Programme and Keynote speakers 2025

Thursday, March 20, 2025

10:00 Registration begins
12:00 Welcome words and Thesis Award
12:30 Plenary I: Mark Carrigan, Can ChatGPT do Public Sociology? Sociological Practice, AI and Platform Capitalism
13:30 Coffee break
14:15 Working groups
15:45 Break
16:00 Working groups (Finishing at 17:30)
17:30 Ilmiö-preparty in Portti (more information below)
19:00 City reception, dinner and evening celebration in Karen

Friday, March 21, 2025

9:30 Working groups
11:30 Lunch
12:30 Plenary II:  Neferti X.M. Tadiar, This Bridge of Earth
13:30 Break
13:45 Panel discussion: What is Sociology and Sociological Expertise of the Future?
14:30 Westermarck Society’s spring meeting and Conference closing remarks (Finishing at 15:15)

 

Ilmiö preparty!

Ilmiö magazine, which aims to provide ”sociological media for all”, is organising a preparty for the participants of Sociology Days on Thursday, March 20 from 17:30-19H — just before the evening dinner! Come and meet your colleagues as well as the editorial staff of Ilmiö and discuss the popularisation of sociology!

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Mark Carrigan – The University of Manchester, UK

Dr Mark Carrigan FRSA FHEA is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester where he is programme director for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (DTCE) and co-lead of the DTCE Research and Scholarship group. Trained as a philosopher and sociologist, his research aims to bridge fundamental questions of social ontology with practical and policy interventions to support the effective use of emerging technologies within education. He has written or edited eight books, including Social Media for Academics, published by Sage and now in its second edition. His latest book Generative AI for Academics will be released by Sage later this year.

He jointly coordinates the Critical Realism Network while being active in the Centre for Social Ontology and a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. He is a board member for a range of publications, including Civic Sociology, the Journal of Digital Social Research and Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Mark Carrigan: Can ChatGPT do Public Sociology? Sociological Practice, AI and Platform Capitalism – Abstract

Can ChatGPT do public sociology? The question might seem frivolous at a time when generative AI is generating widespread anxiety within universities about the integrity of assessment. However, I suggest it helps us understand the profound implications which these systems have for sociological practice. Drawing on my research into how academics use social media and generative AI, I argue that conversational agents can support public sociology in concrete and practical ways. However, this possibility needs to be understood against the backdrop of platform capitalism within which these tools have emerged. Far from being a radical break with what came before, generative AI represents an intensification of the dynamics which defined social media platforms: the enclosure of social activity as training data, the computational processing of human experience and the commodification of interaction. Under these conditions, the capacity of conversational agents to support public sociology exists in tension with their contribution to a deteriorating digital public sphere. Understanding this tension through the lens of sociological practice can help us negotiate between the opportunities and threats which generative AI poses for public sociology, as well as suggesting how we might contribute to the development of more sustainable digital platforms which could support rather than undermine public scholarship.

Prof. Neferti X. M. Tadiar – Barnard College, Columbia University, USA, & Linköpings Universitet, Sweden

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial feminist scholar of Philippine cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy. She is currently the Moa Martinson Guest Professor (2024-2025) in the Division of Migration, Ethnicity, and Society at Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden, and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York city. She is the author of several books on Philippine culture, literature, and social movements, and globalization. Her most recent books are Life-Times of Becoming Human (2022), a treatise on life expenditure and global humanity, which won the 2023 Philippine National Book Award for Philosophy; and Remaindered Life (2022), an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, which was awarded The ASA John Hope Franklin Prize as Best Book in American Studies in 2023.

Her current book project, entitled Vital Platforms: A Brief Cultural Genealogy, explores kinship networks and human mediatic capacities crucial to Philippine communities’ social reproduction in the long durée of Spanish and U.S. colonialism (16th to 20th centuries). A new research project focuses on socio-environmental transformations in Northern Luzon, Philippines in the long 20th century.

She is the founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library, cultural space, and publishing house in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar: This Bridge of Earth – Abstract

How can a regard for the earth offer alternative ways of attending to the experiences of the dispossessed? Of connecting these experiences across historical social and temporal differences? How can the earth be a bridge? In this talk, I read select poetry, narrative, and art from Palestine and the Philippines to probe the role that earth plays in people’s movements in war and survival, struggle and community, becoming and belonging. I provide a meditation on elements of the landscapes of struggle rendered by those seeking living despite and through ongoing catastrophes. Out of these elements I attempt to weave another geography, another map, another itinerary for reckoning with these vibrant milieus of people’s life-making, beyond the devastation inflicted on them and their lifeworlds by genocidal and ecocidal imperial and colonial wars and the active wasting of the world under late global capitalism.

Through this exercise I offer another method for seeing and making the world, beneath the threshold of recognition and understanding of the ruling disciplinary humanities and social sciences we inherit from Western colonialism. It is an example of other possible ways of knowing and telling, other times of unfolding, that we might explore in the building of a decolonizing people’s pluriversity and another shared earth.