Dear RC02 Community,

In 2019, your Program Co-organizers for the Fourth ISA Forum of Sociology, Nadya Araujo Guimaraes and myself, have been busy organizing two conferences for 2020.

The ISA Forum will be held July 14-18, 2020 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The topic of economy and society is a large one, and we are organizing or co-organizing 26 sessions under this big tent. Nearly all these sessions were filled through competitive calls for abstracts advertised in this newsletter as well as cognate listservs. As detailed elsewhere in this newsletter, we have an open competition for Registration Grants that are designed to promote access and participation at the Forum by conference participants who are student members or members from middle- and lower-income countries.

We are also organizing a full day pre-conference entitled, “Cultural Analyses of the Economy” on July 13, 2020. We will have two keynote speakers. Philippe Steiner (Université Paris-Sorbonne) will open the pre-conference with a lecture titled, “Culture and the Economy: From Horkheimer to Bourdieu and Beyond.” Our closing keynote will be delivered by Frederick Wherry (Princeton University). There will be no registration fee for the pre-conference. As detailed elsewhere in this newsletter, we have two open calls for abstracts for the pre-conference with closing deadlines of January 5, 2020.

I encourage you to mark your calendars for both conferences in Porto Alegre from 13-18 July 2020.

We’ll have our interim Business Meeting at the Forum. In the meantime, if you have any comments, ideas, or would like to volunteer your time to advance our Research Committee, please don’t hesitate to contact me: Aaron.Pitluck@IllinoisState.edu.

Also, in this quarter’s newsletter, Manalisa Sarmah and Laletendu Kesari Das offer a preliminary report on ongoing research about the politics of private school accreditation in India, and Dustin Stoltz reviews Steve Viscelli’s The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream (UC Press).

Aaron Pitluck
RC02 President (2018-2022)