2022 Social Thought Program Annual Conference

Theme: Race, Policing, and Social Theory

The 2022 annual conference for the Penn State Social Thought Program will be held Friday, April 1 and Saturday, April 2. The theme of this year’s conference is Race, Policing, and Social Theory. The keynote presentation will be given at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, April 1 in Foster Auditorium (102 Paterno Library). Conference presentations will take place from 9:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 2 in 406 Oswald Tower.

The keynote presentation will be given by Julian Go, professor of sociology atthe University of Chicago. Dr. Go’s talk—“Militarizing the Police: Empire, Race and the Global Color Line”—links waves of police militarization in the United States and Britain with “imperial-military” regimes that are inextricably tethered to empire, colonial counter-insurgency, and race. This historical sociology of police militarization offers opportunity to rethink how we theorize “policing” and its relations to racialization and imperialism.

This work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology and in the forthcoming Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829—Present from Oxford University Press.

For more information about this event, email socialthoughtconference@gmail.com.