Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting 2012

The ESS welcomes submissions addressing any and all issues of interest to sociologists, drawing on methods of every sort. In addition, the 2012 meeting will have a special focus on “Storied Lives.”

Men and women live in stories and through stories. They tell stories, individually and collectively, about themselves and others, about and on behalf of the families and communities in which they live, the organizations in which they work, the causes in which they believe. They tell stories about the routine and the extraordinary, about their highest aspirations and their deepest fears. Some of these stories are acts of liberation, calls to discover new identities and to discard old oppressions. Others are themselves acts of oppression, stories that inscribe and justify existing inequalities of wealth, honor and power. Men and women tell stories, as do groups, organizations, and movements, but not under conditions of their own choosing. Rather, they tell stories within the limits of culture and in response to the demands of structure. They tell stories with the resources, material and symbolic, at hand. But these resources are distributed unequally with the result that some stories are heard, some demand to be heard, and others are ignored altogether. The 2012 meeting of the ESS will consider stories across a range of settings—at the workplace and in families, in communities and in religion, about immigration and about race, in the nation and across borders, about crime and about the law, and, not least, in the construction of both personal and collective identities. The meetings will examine the conditions under which men and women tell stories but also the conditions those stories help create.