Open events

This session will offer a space for explicit engagement with the ideas, structures, and ways of knowing that often represent the 'background' of everyday life. Many theories have attempted to grasp at this liminal space: lifeworld, habitus, tacit knowledge, prereflective backgrounds, primary frameworks, spheres and counter-spheres, etc. We investigate how questions of such 'theories of the background' apply (and perhaps ought to be adapted) to the current circumstances of our age, whether epistemic, ontological, or ethical. The strength and flexibility of such a session is that all social questions – including such reckonings and re-imaginings as the focus of this year’s Congress – carry buried within them the question of ‘what is going on in the background?’ Sociology's inherently interdisciplinary nature represents a strength in this regard and therefore, with the help of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, the presentations included will represent a host of disciplines to help spark new theoretical engagements to answer the questions of today, tomorrow, and beyond.