The ASA meeting will be entirely virtual this year:

https://www.asanet.org/annual-meeting-2021

Reminders: the deadline to submit a full paper or extended abstract is Wednesday, February 3, 2021 at 11:59 p.m Eastern. You can submit a full paper or extended abstract of 3-5 pages (with full paper due in early-July). 

Please consider submitting your work to our section sessions or roundtables! We look forward to seeing you (virtually) at the next ASA meeting! See below for a listing of the sessions.

SESSION 1
Title: Environment and migration: short term shocks, long term crises
Session Organizer: Leah K. VanWey, Dean of the School of Professional Studies & Professor of Sociology and Environment and Society, Brown University
leah_vanwey@brown.edu

Migration has been inextricably linked to socioeconomic development, and to environmental change, for centuries. Migration out of communities influences the local and regional environments through changes to land use systems. Historically, humans migrated in response to changes in environmental conditions. Yet results are mixed regarding the impact of changing weather or environmental shocks on migration; to date, evidence suggests that environmental change leads to relatively few migrants beyond those who would have left anyway. As we move into an era of rapid climate change and associated phenomena, new questions arise about how environment and migration will be connected. Will we see millions of climate migrants or climate refugees? How do historical migration patterns and paths of socioeconomic development influence how individuals, families, and communities respond to environmental changes? Will environmental hazards or disasters have differential impacts on migration of rich and poor, or of different racial or ethnic groups?

The year 2020 appears to be a tipping point in the global experience of climate change impacts, with intensified hurricane seasons, fires, heat, and evidence of accelerating species loss. At the same time, 2020 is a year of overlapping crises. The slowly intensifying threat of climate change interacts with the deep-seated impacts of white supremacy globally. These both interact with the acute global health crisis and related economic downturn. This session welcomes papers examining complexities surrounding the relationship between environment and migration, especially those with relevance to understanding the overlapping short term and long term crises facing the world today.

SESSION 2
Title: Food as struggle, food as resistance
Session Organizers:
Sarah Bowen, Assistant Head, Department of Sociology of Anthropology & Professor of Sociology, North Carolina State University, sarah_bowen@ncsu.edu
Marie Sarita Gaytán, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Sociology, University of Utah, sarita.gaytan@soc.utah.edu

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chains, caused cluster outbreaks among farmworkers and meatpackers, and contributed to unprecedented increases in rates of food insecurity in the United States and around the world. Fractures like these demonstrate how systemic racism, capitalist exploitation, and settler colonialism shape how our food is produced, distributed, regulated, and consumed. Yet food also continues to be a site of resistance, as illustrated by the Children of Smithfied campaign and other movements around food workers’ rights, as well as innovative collective efforts to feed hungry people during the pandemic. In this session, we welcome papers that analyze the struggles, inequalities, solidarities, and innovations that are part of the global food system. Possible topics include shifts in how supply chains are organized or regulated, social movements around workers’ rights or food safety, the experiences and perceptions of food workers or consumers, and efforts to foster food sovereignty or a more sustainable food system. We are especially interested in papers that consider how food shifts and discourses are tied to broader political-economic processes and/or social contexts. Papers do not need to focus on COVID-19 specifically, but we hope to use these papers to foster a broader conversation about how crises can generate new frames for thinking about what justice means in the context of the food system and how to achieve it.

SESSION 3
Title: The development of underdeveloped public health
Session Organizer: Nitsan Chorev, Harmon Family Professor of Sociology and International Studies, Brown University, nitsan_chorev@brown.edu

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, yet again, the unequal distribution of access to health – between rich and poor countries and, even more strikingly, within countries, between the socio-economic elites on the one hand and ethnic/racial minorities and the poor on the other. This panel interrogates the relations between development, public health, and economic and/or racialized social exclusions, at the transnational and/or local levels.

SESSION 4 and SESSION 5
Sociology of Development Business Meeting
Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtables
Matthew R. Sanderson, Chair, mattrs@ksu.edu
Joan Ryan, Roundtables Organizer, joanryan@sas.upenn.edu

Here are some of the topics submitted for panels that might be used to organize roundtables (we would need to see what papers are submitted by the February deadline):

1) Sociological Perspectives on Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene
2) Sociological Perspectives on COVID-19
3) Corruption and Development
4) Gender, Migration, and Development
5) Gender and Work
6) Development and Globalization
7) Migrant Crises and Urban Governance in the Global South
8) The SDGs and Legal Identity
9) Development and Maternal Mortality
10) Environmental Inequalities in Developing Countries
11) International Development and Urban (Re-)Development
12) Field Research Methods in Development Studies
13) Sociology of Agro-Food Systems and Alternatives to Development