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About the Conference

The overall goal of this conference is to improve understandings of how sociologists can mobilize transnationalism at the local and international levels to respond to and account for present-day social transformations through academic work. The nation-state is often the starting point used to understand social change within society: what is included or excluded as important groups and processes for understanding these changes and the social inequalities that manifest (or are mitigated) from them. The concept of transnationalism as a corrective to methodological nationalism offers an opportunity to expand accounts and explanations of social transformations beyond these limited geographical and imagined boundaries of the nation, and thus who and what constitutes 'the social' as a result. yet. In fact, transnational lenses may be leveraged to paradoxically reinforce concepts of society as confined within a nation-state world order .

Without coordinated dialogue and international exchange, these paradoxes and fragmentations may subsequently limit our ability to account and address some of the most critical social issues of our time such as climate change, displacement crises, anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of right-wing nationalist Parties that fuel and relate to changing configurations of belonging, work and family.

Invited participants will therefore take on the 'tumultuous' task of addressing what transnationalism means theoretically, methodologically and pedagogically, and how our assumptions about 'the transnational' often direct, shape, and perhaps unwittingly limit how 'we' may think about the transnational, too. Participants' contributions will draw on their own research and instruction, and will have the opportunity to collectively reflect on how to incorporate them into a comprehensive research agenda moving forward.