At the end of the year 2024 the RC02 board is looking forward to our two next large events, the 5th ISA Forum in Rabat, Morocco from July 6-11, 2025 and the 21st World Congress of Sociology in Gwanju, Korea July 4 – 10, 2027. The forthcoming IV ISA Forum in Rabat, Morocco, will be the largest RC02 to date, with 28 sessions, nine collaborative sessions and a diverse expansion of membership across global regions to address broader economic and social challenges (see my article in this issue).
In this last issue of 2024, we introduce a new format where new RC02 members introduce themselves. Since August 2024 when the new board took office our membership has been growing steadily, now at about 220 total members. We are especially happy about the number of young scholars joining our RC, and the geographical spread of our membership across all regions of the world, ensuring diverse perspectives in addressing a wider range of economic and social challenges globally.
A highlight in our activities since the last newsletter was the International Political Economy of Labor Migration conference held in Duisburg, Germany, July 18 – 22, 2024, with generous support from the World Society Foundation. A full report on the conference appears is in this issue by Heidi Gottfried and Karen Shire. We thank the foundation, especially for the support in awarding travel grants to scholars from the Global South participating in the program.
In this newsletter we include original reports of research by several RC02 members. The article by Natascia Tieri underlines the importance of labor policies and employment as part of disaster relief efforts. RC02 Vice President Nadya Araujo Guimarães reports from ongoing research on collective care labor and the chains of solidarity required to support these. Readers can look forward to two Session at the Forum organized by Nadja and RC02 past president Heidi Gottfried to learn of more cutting edge theoretical and empirical research on global reproductive labor. An index for measuring patriarchal family relations, a part of understanding societal systems of patriarchy, is presented in the article by Mikolaj Szotzsek. His piece also illustrates its use in mapping results globally. Lynn Ng Yu Ling reflects on the failure of migrant destination countries to adequately recognize the qualifications of migrants obtained in their countries of origin. The misrecognition of qualifications is not only a matter of the loss of skilled labor, as skilled migrants are forced into underemployment, but also an act of systematic structural discrimination against migrants in destination labor markets.
While our attention is now focused entirely on the 5th Forum next year, the brief but shocking return to martial law in Korea this past month turns attention to the location of the 2027 World Congress, and memories of what happened in 1980 in Gwanju. The coincidence of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Han Kang, an author from Gwanju writing about the 1980 protest, massacre and subsequent suppression of democratic movements, presents a rare chance to prepare for the conference through works of fiction. In her novel, Human Acts, published in English in 2017 readers follow the end of youth for adolescents wretched out of their everyday school lives to witness, or fall victim to the mass and indiscriminate shooting of passers-by and protestors in 1980. In a third act about censorship as both physical and psychological violence, and a fourth about the long-term trauma of torture, readers experience how cultures and lives can no longer be recovered so easily, while humanity becomes a hard fought for condition. Kang could not have anticipated the return of martial law in 2024, however brief. The reaction of the Korean people in the last month in massive protests demonstrated how deeply 1980 Gwanju is embedded in collective memories and the will to protect Korea’s hard-won democracy, while other so-called advanced nations seem to give up on justice easily in the ballot boxes of ‘fair’ elections. The World Congress presents us with a chance to build sociological knowledge about protecting and building more democratic and just social orders. What better place than Gwanju, Korea for this task!
Finally, we wish all RC02 members a joyful and fulfilling 2025 filled with happiness and meaningful experiences!