Professor Pierpaolo Donati
University of Bologna, Italy
Pierpaolo Donati is Professor of Advanced Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy). Past-President of the Italian Sociological Association, he is known as the founder of an original “relational sociology” or “relational theory of society” and has published more than 650 works, including 90 books.
Dr. Tony Lawson
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Tony Lawson is a trained mathematician located in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge University. His work spreads over various fields, but it focuses primarily in the philosophy of social sciences, in particular: social ontology. Amongst his publications are the Routledge monographs Economics and Reality (1997) and Reorienting Economics(2003). His views are much debated in the international academic community, numerous journal symposia and publications by others have been devoted to his work. The most recent is Edward Fullbrook’s Ontology and economics: Tony Lawson and his critics(2009).
Professor Douglas Porpora,
Drexel University, United States
Douglas Porpora is a professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He has written widely on social theory. His books include How Holocausts Happen: United States in Central America (1990 Temple) and Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (2001 Oxford). He is interested in how the American public sphere deliberates over such macro-moral matters as war and torture and is currently writing a book on how America debated the 2002 attack on Iraq and the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Centre for Social Ontology 