The CSO announces an online launch event for the ultimate book of Prof. Dame Margaret Archer.
Further information (incl. registration) on this webpage from the CRN.
Book description, featuring reviews from CSO members Doug Porpora and Emmanuel Lazega, on this webpage from the publisher CUP.
Picture: open book and sunset, generated by DALL.E on ChatGPT 4.0
We are delighted to announce a one-day symposium co-organised by Dr. Mark Carrigan with the BSA Theory Group. The symposium will be dedicated to exploring and celebrating the legacy of Prof. Dame Margaret Archer. The aim of the symposium is to engage with and critically assess Archer’s contributions to social theory, her influences and engagements outside critical realism, the global reception of her work, and her place within the larger tradition of critical realism.
Further information, including the call for papers, may be accessed here and here.
Picture: Warwick University House, Public Domain CC BY-SA 4.0 by Rwendland
The 26th annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) will take place from the 31st of July to the 2nd of August 2024 (+ pre-conference on the 29th and the 30th of July 2024). It will be hosted by the School of Law at the University of Warwick.
The theme – ‘looking back in order to look forward’ – commemorates the 1st anniversary of Margaret Archer’ s death as well as the 10th anniversary of Roy Bhaskar’s death.
All details of the event – including streams, call for papers, plenary speakers, bursaries, submission timeline and transportation & accommodation information – will be gradually posted on the conference website here.
The 11th annual Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) workshop Celebrating Margaret Archer’s intellectual life and contributions will take place at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM), Grenoble, France, from January 9th to January 12th, 2024. It will culminate in an open workshop (roundtable) Margaret Archer’s legacy to the social sciences in the morning of Friday January 12th. The CSO is glad to invite GEM colleagues (e.g., Professors, PhD students) to attend this open workshop. Other researchers in the Grenoble area are also welcomed. This year, we will discuss the legacies of sociologist and social theorist Prof. Dame Margaret S. Archer (†2023) who founded the CSO in 2011. Registration details below.
Margaret Archer’s legacy to the social sciences
Centre for Social Ontology Open Workshop
Friday 12th Jan. 2024, from 9.30am to noon
Grenoble Ecole de Management, 12 rue Pierre Sémard, 38000 Grenoble, France
Room F601 (last-minute change!), in-person only
Registration: please contact Aristide Bertrand on aristide.bertrand@grenoble-em.com (RSVP by Monday 18th Dec. 2023). Attendance is free of charge.
Discussants of this roundtable:
Ismael Al-Amoudi (Grenoble Ecole de Management, FR);
Mark Carrigan (University of Manchester, UK);
Anna Galazka (Cardiff University, UK);
Doug Porpora (Drexel University, PA, USA);
Genevieve Shanahan (Cardiff University, UK).
With special thanks from the CSO to Chrystel Brochand, from GEM research administration, for her prime role in making it possible for these discussants to discuss at GEM in-person.
Prof. Dame Margaret S. Archer (†2023) was one of the most distinguished sociologists and social theorists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Although her life and career have been long and fruitful, her death also leaves a void among academics, esp. those interested in interdisciplinary research that combats structures of oppression and inequality. She leaves behind a large and dense sum of works that deserves to live through the future writings of new generations of scholars.
This year’s CSO Open Workshop consists in a roundtable gathering scholars from various disciplines and of various levels of experience who engaged with Archer’s work in their research. Participants shall discuss the contributions of Prof. Margaret Archer both to social theory and to the practices of (inter-disciplinary) social scientists. Doing so is compounded by the breadth of Archer’s intellectual career that went through several intellectual turns, each spanning over thousands of densely written pages: realism and temporality in the 1990s, in defence of Humanism in the 2000s; social reflexivity in the 2010s and philosophical reflections on personhood and robophobia in the late 2010s/ early 2020s…
Picture at the top: Copyright Agence Prisme / Pierre Jayet via GEM photothèque
The 2023 Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) will take place from the 9th to the 11th of August 2023 (+ pre-conference on the 7th and the 8th of August 2023). It will be hosted by the Gokongwei Brothers School of Education and Learning Design (GBSEALD) of the Ateneo de Manila University. All details of the event – including themes, call for papers, plenary speakers, submission timeline and transportation & accommodation information – can be found on the conference website here.
The 2022 Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August 2022 (+ pre-conference on the 8th and the 9th of August 2022). It will be hosted by the International Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in the Hague (Netherlands) part of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Details of the event, including themes this year centred around ‘Realist Complexity, between Causal and Complex Systems’ can be found on the conference website here.
The ninth annual Centre for Social Ontology workshop will take place at Grenoble Ecole de Management from January 11th to January 14th, 2022. It will culminate in a roundtable with Prof. Margaret Archer and colleagues on the morning of Friday January 14th.
This roundtable is intended both as an intellectual exchange and as a celebration of the recent quadrilogy The Future of the Human.
Until the most recent decades, natural and social science could regard the ‘human being’ as their unproblematic point of reference, with monsters, clones and drones being acknowledged as fantasies dreamed up for the purposes of fiction or academic argument. In future, this common, taken for granted benchmark will be replaced by various amalgams of human biology supplemented by technology – a fact that has direct implications for democracy, social governance and human rights, owing to questions surrounding standards for social inclusion, participation and legal protection.
Considering the question of who or what counts as a human being and the challenges posed by anti-humanism, the implications for the global social order of the technological ability of some regions of the world to ‘enhance’ human biology, and the defence of humankind in the face of artificial intelligence, the books in this series examine the challenges posed to the universalism of humankind by various forms of anti-humanism, and seek to defend ‘human essentialism’ by accentuating the liabilities and capacities particular to human beings alone.
Those interested in attending are requested to RSVP before December 15th with Ismael Al-Amoudi: ismael[dot]al-amoudi[at]gmail.com.
Friday 14th January 2022, Grenoble Ecole de Management, room E341
The 2021 Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (#IACR2021) will be held online this year. Hosted by Rhodes University and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), it will take place via Zoom from the 20th to the 24th of September. Details of the event, including subthemes this year centred around the unifying theme of emancipation, can be found here.
The latest volume of the Post-human Society and the Future of Humanity book series has been published and is available for purchase from Routledge. Edited by Margaret Archer and Andrea Maccarini, this compilation of essays “asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings despite their continuous enhancement – a nature that can serve to distinguish humans from artificially intelligent robots, now and in the foreseeable future.”
Considering what might qualify as such an essence, this volume demonstrates that the abstract question of ‘essentialism’ underpins a range of social issues that are too often considered in isolation and usually justify ‘robophobia’, rather than ‘robophilia’, in terms of morality, social relations and legal rights. Any defence of human exceptionalism requires clarity about what property(ies) ground it and an explanation of why these cannot be envisaged as being acquired (eventually) by AI robots. As such, an examination of the conceptual clarity of human essentialism and the role it plays in our thinking about dignity, citizenship, civil rights and moral worth is undertaken in this volume. What is Essential to Being Human? will appeal to scholars of social theory and philosophy with interests in human nature, ethics and artificial intelligence.
1. Introduction – Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini
2. On Robophilia and Robophobia – Douglas V. Porpora
3. Sapience and Sentience: A Reply to Porpora – Margaret S. Archer
4. Relational Essentialism – Pierpaolo Donati
5. Artificial Intelligence: Sounds like a friend, looks like a friend, is it a friend? – Jamie Morgan
6. Growing Up in a World of Platforms: What Changes and What Doesn’t? – Mark Carrigan
7. On Macropolitics of Knowledge for Collective Learning in the Age of AI-Boosted Big Relational Tech – Emmanuel Lazega and Jaime Montes-Lihn
8. Can AIs do Politics? – Gazi Islam
9. Inhuman Enhancements? When Human Enhancements Alienate from Self, Others, Society and Nature – Ismael Al-Amoudi
10. The Social Meanings of Perfection: Human Self-Understanding in a Post-Human Society – Andrea M. Maccarini
The latest volume of the Post-human Society and the Future of Humanity book series has been published and is available for purchase from Routledge. Edited by Mark Carrigan and Doug Porpora, this volume “engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence.”
With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological ‘advances’ introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of ‘essentialism’ that justifies providing a ‘decent minimum life’ for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.
1. Being Human (or What?) in the Digital Matrix Land: The Construction of the Humanted – Pierpaolo Donati
2. Being Human as an Option: How to Rescue Personal Ontology from Transhumanism, and (Above All) Why Bother – Andrea M. Maccarini
3. Perplexity Logs: On Routinized Certainty Work and Social Consequences of Seeking Advice from an Artificial Intelligence – Emmanuel Lazega
4. Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Social Care in Aging Societies: Who or What Will Care for Us in the Future? – Jamie Morgan
5. Why Should Enhanced and Unenhanced Humans Care for Each Other? – Ismael Al-Amoudi and Gazi Islam
6. Can Humans and AI Robots be Friends? – Margaret S. Archer
7. Humanity’s End: Where Will We Be in a Million Years? – Douglas V. Porpora
Centre for Social Ontology 