Dear SSS colleagues,
Our opportunity to get together at the Southern Sociological Society meetings in Charlotte is now a couple weeks away. Are you excited? I am.
It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Vice President Anthony Peguero, Executive Officer David Brunsma, Associate Executive Officer Elizabeth Roberts, and Recording Secretary Rhiannon Leebrick as we have moved toward this event. And, I am blown away by the amazing job that Program Chair Lisa Slattery Walker and her entire program committee have done in helping to assemble this program and the creative efforts of Local Arrangements co-chairs Vaughn Schmutz and Zara Jillani to create some really special and fun experiences for us.
If you have downloaded Whova and taken a look at the program, you know exactly what I mean. I’ll tell you right now: you are going to have to make some choices. If you haven’t downloaded Whova yet, you can do so here. Create an account using the same email you use for the SSS Member Portal and you will automatically be added to the SSS 2025 conference. If asked for an invitation code, use: SSS2025CLT.
In the app, you can see the program, build your schedule, interact with old and new friends, locate your session room on a map, find out about side trips, restaurants, coffee shops, advertise a job, post photos, and more. You can find a list of Black-owned restaurants in Charlotte. You can sign up for the Donut Run on Friday morning. You can look at the food truck schedule to decide which day you’re having Texas BBQ, which day you’re eating Columbian empanadas and which day you’re going for a Vietnamese lunch. It gives us another way to engage with the conference as a community. For those of you who don’t like looking at the tiny screen on your phone, you can also access the program on Whova on your web browser using this link: https://whova.com/portal/webapp/sss_202504/.
Of course, we are all there for the sociology – and sociology we will have. Whether your bag is medical sociology, sociology of immigration, sociology of race, science and technology, group process, inequalities, environmental sociology, or criminology, we got you covered. You can go and hear it all. Or, if you want to stay in the same room and immerse yourself deeply in a set of related ideas and findings, you can attend a mini-conference on:
- Group Processes
- Disaster Futures and the Future of Disaster Studies,
- Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,
- Mental Health: A Public Health Problem, or
- Diasporic Womanism.
On Thursday, make sure to come hear about cutting edge work by Melissa Alinor, Scott Duxbury, and Thoa Khuu. Jody Clay-Warner will moderate a panel by these young scholars who will be giving us a preview of the Sociology of the Future. On Friday and Saturday. ASA President-elect Shelley Correll, SSS President-elect Kendra Jason, SSS past-Presidents — Stephanie Bohon, Larry Isaac, Barbara Risman, Lynn Smith-Lovin, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Program Chair Lisa Slattery Walker, and our distinguished guests, Omar Lizardo and Brian Powell, will lead us in discussions the Future of Sociology. Please come join the conversation.
If you want to sit down and have engaged, high-level discussion about some sociology, come to one of the roundtable sessions. If you are impatient to consume a lot of great sociology in a short period of time, make sure to come to the Flash Talks on Thursday morning and take it all in. If you want to learn more about publishing your journal articles – there is Thursday morning session on the Art of Publishing (with J. Scott Carter and Cameron Lippard) and a Friday morning workshop on Demystifying Publishing in Sociology (with Barbara Risman and Don Tomaskovic-Devey). On Saturday morning, you can also go receive some GIFTS (Good Ideas for Teaching in Sociology). And, whatever you do, don’t miss the amazing array of work that will be featured in the Poster Session on Thursday evening.
If you had thought about skipping these meetings but are reconsidering – it’s not too late! You can register onsite. All that good Southern sociology will be there waiting for you in Charlotte.
Dawn T. Robinson
SSS President
P.S. The JEDI Committee is still accepting donations of books by and about historically marginalized communities, which will be raffled off to student attendees at the end of the conference. More information about that here.