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 engage new audiences with the work of Norbert Elias and to extend figurational or processual perspectives into emerging areas of inquiry. We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical perspectives. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- 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.
- Historical and contemporary analyses of power, exclusion, and adaptation in transnational contexts.
- Contributions engaging with Elias’s work critically, comparatively, or in dialogue with other theoretical traditions.
We warmly invite you to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words by Monday 30th November 2026 using the button below.
We look forward to receiving your submission.