Dear Colleagues and Friends,

As I write this, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to take root worldwide, including in Brazil where the ISA Forum was supposed to be held last month. As you may recall, the Forum had been postponed to February 23-27, 2021. The ISA Forum’s organizers are waiting until September to see how the disease and global responses develop before deciding how to proceed forward. As soon as I receive additional information, I’ll post it to our weekly website and your email boxes.

RC02 was also planning two international conferences in the summer of 2021 in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These conferences were intended to be fully-funded in-person events and so both sets of organizers have chosen to push their conferences forward, most likely to the summer of 2022. The World Society Foundation, the conferences’ principal funder, has in principle agreed to support this transition.

To use the vocabulary of our times with its emphasis on video conferencing and online teaching, we can no longer rely on synchronous in-person global conferences to maintain our academic community. We must look for asynchronous alternatives.

We are fortunate to have one such community-building tool. Almost two years ago, Dustin Stoltz and I initiated the RC02.org website which merged our previously text-based email listserv and our pdf newsletters. You should be receiving weekly emails from RC02 with announcements for calls for papers, conferences, job positions, and other items of interest. If you haven’t been receiving them, click ‘sign up’ at the bottom of the RC02.org website.

These are frankly bleak times accompanied by death, social instability, and authoritarian tendencies. Yet these crises provide a potential catalyst for community building. Last weekend I counted at least 7 Black Lives Matter street demonstrations within 3 kilometers of my Chicago apartment. Since the first protests began on May 26 in response to the police murder of George Floyd, there have been over 4,700  demonstrations geographically spread across the United States from small towns to large cities; by some measures this may be the largest social movement in U.S. history. This is a rare opportunity for the USA to not merely enact police and criminal justice reform but also social, political, and economic reparations for Black Americans to redress four centuries of exploitation and oppression. 

In this spirit of solidarity and outreach in an era of social distancing and restricted travel, the board and I are developing new strategies to reach out to you and distant colleagues. One simple thing each of you can do is to share opportunities with others. When you receive an email describing an opportunity of interest to scholars in Economy and Society, please forward it to Dustin Stoltz (dss219 [at] lehigh [dot] edu) who will then post it as an announcement in our weekly emails and archive it on the RC02.org website. Please forward your emails in French, Spanish or English (the three working languages of ISA). The more you share with colleagues, the stronger our community. The minute you spend forwarding an email could potentially alter the career trajectory of a colleague that you haven’t yet met. 

If you have ideas on how to promote connections within RC02, or if you have an initiative that you’d like to volunteer for, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me (Aaron.Pitluck [at] IllinoisState [dot] edu).

In closing, I’d like to publicly thank one such colleague. For the past two years, Dustin Stoltz has donated his time as our secretary and newsletter editor while working in the graduate program at the University of Notre Dame. Having defended his dissertation, The Sociology of Elite Advisors, he’ll continue in both roles in his new position as Assistant Professor at Lehigh University. Congratulations, Dustin!

Aaron Pitluck

RC02 President (2018-2022)
Illinois State University