International Political Sociology Symposium at SSE brings artists, historians and ritual practitioners together
The day’s activities include roundtables on religious and magic rituals and rituals in our everyday social lives, plus an intervention by London-based performance artist group Plastique Fantastique.
Have you ever blown out a candle for your birthday, and made a wish? Do you cross your fingers or look for four-leaf clovers for good luck? We all rely on small rituals to manifest what is not yet available to us.
This week, SSE’s Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations is hosting the international event ‘Enchanting the Social – Rituals for Collective Life’, a one-day symposium exploring how rituals, ceremonies and everyday practices shape social life, texture our politics and produce possibilities for living otherwise.
Giulia Carabelli, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, and Jamie Matthews, Lecturer in Sociology who are hosting the event said: “We are very excited about welcoming Plastique Fantastique to SSE to hear about how they draw on ritual performance, sigil magic, and storytelling in their artistic practice.
“We hope these conversations will connect critical sociology with practitioners and thinkers experimenting with new ways of remaking social and ecological relations.”
The Symposium questions this need for rituals at times of crises, and explores them from the more overtly symbolic or aesthetic forms of religious and magic ritual to the quotidian repetition, performance, and shared practices that give political life its texture.
The Symposium brings together a pool of interdisciplinary speakers to facilitate a discussion around the need for rituals (magic or not) to make sense of life, to navigate crises, and perhaps also to imagine a different future.
Giulia and Jamie said: “We are particularly looking forward to hearing from the first panel about religious and magic rituals to then reflect, in the second panel, about the more mundane rituals that shape our everyday life and politics.
“Sociology at SSE is a growing discipline and events with international reach like this one showcase the importance of sociology as a subject at the school, leading the way in the field on a global level.”
Across the day’s two discussion panels, contributors will include: Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths); Çiçek İlengiz (Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin); Dawn Lyon (Sussex, Kent); Zoë de Luca Legge (independent curator); Liz McDonnell (Sussex); Delfi Nieto Isabel (QMUL); Alex Rhys-Taylor (Goldsmiths); and Jabulani Shaba (Groningen).
The Symposium is convened by the International Political Sociology research group within the department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations. It is supported by the Forum on Decentring the Human at QM.