About the Conference

This international conference explores how contemporary societies are being shaped by intersecting global crises, including climate change, pandemics, digital surveillance, migration pressures, and political polarisation. These developments reveal the increasingly complex and fragile nature of social interdependence, where historical patterns of co-operation, inequality, and belonging are simultaneously intensified and disrupted. In this context, shifting We–I balances and established–outsider relations provide important insights into how social figurations are being transformed across local, national, and global settings.

The conference seeks to introduce and extend the work of Norbert Elias to new audiences and emerging areas of inquiry. We warmly welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical perspectives. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the emergence of new ‘We’-identities and established–outsider relations within organisations, politics, and activism; interdependencies in the age of social media, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic governance; figurational approaches to food, nature, the environment, and non-human animals; revisiting Elias’s work in relation to authoritarianism, disinformation, and social unrest; and analyses of power, exclusion, adaptation in transnational contexts.

The conference is supported by the Norbert Elias Foundation and represents a collaborative endeavour between Manchester Metropolitan University and The University of Manchester.