PRESIDENT’S LETTER

Dear RC02 Members,

It was a pleasure to virtually see many of you in the audiences of the 4th ISA Forum of Sociology on 23-28 February 2021. For those of you unable to attend, our newsletter editor, Dustin Stoltz, has asked some of the session organizers to write summaries of their sessions for this issue of the newsletter. All ISA members and all Forum participants can watch recordings of any session at the Forum by logging in to the Forum’s program or looking here.

The ISA Forum gathered together 3,516 participants from over 100 countries, with roughly half female (56%) and a quarter students (25%). Brazil contributed the largest number of scholars (656), distantly followed by the United States (314), Germany (286), India (163), the United Kingdom (146) and Japan (145). Other countries with over 100 scholars attending include Canada, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Argentina and France. Within RC02, 27 session organizers created 21 sessions with 86 authors presenting their work. In addition, RC02 members organized or significantly contributed to organizing several semi-plenaries and common sessions: a tribute to Immanuel Wallerstein, a session celebrating the life and work of Erik Olin Wright, and a semi-plenary that contributed political economic analyses in “The Politics of the Population Census: Key Indicators for Sustainable Development?” RC02 also co-organized joint sessions with RC09 (Social Transformations and Sociology of Development), RC 46 (Clinical Sociology) RC48 (Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change), among others. 

We took advantage of the Forum’s online location to host our Business Meeting on another Zoom platform, thereby allowing members who had not registered to attend the Forum to nevertheless join us. Our business meeting attracted 20 scholars world-wide on a Sunday—some attending very late at night or very early in the morning from Japan and Australia. For those of you who were able to attend, I’m grateful for your ideas, feedback, and commitment to the research committee.

Candidly, the online Forum was smaller than our original plans. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Forum was organized for Porto Alegre from 14-18 July 2020, we had 26 sessions and 163 authors. In addition, Nadya and I had organized a day-long pre-conference on Cultural Analyses of the Economy with an opening and closing keynote speaker: Philippe Steiner and Fredrick Wherry. To the degree that the online version of the Forum was a success, it was a success due to RC02’s 27 session organizers who organized their sessions for Porto Alegre in July 2020, re-organized it for Porto Alegre in February 2021, and then re-organized it a third time for the online variant. It is a testament to our session organizers that we lost only five sessions under these challenging circumstances.

COVID-19 continues to circulate globally, with unpredictable consequences on global society. Meanwhile, RC02 and the ISA are in the process of planning for the next World Congress of Sociology as well as two RC02 thematic interim conferences. As of today, the ISA will certainly not hold the World Congress, as scheduled, as an in-person event in July 2022. We are debating whether to hold it as an online-only event around July 2022, or to plan for an in-person/hybrid event around July 2023. The ISA Assembly of Councils will meet on May 1st to deliberate on the two options and to make a formal vote.

In the meantime, if you have any ideas, plans, suggestions, or time to contribute to RC02, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at any time.

Aaron Pitluck
RC02 President (2018-2022)
Illinois State University