ASA Theory Section

Theory Section Sessions at ASA 2026 in New York

Submit Here


Coser Salon and Lecture
The annually organized Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting recognizes a mid-career sociologist whose work holds great promise for setting the agenda in the field of sociology. The 2026 Lewis A. Coser Lecture is delivered by a faculty member to be determined in the Fall. The talk will be followed by a reception.
Participants:

Critical Epistemologies of the Global South
It is now commonplace knowledge that sociological theorizing, especially in the United States is mostly shaped by Western thought, creating Eurocentric theories and analysis. In turn, this recognition leads to calls for the “recovery” of theorists not represented in the canon and a turn towards theorists from the Global South (understood as a political and social, rather than a geographical, category). In this panel, we use the second tactic, asking for papers that are critically grounded in the Global South, or more generally, non-Western frameworks either as theoretical development or empirical analysis. In submitting this joint call from the Theory and GATS section, we build on the strength of both sections and draw papers from across them. In this way, we hope to spur the growth of truly balanced sociological theories: afterall, sociological theories are not generalizable if they are based on only a small slice of the world.
Additional Information: This is a joint session with the GATS and Theory Sections.
Participants:

Marxism and Anti-Colonialism
The Marxism and Anti-Colonialism session invites papers that explore the historically dense, complex, and sometimes fraught engagement of Marxism with colonialism. The session suggests four broadly conceived avenues through which this relation between Marxism and anti-colonialism can be explored.

First, how did the various global traditions of Marxism—in both theory and political practice—historically encounter, conceptualize, and challenge colonialism. Reciprocally, how did the colonial past give contoured shape to Marxisms around the world? Second, how did Marxisms’ encounter with the colonial question broaden the theoretical problematics of Marxism to engage with questions of slavery, racial capitalism, dispossession, gender, uneven development and other constitutive aspects of the colonial past and present. Third, how has Marxist sociology contributed to thinking colonial relations both historically and contemporaneously. What conceptual and theoretical interventions have emerged from the synthesis of Marxism and sociology to make sense of and critique the colonial present? Finally, in the context of repeated calls for decolonizing knowledge and the sociological canon, what resources does Marxism and Marxist sociology provide for a decolonial and global social theory?

We invite papers with varied methodologies and theoretical persuasions that seek to both historicize and situate the interaction between Marxism and colonialism, offer new readings of Marxist anti-colonial thought, and show how Marxist discourses and critiques of capitalism were deeply entangled in the colonial world system.

Additional Information: This session is joint with Marxist Sociology.
Participants:

Microsociologies, Mezosociologies, and Macrosociologies: Scale, Level, Integration
From interaction rituals to histories of empire, Sociologists move across scales of analysis, with varying ways of theorizing from the scalar. Ethnomethodologists and affect theorists often generalize from a conversation or the interior life of individuals toward the structural., while world-systems scholars and theorists of empire abstract from global dynamics to explain organizational and human behavior. Across the discipline, methodological orientations — grounded theory, abductive analysis, extended case method, and hypothesis testing — also raise questions of level, inference, and generalization. This raises several key questions. How are sociological findings at one scalar level translated into general theoretical insights about society at large? What rationales do sociologists use to defend their choice of scale? Do they treat scale as inherent to the object of study, as a theoretical commitment, or as a methodological convenience? What would a sociology of scale look like? What analytic moves, conceptual tools, or methodological practices allow sociologists to connect across scales – moving from the micro to the macro, or vice versa, without collapsing one into the other?
This session welcomes papers that engage with these questions and also serve as examples of analytic moves that attempt to theorize across scales.
Participants:

Rethinking Theories of Gender, Race, and Sexuality from Anti-, De-, and Postcolonial Perspectives
This panel seeks to bring together papers that critically examine theories of gender, race, and sexuality from anti-, de-, and postcolonial perspectives. We are interested in work that is grounded in situated differences—whether historical, geographical, cultural, or identity-based—rather than assuming the universal applicability of existing theoretical frameworks. We welcome submissions that explore how these new approaches can reshape the production and development of theories of gender, race, and sexuality, as well as the relationship between theory and practice. By interrogating how dominant sociological theories of gender, race, and sexuality have reproduced hegemonic frameworks, this panel aims to foster critical engagement with the possibilities and challenges of employing anti-, de-, and postcolonial perspectives, while advancing theoretical dialogue on how these approaches can inform scholarship, pedagogy, and politics.
Participants:

Social Theory and Complexity Science: New Research Directions
After relational and cultural turns, sociology could take a complexity turn in light of recent developments in complex systems research across the sciences. Complexity research explores how social systems far from equilibrium self-organize and produce emergent properties. Self-organization through scale-invariance and nonlinear sensitivity to initial conditions is typical of complex social systems which exist in the phase space between chaotic and congealed states. At this edge of chaos, the presence of power-law and other long-tailed distributions signals that systems are self-organizing by preferential attachment and other feedback loop mechanisms. Runaway loops accumulating change may cross a threshold and enter a phase transition (bifurcation) where new social organizations emerge. Phase transitions are like dialectical transformations in Hegelian parlance where changes in quantity become changes in quality and new forms emerge at larger scales. For example, a city can phase transition from industrial to postindustrial reaching a threshold after which new emergent properties arise, like unexpected health disparities. We live in complex social systems far from equilibrium with path-dependent histories and unpredictable phase transitions, and that now more than ever exist in strained relations with our planet. In this context, social theory would benefit significantly from a closer engagement with complexity research which can provide interdisciplinary frameworks to bridge our current fragmentation of sociology.

This panel aims to present and discuss recent scholarship that engages complexity thinking with social theory. The panel welcomes submissions from a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Topics may include, among others: (1) What new theoretical frameworks in network analysis or agent-based modeling are incorporating in their models historical path dependence and/or meaning-making, such as meta-rules and second-order observations? (2) Given that systems boundaries in human life are seldom physical but primarily semiotic, how can semiotics (e.g., indexical semiotics and metapragmatics) contribute to our understanding of boundary formation and multiplex context-making in complex social systems? (3) How can intersectional or postcolonial theorizations of power and identity help us understand dualities of differentiation and interpenetration in complex systems where multiple effects occur in same social spaces (e.g., interpenetrations of class, race, and gender)? (4) How is the digital revolution (e.g., social media and artificial intelligence) “self-organizing” our social world with unintended consequences for civic cultures and institutional practices, including ideological polarization fueling the crisis of liberal democracies?

Additional Information: This session is cosponsored by Theory and Mathematical Sociology.
Participants:

Social Theory and Environmental Change
The reality of rapid environmental change, as well as increased recognition of how social dynamics are in some senses also ecological dynamics, has led to increased sociological attention to environment. This panel will examine how social theory can best continue to bring environmental change into its remit, both today and in the near future. It welcomes conversation and critique of fundamental questions, for instance what it might even mean to do “environmental” social theory in 2026, as well as papers on particular substantive processes and problems, epistemological approaches, and/or ontological arguments. The goal of this session, however, is not to rehearse well-worn debates regarding any line between society and environment. It is instead to put scholars into conversation across distinct analytical registers and perspectives so that social theory can more precisely turn toward the interactive nature of social and environmental change.
Participants:

Theorizing Capitalist Crisis & Middle-Class Politics
The erosion of class locations is not an isolated or bounded phenomena but rather speaks to the global crisis of capitalism. The middle class emerges as a pivotal site for examining the relationship between capitalist crises during the past decades of global neoliberal restructuring. From the foreclosure crisis in the United States after 2008, to austerity in Europe, and sovereign debt traps across the Global South, middle classes once considered stabilizing forces are increasingly destabilized. In response to the devastating impacts of austerity politics massive waves of global protests have erupted in the past decades expressing disdain and indignation over deteriorating living conditions. Yet, even amidst heightened disillusionment, broad masses of people retain emotional attachments and subjective investments in fraying ‘good life’ promises under capitalism. While traditional class analysis, specifically Marxist theories of class formation, have sidelined the category of the middle class, theorizing its eventual dissolution into either one of the two poles, transformations in labor, consumption, and production brought about by rampant financialization and neoliberalization have forced scholars to come to terms with global middle-class transformations. Scholars have pointed to the ambivalent and contradictory class locations occupied by the middle classes. States have clear stakes in promoting middle classes—in the interest of capital, profits, and political stability—even as they simultaneously delegitimize, and, when necessary, suppress, class-based politics (Heiman et al. 2012). In this panel we ask: what forms does middle class politics take within contemporary global capitalist relations? How are middle-class subjectivities remade in the ruins of financial capitalism? How can we theorize class transformation and class politics in relation to the dialectics of conflict and stability under capitalism, while remaining attentive to the multiple modes of agency through which people constantly renegotiate shifting class identities in the contemporary crisis-ridden global landscape?
Participants:

  • (Session Organizer) Mona Khneisser, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
  • (Presider) Mona Khneisser, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Theorizing the Populist Moment
What has been referred to as “the populist moment” has manifested itself throughout much of the world in recent years, generating a noticeable increase of interest in populism among both scholars and casual observers. Despite the proliferation of populism research in recent years, this apparent increase has been largely driven by political science and social psychology, leaving the sociological qualities of populism underdeveloped. Sociologists can offer a wide range of theoretical insights to better understand what has become such a prominent feature of political life and culture. This session seeks papers that aim to uncover salient conceptual dynamics of populism in its various dimensions (e.g., ideational, performative, etc.).
Participants: