38th IIS World Congress, Budapest, 26-30 June 2008

To all members of the IIS and all interested scholars,

The 38th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology will take place, as announced, at Central European University in Budapest, Thursday evening, June 26 – Monday noon, June 30, 2008.

The theme of the Congress is:

Sociology Looks at the Twenty-first Century:
‘From Local Universalism to Global Contextualism

The four previous World Congresses of the IIS have highlighted dilemmas of human existence and societal institutions in the contemporary world. They have examined problems of social existence amidst processes of globalization, cooperation and violent conflict. They have been conducted in the spirit which guided the formation of the IIS, namely that of an engagement and encounterbetween a variety of theoretical positions among members of a truly international community of scholars.

The 38th World Congress will reaffirm that spirit. It will address some of the most fundamental issues of sociological inquiry in the light of global processes and the development of a range of other fields of knowledge: What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of social as opposed to natural processes? How do different efforts to map the social and political world interact with that world and with traditional sociological practices? What can we now say about relationships between scientific, political and religious beliefs? These are just some of the questions that will be raised at a congress that has the ambition to set the stage for a sustained look at what sociology may or may not have to say about the twenty-first century.

The structure of the Congress is straightforward. Each morning there will be two plenary sessions. Each afternoon will be devoted to sessions proposed and organized by participants themselves. Enclosed is a call for proposals for regular sessions to be submitted no later than September 30. The sessions selected will be announced by mid-October. Participants who want to present a paper in any of these sessions can then propose such a paper from mid-October 2007 until mid-January 2008.

The Congress is hosted by Central European University (CEU). It is jointly sponsored by CEU and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) and organized by Yehuda Elkana, President and Rector of CEU, and Björn Wittrock, Principal of SCAS and President of the IIS, together with Prem Kumar Rajaran (CEU), Shalini Randeria (Zürich and Berlin), Don Kalb (CEU), and Ivan Szelenyi (Yale University and CEU). Katalin Lassu (lassuk@ceu.hu), Senior Administrative Officer of CEU, is Executive Assistant for the Congress and responsible for its administration.

Among the speakers in the plenary sessions are

Arjun Appadurai, Rajeev Barghava, Rogers Brubaker, Ayse Caglar, Craig Calhoun, Tom Carothers, Thomas Cooley, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Peter Gärdenfors, Peter Hedström, Hans Joas, Sudipta Kaviraj, Ivan Krastev, Steven Lukes,
Helga Nowotny, Sheldon Pollock, Shalini Randeria, Alan Ryan, Gesine Schwan, Seteney Shami, Ivan Szelenyi, Piotr Sztompka, Pal Tamas, Yogendra Yadar.

All scholars are kindly invited to submit proposals for sessions at the Congress. Please send proposals no later than September 30 to iis2008@iisoc.org

The programme of the Congress and all other information concerning the event will be continuously updated on the congress homepage.

We greatly look forward to seeing you at a Congress that promises to set landmarks for the further development of sociology and the social sciences at large.

You are warmly welcome to Budapest in 2008,

Yehuda Elkana
Björn Wittrock

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