Speakers
Keynote Speaker: Professor Ghassan Hage
Professor Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. He works on questions of nationalism, migration and inter-cultural relations from a comparative perspective. His most well-known publications are White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Barbara A. Misztal
Professor Barbara A. Misztal is Head of Department of Sociology at the Leicester University. She is theauthor of Public Intellectuals and the Public Good (CUP, 2007), Theories of Social Remembering (2003), Informality (2000),Trust in Modern Society ( 996). Her new book project aims to enhance sociological understanding of the concept of vulnerability.
Keynote Presentation: The source of intellectuals’ public standing: the lesson from a Nobel Trinity
The paper’s aim is to debate what public intellectuals can earn the attention of a general audience. By focusing on unusual achievements of three women sociologists who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the paper demonstrates what social scientists can offer in the role of public intellectuals and shows what does provide intellectuals with the authority to speak to a non- academic audience. Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch and Alva Myrdal’s achievements as public intellectuals and their input into public life document that the essential feature of public intellectuals’ authority is their professional knowledge and their standing in the field. Their idea of sociology’s contribution to improving the quality of public discussion, like Burawoy’s project of public sociology, stresses an organic relation between sociology and its various publics. Their accomplishments as public intellectuals and their ability to put important issues on the public agenda can be seen as a result of their ability to courageously uphold and act upon their core civic values. The paper concludes by arguing that Addams, Balch and Myrdal’s successful realization of their goals was possible because of both: their professional credential and their courage to take on risky actions for purposes to institutionalise social or cultural change.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Philippa Pattison
Professor Pip Pattison is a quantitative psychologist interested in the development of mathematical models for social and behavioural phenomena, particularly for social networks and network-based social processes. Her current research focuses on the development of dynamic network-based stochastic models for social processes, and on applications of these models to a diverse range of phenomena, including: the epidemiology of mental health; organizational design; the emergence of markets in 15 the century Florence; river management; and the spread of communicable diseases.