Description

Talking Circles offer an opportunity to meet other delegates with similar interests and concerns. Delegates self-select into groups based on broad thematic areas and then engage in extended discussion about the issues and concerns they feel are of utmost importance to that segment of the Research Network. Participation is open, encouraged, and supported.

How Do They Work?

The Talking Circles are grouped around each of the conference themes so discussions can focus on the specific areas of interest represented by each theme. 

How to Begin:

Allow members of the group to briefly introduce themselves. 

The facilitator should encourage open dialogue and ensure a collegial and respectful conversation. 

Starting Questions to Assist Discussion

Talking Circle: Who are we?

What is the territory, or scope, or landscape of this thematic area?

What are the burning issues, the key questions for this theme?

What are the forces or drivers that will affect us as professionals, thinkers, citizens, and aware and concerned people whose focus is this particular theme?

What are the future directions (in research, in theory-building, in practice) for this thematic area?

• Sociology: concepts and practices
• Geographical perspectives on spaces and flows
• What are the behavioral sciences?
• Psychology of the social
• Where mind meets world: cognitive science as interdisciplinary practice
• Economics as social science
• Sociology and history: the dynamics of synchrony and diachrony
• Philosophy’s place in the social sciences
• Social welfare studies as interdisciplinary practice
• Health in community
• Horizons of interest: agenda setting in the social sciences
• Research and knowledge in action: the applied social sciences
• Social sciences for the professions
• Social sciences for social welfare
• Accounting for inequalities: poverty and exclusion
• Social breakdown: dysfunction, crime, conflict, violence
• Social sciences addressing social crisis points
• Technologies in and for the social
• Economics, politics and their social effects: investment, ownership, risk, productivity, competition, regulation and deregulation, public accountability, stakeholders, trust, worklife, resource distribution, consumption, wellbeing, living standards
• Commonalities, differences and relationships between the social and the natural sciences: research methodologies, professional practices and ethical positions
• Research methodologies involving ‘human subjects’
• The social sciences in the applied sciences and professions: engineering, architecture, planning, computing, tourism, law, health

Theme 2. Civic and Political Studies

• Political science as disciplinary practice
• Investigating public policy
• Law as a social science
• Criminology as social science
• Public health
• Social sciences in the service of social policy: risks and rewards
• Social transformations: structure and agency in social dynamics
• Accounting for the dynamics of citizenship, participation and inclusion
• Trust, social capital, social cohesion and social welfare
• Politics in, and of, the social sciences
• Interdisciplinary perspectives on politics, public policy, governance, citizenship and nationality
• Security and insecurity, conflict and cohesion, war and peace, terror and anti-terror
• The neo-liberal state and its critics
• Policy measures: assessing social need and social effectiveness