Chair: Niall Campbell
Erin Silver
Abolition Sociology
This paper calls forth ‘abolition sociology’ as a framework to guide the wanderings of our sociological imaginations, and to in/form a sociology to come.
It traces abolitionist histories of movements like those to end slavery, prisons, schools, and work, to suggest abolition as a paradigm that includes ontologies of expansive space, time, and being; epistemologies of collective study, imagination, and storytelling; methods of mutual aid, refusal and fugitive creation; and grammars of possibility and critical hope.
In encompassing ontology, epistemology, method, and grammar, abolition provides a substantial structure for sociological inquiry grounded in an ethic of transformation and restoration. In specifically drawing out abolition sociology, this paper offers a framework that can be applied in studies across our discipline.
Noel Packard
Max Weber's Social Order Concept Applied to U.S. Miltary/Pre-Commercial Internet History
Talcott Parsons canonized Max Weber as a sociologist in the 1930s. Today Weber's theories regarding 'ideal types', bureaucracy, sociology, economy and history are global. Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism" has never gone out of print. Here Weber's social order concept, from, "Class, Status and Party", frames history of military networks that were forerunners to the Internet. Weber's social order helps recount what Cold War military networks were made to perform, thus green lighting them into mission service with the Pentagon and later the Internet. Weber's social order concept divides society into a: Political Party realm (with decision making power); Market realm (with power over production) and a Social Honor realm (with power over lifestyle, and consumption of rare goods). In overlaying Weber's social order concepts on network history, I also recount how sociologists C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth plagiarized sociologist and C.I.A. agent Edward Shill's translation of "Class, Status and Party" in their 1946 book From Max Weber Essays in Sociology, causing a rift between the sociologists. In the 1960s, C. Wright Mills coined the term "New Left" when military networks were tested to spy on people of the New Left - including C. Wright Mills.
Noel Packard is a multidisciplinary scholar with a PhD in Media, Film and Television from University of Auckland (2023), a BA Honors in Sociology from University of Victoria in Wellington, NZ (2017), a MA in Sociology from New School in NYC (1998), a Master of Public Administration from California State University East Bay, and a BA in Economics from California State University Fresno. Her research focuses on how the military-networks that became the Internet were tested, distributed and commercialized. She uses classical sociological theories by Marx and Weber to frame contemporary issues pertaining to networked society vs. non-networked society. She arrived at this line of research by hosting a conference session about collective, individual and electronic memory for the Pacific Sociological Association for 15 years.
Chamsy el-Ojeili
After Liberalism?
In a recent reflection on the field of ideology studies, Freeden (2019, p. 1) has contended that “the world of formal ideologies has been rocked to its foundations”. Ideologies “have lost much of their staying power”, and ideology studies is increasingly characterized by immediacy, fragmentation, and ephemerality – the contemporary ideological landscape obscured by “swirling clouds of dust” (p. 2). This situation has been of particular concern to liberals, a concern expressed by a wave of interventions warning of the declining popular enthusiasm for the creed and the accompanying rise of illiberalism (see, for instance, Emmott, 2017; Fukuyama, 2022; Luce, 2017). One part of the contemporary challenge to liberalism has been the rise of Anglo-American “postliberalism”, a current of thought associated with figures such as John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, and with publications such as American Affairs, Prospect, First Things, and Compact. In this paper, I attempt an ideological mapping of post-liberalism, exploring its origins, core claims, and political and theoretical affiliations and ambiguities.
