ISA Second Forum of Sociology

ISA Forum of Sociology took place in Buenos-Aires, Argentina. Ekaterina Lytkina tells about the Forum.

The Second Forum of Sociology of the International Sociological Association (ISA) took place in Buenos-Aires, August 1^st - 4^th, 2012. The conference was devoted to the topic "Social Justice and Democratization". The forum of sociology is held once in four years in between the ISA Congress of Sociology, which happens once in four years as well. Research assistant of the LCSR Ekaterina Lytkina participated at the Forum and now she shares her impressions of the event. 

I've attended the ISA Forum of Sociology for the first time, though I was a participant of the XVII ISA Congress of Sociology in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2010. The Forum was not as big as the Congress, but still there were a great number of simultaneous sessions of various research committees, so it was really hard to choose which ones to visit.

The format of the Forum differed from the usual format of the ISA Congresses a lot. Most famous sociologists presented their papers at research committees sessions, while the plenary talks were devoted to presentations of mostly unknown sociologists from various countries all over the world telling about the most acute social problems within their societies, as "Poverty and Human Rights" (Monica Pinto) or "Post-Democracy in an Increasingly Unequal World" (Edgardo Lander).

Though not all of the interesting sociologists scheduled on the program managed to get to Buenos-Aires, one should still enjoy presentations of Piotr Stompka (presenting papers on "Teaching Visual Methods, Learning to Become a Visual Sociologist" and "Visual imagination: An important competence of a sociologist"), Hartmut Rosa("Social time and the problem of desynchronization"), and Helena Flam, one of the most notable German specialists on social movements ("Transnational social movement as a governance babushka" and "Exporting justice, importing security, and the rise of the EU as a normative power"). One had also a great opportunity of getting acquainted with many interesting young sociologists all over the world both presenting papers and leading sessions and round table. Even though some reports or sessions were only in Spanish, there was a great amount of interesting sessions in English to consider and useful scientific contacts to acquire.

During the Forum I gave two oral presentations, "Anomie and alienation: Necessity of discrimination between the concepts" at the Round Table on the topic "Alienated labor in the production of cultural and social capital" (Research Committee 36, "Alienation Theory"), covering theoretical issues of separation of the concepts of anomie, anomia and alienation; and "Analyzing global social disorder: on relevance of classical theories of anomie and alienation" at the session "Cellular globalization: Social theory as projected on applied sociology" (Research Committee 26, "Sociotechnics, Sociological Practice"), in which I developed a model of operationalization of anomie, anomia and alienation and implemented it in a case study in order to demonstrate how crucial it was to draw difference between anomie and alienation in empirical research. It was a great opportunity to get feedback on my presentations related to the research project at the laboratory as well as my PhD thesis.

Ekaterina Lytkina