Mid-Term Conference “Memory, Crisis and Future” ESA RN 03 “Biographical Perspectives on European Societies” in association with the Institute of Sociology at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen
Call for Papers (until 15 March 2025)
The European Sociological Association Research Network 03 “Biographical Perspectives on European Societies” and the Institute of Sociology at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen invite sociologists and social scientists to participate in our upcoming mid-term conference titled “Memory, Crisis and Future.”This mid-term conference will take place during the 30th Anniversary of the ESA RN 03. This milestone presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the network’s legacy in advancing European scholarship through interdisciplinary biographical methods. Over the past three decades, the network has led studies exploring contemporary societies and their transformations. Now, as the network enters its fourth decade, European societies grapple with recovery from the pandemic’s aftermath amidst geopolitical crises such as the war in Ukraine and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Compounded by the global environmental crisis, marked by unprecedented floods in Spain and wildfires in Southern Europe, these challenges have left deep scars on individuals and communities. At the same time, we continue to witness ongoing social conflicts surrounding the consequences and memorialization of past crises, conflicts, and disasters—such as wars, genocidal violence, and social and political inequalities—both within and beyond the European continent. These historical events shape the context in which current processes are interpreted. The rapid and dramatic societal changes, along with emotional traumas of illness, loss, and separation, call for a renewed focus on biographical research as a lens for connecting past, present, and future (Wengraf, 2001; Roberts, 2002; O’Neill and Nurse, 2024).
In this era of rapid global change, economic instability, environmental challenges, and political unrest, this conference seeks to explore the intricate connections between biography, memory and temporality, societal processes, and crises, as well as visions of the future. These themes are particularly relevant in a European context, where historical narratives and contemporary challenges continue to shape lives and societies. Biographical research, as Norman Denzin (1997) highlighted, embodies a humanistic commitment to studying the social world from the perspective of interacting individual. The conference aims to foster and encourage the interpretive analysis of lives, embracing the ethical, political, and self-reflexive dimensions of biographical research. As AI becomes an increasingly significant tool in academic research, we invite discussions on its role as a transformative tool shaping both methodology and understanding in biographical studies and AI as a critical subject of sociological examination. Given the profound societal changes we are witnessing, the importance of methodological innovation and the development of research ethics, ethical procedures and practices, including methodological governance remain one of the key challenges of biographical methodology (Caetano and Nico, 2018).
We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that explore issues, opportunities, challenges and addresses future prospects, in the following themes, but are not limited to these topics:
▪ Biographical Narratives and Memory: Exploring the mechanisms through which lives are remembered and stories are composed.
▪ Biography and Forgetting: Significance of forgetting and how the forgotten can shape the future.
▪ Future Perspectives in Biographical Research: Investigating how individuals and communities imagine, construct, and narrate their futures amid crises and societal transformations.
▪ Family and Intergenerational Narratives: Examining the family’s role in transmitting memory, managing crises, and shaping aspirations for the future.
▪ Innovations in Biographical Methods and Methodologies: Advancing techniques such as creative and arts-based, participatory, digital, visual, oral history, and documentary research; AI application in research; biographical story writing/telling as a form of elicitation in qualitative social research.
▪ Theoretical Contributions: Reflecting on theoretical advancements in biographical research and applying them to issues like environmental crises, geo-political shifts and conflicts, family disruptions, and crises of trust.
▪ Crisis as a Collective and Individual Experience: Examining how individuals and groups experience and narrate crises, influencing self-understanding and life trajectories.
▪ Political and Cultural Contexts of Crisis: Analyzing how political discourse, cultural practices, and global shifts shape individual biographies and societal transformations.
The conference will also include two special plenary sessions: one dedicated to the ‘30th Anniversary Reflections’, focusing on the legacy and future of the RN03 'Biographical Perspectives on European Societies' and the other presenting ‘Biographical Research in Germany’, highlighting its history, advancements, innovations, challenges, recent studies and impacts.