Editorial
Over the past half year, the RC02 V Forum Program Committee has been busy building the largest RC02 program in our history. We are looking forward to welcoming all participants in the next week in Rabat!
We invite all participants to an RC02 Dinner Wednesday 19:30 Dar Naj in Rabat City (see Invitation this issue and be sure to get a free ticket through the Eventbrite link).
Please attend the RC02 Business Meeting Thursday 19:00-20:30 SJES030 Faculty of Legal, Economic and Social Sciences to discuss the future of the RC and planning for the World Congress in Gwanju South Korea 2027. We depend on the active participation of our members!
ISA members continue to mourn the untimely death of RC02 member, past ISA president, and founder of Global Dialogues, Michael Burawoy on February 3, 2025. Many tributes have reflected on Michael’s work and his public intellectual activities as one of the foremost social theorists of our time. Michael’s tragic passing was a heavy blow, but RC02, along with RC44, where he also made significant contributions, is now looking ahead. We are committed to deepening our engagement with public sociology and offering a tribute that reflects what Michael would have done in response to tragedy and adversity. Please join us for the Research Committees Tribute to Michael Burawoy Wednesday 17:00 – 18:45, SJES001 Faculty of Legal, Economic & Social Sciences.
The full RC02 Forum Program for the V Forum of the International Sociological Association is available here:
https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/forum2025/meetingapp.cgi/Symposium/839
As a sign of our dedicated to advancing early career researchers, the program begins on Monday morning with two sessions dedicated to PhD and post-doc presentations organized by Sandhya AS (see article this issue). Thanks to members Gracia Liu-Farrer. Sanjeev Routray, Aaron Pitluck and June Wang.
The RC02 program includes several thematic foci, worthy of mention. Four RC02 panels on environment, economy and society scheduled on Tuesday and Wednesday take up pioneering aspects of the conference theme Knowing Justice in the Anthropocene from an economy and society perspective:
Disaster Socialism (Monday 15:00-16:45)
Building the Environmental State: Markets Movements Bureaucracies (Tuesday 11:00 -12:45)
Chinese Investments in Africa and Other World Regions and the Just Transition Path (Tuesday 13:00 – 14:45)
Ocean and Society: Organisational and Technological Developments (Wednesday Part I 11:00 – 12:45 and Part II 13:00 – 14:45)
A focus the economy and social regulation of migration and global mobilities, spanning four panels, with an author-meets-critics panel covering violence in the global economy in an author-meets-critics session on trafficking in human beings.
Inequalities and Access of Cross Border Labor Markets (Tuesday 9:00 – 10:45)
Subjection and Struggle of Non-Movers, Migrants, and Refugees: A Dual Marginal Space and the Nation State (Tuesday 19:00-20:30)
Cross-Border Labor Markets: Actors, Infrastructures and Institutions (Thursday 9:00 – 10:45)
India’s Migration Development Regime: A New Analytical Framework for Labor Migration (Thursday 11:00 – 12:45)
Economic Sociology of Transnational Labor: Skills, Sectors and Finance (Thursday 13:00 – 14:45)
The Economic Sociology of Migration (Thursday 15:00 – 16:45)
Authors-Meets-Critics: Trafficking Chains – Modern Slavery in Society by Sylvia Walby and Karen Shire
As in the past, the RC02 program advances leading research on the reproduction and care economies internationally, this year drawing on original research about gray markets, regional care labor markets in the global north and south, and in a new book featured in Author-Meets-Critics, on theorizing solidarity in securing livelihoods and social care.
Varieties of Care across the Global North and South Part I (Wednesday 9:00 – 10:45)
Varieties of Care across the Global North and South Part II (Wednesday 11:00 – 12: 45)
Authors-Meets-Critics: Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest by Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han, with comments by Bridget Kenny, Eleana Kim, Rina Argawala, Marcel Paret, Yewon Andrea Lee.
The sociology of finance remains a focus with two panel scheduled for Friday morning.
Contested Financial Imaginaries: Islamic, Hindu Cybernetic, Cooperative and Sustainable (Friday 9:00 – 10:45)
Financial Relationships: Violent, Marital, Intergenerational, Gendered and Emotionally-Laden (Friday 11:00 – 12:45)
The RC02 program committee has included a series of panels on topics on theoretical traditions and empirical evidence of major socio-economic transformations bringing leading scholars into dialogue with early career researchers in economy and society research.
The Continued Relevance of Marxism Today (Monday 13:00 – 14:45)
Navigating Authoritarian Capitalisms: Insights from variegated perspectives on labor, gender and social economies (Tuesday 15:00 – 16:45)
World Economic Change and Waves of Social Protest: Findings from the Global South Protest Data Base (Wednesday 13:00 – 14:45)
Revisting Revolutions: Debates and Trajectories (Wednesday 15:00 – 16:45)
The Political Economy of Violence (Thursday 13:00 – 14:45)
RC02 members from Morocco have organized a panel dedicated to Personal Branding for Professors and Researchers (Thursday 9:00 – 10:45)
At the crossroads of economy, sociology and addressing social inequalities in the economy is the study of entrepreneurship, featured in RC02 session Entrepreneurship and Enterprises from the Lens of Justice (Monday 9:00 – 10:00)
RC02 joins seven other RCs in joint sessions on Violence (WG11), Organizations and a second series of panels on Ocean & Society (RC17), Equitable Development (TG03), Democratic Innovations (RC18) Futures of Globalization and a second on Just Development Transitions (RC09).
RC02 together with RC41 has organized an integrated session dedicated to Scientific Knowledge and Social Practice – High Expectations, Tensions and Compromises, (Monday 17:00 – 18:45) and joins Part I of the RC41 session on Research to Practice? Concepts of ‘Knowledge Transfer’ and Their Elective Affinities (Tuesday 8. July). Plans are already underway for a special issue of Current Sociology.
A tip for those attending an ISA conference for the first time: the conference program includes a tool for constructing a personal conference calendar. Be sure to include the RC02 Business Meeting scheduled for Thursday, July 10, 17:00 (for the agenda, see the notice in this issue).
My heartfelt thanks to Program Committee Members for their persistent efforts to make a conference program inclusive of diverse members from all world regions and addressing cutting-edge research on economy and society.
In this first issue of the RC02 Newsletter 2025 we continue the presentation of new members’ profiles. The RC02 membership has grown to well over 200 since 2023, and we are especially pleased to welcome many new early career researchers as members and scholars from the global south. Their participation in the network is reflected in the diversity of regions covered in the RC02 Forum program.
In this issue we present the participants of the early career researchers panels at the Forum (see the accompanying article by organizer Sandhya AS). Aaron Pitluck presents a special issue of Current Sociology on the RC02 project to broker new concepts in economic sociology, out of sessions in the last world congress, and covering a number of ethnographies of economy and society throughout the world. Ece Kocabıçak in From Farm to Factory: Not for Women in the Global South challenges recent Nobel Prize in Economics winner Claudia Golden’s assumption that economic development will improve the livelihoods of women in middle- and lower-income countries. Ece Kocabıçak, drawing on a recent article with Yasemin Dildar demonstrates that patriarchal relations in production also have a determining effect on the share and quality of women’s labor force participation.
The publication of this newsletter and the V ISA Forum in July 2025 take place in a period of extreme violence and dislocation in Central Asia and the MENA region, regions of the world where geopolitics, legacies of colonial development, and incomplete revolutions continue to threaten not only livelihoods, but lives. Whether the aggressions in Iran, Gaza and the Ukraine constitute one war, or three is a debate. What appears certain is the relation of rising authoritarianism to violence, human rights, and environmental destruction. The V ISA Forum is our chance to build solidarity, search for solutions, and defy repression through theory driven research that matters, and collegial discussion that carve out pathways for a peaceful and sustainable future.