The 11th ESA conference “Crisis, Critique and Change” will take place in the University of Turin, August 28th-31st, 2013. The overarching conference theme highlights financial, social and political crisis linked to financial debt, the crisis of the Eurozone and the austerity measures impacting upon all social citizens. The critique and resistance to the current crisis as well as analysis of the transformations taking place in social, political, cultural and psychic spaces, in families, organizations, institutions, structures and processes is captured well by Biographical Sociology. Biographical, narrative methods have a long history of helping us to better understand crisis, especially in the memories of older generations. Biographical Perspectives on European Societies also enable us to write the ‘biography of the current crisis’ through our research with individual and collective life stories and in the process we can explore the societal aspects of the crisis reflected in the biographical narratives, transformations, memories and identities.
The conference organizing team wants to foster an understanding of the crisis and the dual role of critique in interpreting and affecting changes. They state that European sociology has to rely on (1) rediscovering its subject matter as being more than a technical order, as a social world that has a history and a place, and want to see (2) a broad-ranging debate on consequent conceptual and empirical questions. Biographical Sociology can contribute much to understanding the current crisis not only in the context of past crisis but also theoretically, methodologically and in the application of Biographical methods we have much to offer to debates on ‘Crisis, Critique and Change’. Papers are invited on the following themes.
