Our 2009 annual meeting will be April 2-5 in New Orleans, LA. Please check back soon for more information.

Richmond, VA April 9-12, 2008

Movement Matters: Vision, Mobilization, and Memory

"I like a big tent for meeting thematics, one that spreads out and embraces a large number of our substantive concerns. But I also like one that has a central pillar. The 'movement matters'� couplet is that pillar and is intended to signify a duality, one that calls forth concerns of social movement scholarship as well as the belief that movements matter as collective agents in changing the world. There is plenty of room under the movement tent for us to examine all sorts of key sociological concerns: class, gender, race, age, sexuality, labor, immigration, civil rights, environmental degradation, region, globalization, and many others. I also want to signal a conceptual expansiveness that pushes beyond traditional movement questions, one that opens on the movement front-end and back-end, so to speak. Social vision, an imagination of alternative worlds, is what often inaugurates, animates, and drives many social activists who become part of movements to change the world. Yet we see little attention to such vision in the larger corpus of social movement studies. Where do such visions come from? How do certain biographical events and historical circumstances lead some to become visionary movement leaders? How does vision get shaped in the movement framing process? I want to encourage work that focuses on such vision, visionaries, and ways in which new visions sometimes get shaped into a social formation we recognize as a social movement."
--- Larry W. Issac (The Southern Sociologist, 39:2 p.2)

In case anyone still needs a copy: Richmond 2008 Program Atlanta 2007 Program