CALL FOR PAPERS:
Storied Lives: Culture, Structure, and Narrative
2012 ANNUAL MEETING
EASTERN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Millennium Broadway Hotel
New York, NY
February 23-26, 2012
The ESS welcomes submissions addressing any and all issues of interest to sociologists, drawing on
methods of every sort. In addition, the 2012 meeting will have a special focus on “Storied Lives.”
Men and women live in stories and through stories. They tell stories, individually and collectively,
about themselves and others, about and on behalf of the families and communities in which they live,
the organizations in which they work, the causes in which they believe. They tell stories about the
routine and the extraordinary, about their highest aspirations and their deepest fears. Some of these
stories are acts of liberation, calls to discover new identities and to discard old oppressions. Others are
themselves acts of oppression, stories that inscribe and justify existing inequalities of wealth, honor
and power. Men and women tell stories, as do groups, organizations, and movements, but not under
conditions of their own choosing. Rather, they tell stories within the limits of culture and in response
to the demands of structure. They tell stories with the resources, material and symbolic, at hand. But
these resources are distributed unequally with the result that some stories are heard, some demand to
be heard, and others are ignored altogether. The 2012 meeting of the ESS will consider stories across
a range of settings—at the workplace and in families, in communities and in religion, about
immigration and about race, in the nation and across borders, about crime and about the law, and,
not least, in the construction of both personal and collective identities. The meetings will examine the
conditions under which men and women tell stories but also the conditions those stories help create.
Although the ESS particularly encourages submissions related to this year’s theme, we welcome
submissions on all sociological topics, drawing on all methods and a variety of forms. We particularly
welcome proposals for innovative forms we have not had the wit to think of in addition to:
 Individual papers (please include abstracts of 250 words or less; longer drafts are also
welcome via email to the program committee)
 Wholly constituted sessions (with names and affiliations of all presenters)
 Thematic Conversations (panels of two or more scholars engaged in debate or exchange)
 Workshops on specific topics and techniques
 Special sessions organized around prominent scholars and their work
 Roundtable and poster session presentations
 Mini-conferences
 Details about electronic submission will be posted in the next ESS newsletter, announced
electronically on the ESS Announce List, and available at the ESS website:
http://www.essnet.org. Paper submissions and session proposals are due by October 15,
2011. Proposals for mini-conferences are encouraged by June, 2011.
 Questions should be sent to: easterns2012@gmail.com
Program Committee: Dan Clawson (Co-Chair), Mary Ann Clawson (Co-Chair), Robert
Zussman (President), Anne R. Roschelle (Vice President), Enobong Branch, Naomi Gerstel,
James Jasper, Jennifer Lundquist, Millicent Thayer
Details about electronic submission will be posted in the next ESS newsletter, announced electronically
on the ESS Announce List, and available at the ESS website: http://www.essnet.org.