2009 annual meeting
2009 Annual Meeting: April 8-11, Westin Gas Lamp Quarter, downtown San Diego
The 80th annual meeting of the PSA will take place on April 8-11 2009 at the Westin Horton Plaza Hotel in downtown San Diego. Please note that the meeting in 2009 will take place starting on Wednesday April 8th and end early afternoon on Saturday April 11th.*
SUBMIT A PROPOSAL TO ORGANIZE A SESSION
President Judith Treas, UC Irvine (jktreas@ucirvine.edu) invites session proposals for the San Diego Meeting. Nominate yourself or your colleagues today to organize a session by filling out the Session Proposal Form. Deadline is May 1, 2008. If you would like to discuss a proposal, please feel free to contact her at the email address above.
All proposed sessions must be approved by the Program Chair: Dennis Downey, Sociology Program, California State University, Channel Islands, One University Drive, Camarillo, CA 93012 (805)437-3315 dennis.downey@csuci.edu
THEME: THE SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY
A profound concern with inequality unites sociologists. Always central to our sociological research, inequality today presents a special challenge to our theories and understanding. Not since the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies have so many vast fortunes been made. Yet, for the first time in 40 years, the real household income of Americans has stagnated during a period of economic expansion. Race, class and gender continue to confer privilege or disadvantage, but new markers--such as immigration status, insurance coverage and digital divides--are now defining marginalized populations. The blatant discrimination of earlier eras has often given way to more subtle mechanisms of exclusion, such as the creeping privatization of public spaces. Fresh evidence on the lasting consequences of childhood disadvantage over the life course only underscores the cheerless fact that today’s inequality will impose costs reaching to future generations. Beyond intra-societal disparities, inequality has a global sweep. Cross-national comparison, however, offers encouraging examples of beliefs, practices and policies that promote more equal treatment, more open opportunity and more equitable outcomes.
The 2009 PSA Program will focus on social inequality, broadly defined, and on its causes and far-reaching consequences. The program invites us to take stock of sociological knowledge on inequality. It prompts us to reexamine the ways in which the study of inequality informs and motivates the subfields of our discipline. It addresses the urgent need to understand how inequality persists, how it changes, and how it can be resisted. How are social institutions--our families, schools, media and legal system--implicated in the perpetuation of inequality? What emerging or newly recognized forms of inequality demand the attention of sociologists? What strategies and interventions succeed in narrowing the gaps between individuals or communities? How do we better communicate what we know about inequality to our students, policy-makers and the general public?
The 2009 PSA Program Committee encourages a broad range of sessions illuminating the theme of inequality. We solicit sessions that speak to theoretical developments, methodological issues, and research findings on all dimensions of social disparities. We welcome a rigorous stock-taking of the sociological understandings of inequality in order to identify the conceptual challenges confronting the discipline and its many subfields. Our aim is to stimulate lively conversation from all points of view and thoughtful exchange between sociological researchers, educators, practitioners, and students.
Join us in examining inequality at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association. In keeping with our theme of inequality, the 2009 PSA will meet in downtown San Diego, the vibrant community at the Western terminus of the longest border between the developed and developing worlds. The meeting promises exciting exchanges of ideas in a broad spectrum of interactive formats: roundtables, debates, collaborative working groups, panel discussions, paper presentations, posters and didactic workshops. Come share your ideas and innovations in social theory, methods, teaching, and practice. As always, papers and presentations unrelated to the meeting theme are not only encouraged, but they will also make up a large part of the program.
Nominate yourself or your colleagues today to organize a session by filling out the Session Proposal Form. Deadline is May 1, 2008. All proposed sessions must be approved by the Program Chair: Dennis Downey, Sociology Program, California State University, Channel Islands, One University Drive, Camarillo, CA 93012 (805)437-3315 dennis.downey@csuci.edu
* The reason for the change from our normal Thursday through Sunday is that Sunday April 12th is Easter. And the reason for meeting April 8-11 is the greatly reduced sleeping room rate at the Westin. The PSA rate will be $149 single or double. The normal rates at the Westin are from $225-285. The PSA last met in downtown San Diego in 1997.