University of Pisa, will host the 2024 SSSI-EUSSSI Annual Meeting.
This event, fourteen years after the first EUSSSI Conference, which took place exactly at the University of Pisa, should not be considered as a mere celebration, but as a fundamental opportunity to meet up with the most well-known scholars of Symbolic Interaction and Grounded Theory coming from Europe, America, and all around the world.
TOPICS
The theme “Identities, Boundaries and Social Divisions. Reconciling Competing Frames” reflects contemporary questions about identity, closure, separation, differences, and the developing needs of society.
The demand for recognition and integration of individual and collective identities carrying different features from established social and cultural models is generating reactions characterized by closure and conflict. Consequences are the increasing of new borders (social barriers and boundaries), and the resurgence of stigmatization, segregation, and segmentation processes, based on cultural divisions. Terrible wars devastate the lives of many peoples, primarily those directly involved, but they also have significant effects on the daily lives of citizens of all states around the world. Nevertheless, at the same time, there is a need to generate new forms of dialogue and openness, to reconcile cultural visions and social positions that are diverse and competing. Internationally, we are witnessing the spread of social and political movements from below that promote peace, styles of participation, and social integration based on meeting and enhancing diversity, evoking the need for innovative forms of coexistence, based on recognition of social and civil rights, on the realization of ever higher levels of social justice, on the enhancement of common goods and local welfare and community.
It is in this framework that the theoretical and methodological tenets of Symbolic Interactionism can be helpful to analyze these processes, to interpret their scope and effects in people’s lives, and to understand their relevance.
In this sense, the 2024 Pisa Conference is an invitation to dialogue, to affirm the importance of reconciliation between different points of view and between different cultural frames, aspects that are very much needed both in Europe and in the United States, as well as in all other parts of the world.
Find more about the conference, the program, the venue and the organization.