CALL for PAPERS

CULTURAL CHANGE, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, AND KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

SYMPOSIUM on SOCIOLOGY MARCH, 7-9

All academic activities will be celebrated at Zaragoza University, Paraninfo Building (Zaragoza City) and some Working Groups of the Symposium at the Economics Faculty.

THEME

Talking and writing about globalization and information society, or more recently knowledge society, is so widespread that it already risks to become a repetition and platitude. And yet, a closer look, scientific and interdisciplinary, reveals that behind surface phenomena like economic globalization and the Internet there is a deep-rooted change and upheaval of world society as well as individual everyday life. This upheaval is comparable in scope and consequences to what was called the Industrial Revolution in previous centuries. The Information Revolution is, for sure, based on new technologies, i.e. information technologies (IT), just like the Industrial Revolution was based on new technologies. But the changes brought forth are also in this case far-reaching cultural shifts and innovations for which the concepts of digital towns, digital divides, Internet and cyberspace are just first glimpses at a future still in the dark. These shifts entail new kinds of social problems with new qualities and hitherto unknown scopes. Under such a perspective this conference brings together a number of distinguished scientists of the International Sociological Association, ISA, representing a wide range of social science specialties with whom to discuss the implications of cultural change and the social problems inherent in contemporary and future knowledge society.

The conference aims to clarify conceptual tools which contemporary sociology and social sciences might be able to provide in order to deal with these issues both at a theoretical and methodological level. It intends to explore, to the extent possible within a few short days of debate, how these could be applied for pertinent research as well as for developing means and strategies to cope with the social problems analyze.

This will be done in plenary sessions starting out with the issue of social diagnosis for a single world and dealing in the following with the issues of cultural change, new social problems in moving societies, the digital world and cyberspace, and finally the issue of building societies able to cope with the changing world and its changing culture, and the challenges this poses for the social sciences. The plenary sessions will be complemented by working group sessions. This will permit to go into more detail and in particular to discuss these issues in more depth.