Community and Urban Sociology

ASA Online Portal is open for submissions: 

https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/asa/asa24/

Session 1. Interdisciplinarity and Urban Sociology
Session Organizers: Xuefei Ren and Claire Herbert
This panel addresses how urban sociology engages with scholarship in related fields such as urban planning, geography, urban economics, urban anthropology, and architecture. We invite papers that explore what makes urban sociology unique or how urban sociological approaches can enhance these related fields. We also invite papers that discuss what urban sociology can learn from these related fields to improve its own scholarship.

Session 2: Racial Capitalism and the Financialization of the City
Session Organizer: Luana Pinto Coelho
This panel examines how developers, speculators, community boosters, the state, and related actors shape urban life through their valuation and financialization of the city. We especially invite submissions that investigate how such processes are racialized and that engage with recent developments in racial capitalist approaches to urban sociology. Possible topics include but are not limited to how racial capitalism and the financialization of the city influence residential segregation, gentrification, housing, schooling, public health, environmental justice, or community and economic development.

Session 3: Suburbs, Small Towns, and Midsize Cities
Organizer: Kiara Douds
This panel speaks to the proliferation of suburbs, small towns, and midsize cities around the world. In established economies like the United States, these places have become important centers for demographic, economic, cultural, and political change, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We invite submissions that theorize the role that suburbs, small towns, and midsize cities play in the contemporary urban landscape, and how the differences between large and small cities are shaping trends in globalization, labor, migration, politics, and public policy.

Session 4. Urban Inequalities Across Canada
Session Organizer: Prentiss Dantzler, University of Toronto
While most of the world undergoes rapid forms of urbanization, Canada is experiencing an alarming rate of change. Population growth in cities is increasing the need for infrastructure and services of all kinds. Urban sprawl raises environmental concerns surrounding car dependent cultures and encroachment on farmlands, wetlands and wildlife. Although culturally and ethnically diverse, the country continues to grapple with questions around colonization, racialization, and indigeneity. To this extent, Canadian cities raise important questions about the theoretical portability of mainstream (often American) urban sociology and its methodological opportunities and limitations. This session centers the urban question within Canada to highlight the particular influence of space, place and community across the urban form.