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. 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 18^th 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. Margaret S. Archer (†2023) was one of the most distinguished sociologists and social theorists of the late 20^th and early 21^st 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