BSA Annual Conference 2008: Plenary Speakers

We are delighted to have three of the UK's prominent sociologists speaking at the Annual Conference.  Addressing key issues within the theme of Social Worlds, Natural Worlds, the plenary speakers are:

		CANCELLED Professor Nikolas Rose London School of Economics   “The normal and the pathological: Managing bodies and minds in the age of molecular biomedicine”
CANCELLED Due to unforeseen circumstances Professor Nikolas Rose has had to cancel his plenary session.  Professor John Urry will now present “Complexity and Climate Change” - further details can be found below.
		Garry Runciman University of Cambridge   “Natural, Social, Cultural”
Relationships between the human and the natural world are a topic of longstanding sociological interest.  But if they are to be adequately explained, a clear distinction must be drawn between the cultural and the social as well as between the cultural and social on one side and the natural on the other.  Cultural behaviour is the acting-out of information transmitted from mind to mind by imitation or learning, whereas social behaviour is the acting-out of information encoded in rule-governed practices which define institutional roles.  The importance of the distinction for the theme of this conference can be illustrated by examples ranging from the fur trade in 18th-century North America to the policy of the British government in relation to sexually transmitted diseases in the First World War.    W.G. (Garry) Runciman has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1971, and of the British Academy, of which he was President from 2001 to 2005, since 1975.  His major publications include Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (1966) and A Treatise on Social Theory (vol. I, 1983; vol. II, 1989; vol. III, 1997).   He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh, London, Oxford, and York.  He chaired the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in England and Wales of 1991-3 whose report led to the setting-up of the independent Criminal Cases Review Authority to investigate possible miscarriages of justice.
		Professor Kate Soper London Metropolitan University   “Unnatural Times? The Social Imaginary and the Future of Nature”
Unprecedented bio-technological powers to intervene in ‘nature’, and even create it, co-exist today with extensive concern about the use of these powers, and with alarm verging on panic about climate change and its potentially uncontrollable consequences.  This paper opens with some reflections on the variety of contemporary responses to this context, their rationale in current strands of thinking about the environment, science and philosophy, and the contrary discourses on ‘nature’ that underlie or support them.   Although critical of any essentialist appeal to ‘nature’ in this capacity, a qualified defence is offered of the importance of respecting certain intuitive discriminations about what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’.   But it is also argued, that just as we should not overlook intuitive resistances to moves such as cloning or breaching the species barrier, so we should not overlook the much more decisive role of current socio-economic relations on human (and other animal) modes of existence and forms of potential.  Alarms about the future of genetic engineering should not distract from more pressing concerns about the role of the globalised economy and its consumerist vision of the ‘good life’ in precipitating irreversible global warming and socio-ecological collapse.  The paper ends with a sketch of the ‘alternative hedonist’ social imaginary that could help to promote the move to a much needed post-consumerist social order.   Kate Soper is a Professor of Philosophy in the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University.  She has written extensively on social and cultural theory, feminist issues, the conceptualisation of nature and environmental issues.  Her recent writings include:  What is Nature ? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, London, Blackwell, 1995;  To Relish the Sublime?  Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern Times, London, Verso, 2002 (with Martin Ryle).  She has recently completed a research project funded by an AHRC/ESRC award in the ‘Cultures of Consumption’ Programme on ‘Alternative Hedonism and the Theory and Politics of Consumption’ (see Culture of Consumption website under ‘Research’), and is currently working on a number of publications in association with this. She is co-editor with Frank Trentmann of Citizenship and Consumption, Palgrave, 2008, and with Lyn Thomas and Martin Ryle of Counter Consumerism and its Pleasures, Palgrave, 2009.
PROFESSOR JOHN URRY	Professor John Urry Lancaster University   “Complexity and Climate Change”
Professor Urry’s paper examines some major social changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon earth. It deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within contemporary capitalism, from societies of discipline to societies of control, from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess, and from low carbon to high carbon societies. In focusing upon emergent contradictions I am claiming that capitalism is its own 'gravedigger'. Marx and Engels wrote how modern bourgeois society: 'is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells'. I examine how contemporary capitalism through major emergent contradictions is bringing through climate change: 'disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger[ing] the existence of bourgeois property'. I argue that examining the array of adaptive and co-evolving complex systems involved here is the best way of comprehending how 'planet Earth does not generally engage in gradual change. It is far cruder and nastier' (Fred Pearce). And this provides sociology with the most essential of tasks, to examine the nature of those adaptive and co-evolving complex systems that like a ‘juggernaut’ (Giddens) are taking the earth to the edge of a climate change abyss.   John Urry is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University. He is a former RAE Panel Chair in Sociology (1996, 2001). He is the Editor of the International Library of Sociology and co-editor of Mobilities.   He has recently published Sociology Beyond Societies (2000), Bodies of Nature (2001, with Phil Macnaghten), The Tourist Gaze. Second Edition (2002), Global Complexity (2003), Performing Tourist Places (2004, with J-O Baerenholdt, Michael Haldrup, Jonas Larsen), Tourism Mobilities (2004, with Mimi Sheller), Automobilities (2005, with Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift), Mobile Technologies of the City (2006, with Mimi Sheller), Mobilities, Networks, Geographies (2006, with Jonas Larsen, Kay Axhausen), Mobilities (2007).   He is currently completing/working on Aeromobilities. Theory and Method (2008, with Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring), After the Car (2009, with Kingsley Dennis), Mobile Lives (2009, with Anthony Elliott) and a special issue of Theory Culture and Society on ‘Global Heating’ (2009, with Bron Szerszynski).

Further information regarding the plenary speakers and their subject will be available shortly.  Please watch this space for updates.

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