Conference Theme Overview

In the wake of multiple social transformations, ruptures, and crises around the globe, the theme for the 2024 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Meeting emphasizes sources of hope, dignity, and sustainability in economic lives. It starts by envisioning the interplay of economy and society as entangled, in that economic systems and economic lives are both constrained and creatively engendered by social structures, power, culture, and also, crucially, by emotions and technologies. How can we use research on entangled economies to envision and enact a better world and improved lives?

We look for inspiration from a diverse group of researchers who are deeply engaged with, and understandably concerned about, the state of the world today. We invite you to join us for the SASE meeting in Limerick, Ireland, 27-29 June 2024, to offer visions and propose solutions that disrupt the emotions, politics, and technologies of neoliberalism, with a goal to foster greater dignity and sustainability in local and global communities.

We welcome research that widely spans the levels of analysis within socio-economics. We take pride in the strongly established traditions at SASE in macro political economy, institutional analysis, and development. Additionally, we look for scholarship to shed light on the meso organizational contexts and, especially, the micro level of everyday economic lives, which deserves to be featured more prominently at convenings on socio-economics. 

At the broadest scale, we welcome submissions on trends in contemporary and historical political economy, financialization, and racial capitalism to address urgent questions of wealth inequality, global poverty, climate change, and the pitfalls of emotional capitalization and digital economies. Proposals are encouraged to think ambitiously about alternatives to neoliberalism and policy reforms to realize them.

At the meso level, studying corporations, non-profits, governmental organizations, social movements, and community initiatives helps us to delineate economic contexts that entrench exploitation, racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, LGBTQIA+ bigotry, and other sources of exclusion and emotional despair, but also to identify conditions for greater economic dignity and equity, and organizational designs and experimentation to sustain these.

At the micro scale, we invite scholarship and debate on the everyday processes of economic interaction in marketplaces, in online spaces, as well as within households and circuits of care. We want to understand the consequences of the social and emotional meaning of money and work, and how relational work can lead to improved economic lives. 

The SASE conference to be held in Limerick, Ireland, 27-29 June 2024, will feature papers on all issues of concern for socio-economics. This year, we especially welcome contributions that offer visions and propose solutions related to contemporary economic chasms (climate change, pandemics, economic inequality, global poverty, military conflict, surveillance, AI, and others) and how to harness emotions, politics, and technologies for greater dignity and sustainability in economic lives. As such, we are eager to showcase how social movements for economic justice, democratization of work, innovative approaches to cash relief, mutual aid, resistance to grind culture, reinvention of economic paradigms, and other efforts alternative to neoliberalism bring about better lives.

SASE’s current members are uniquely positioned to offer a broad range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives on these themes, but we also hope to attract new scholars to join our conversation. Participants are encouraged to submit their work to one of the 20 vibrant networks, or to submit proposals to this year’s thematic mini-conferences.

SASE provides a platform for creative empirical and theoretical research on key social problems. We are committed to supporting a diverse international membership encouraging lively intellectual and interdisciplinary debates on multiple perspectives. So, whether you are new to SASE or a seasoned aficionado, we invite you – with a limerick—to join us in Limerick!

We’ll hold a SASE meeting, you see, 

To change economic decree, 

Neoliberalism aside, 

’twill be a wild ride, 

To make a more just economy.

President: Nina Bandelj (nbandelj@uci.edu)