Society for Socialist Studies

Congress 2007 - University of Saskatchewan

Keynote Address by Dorothy E. Smith

Thursday, May 31, 2007

2:45pm

place TBA

Title: Making change from below: what can sociology offer?

I’ve been asked to summarize my plenary address and I’m not really finished with thinking through the issues I want to address but here’s what I want somehow to address:

1. I want to recognize how deeply we’re embedded in historical trajectories that are constantly changing our ways of life and the problems and issues we confront. Though Marx wrote his theory in the nineteenth century and things have certainly changed radically since then, we still have the central dynamic that he located, a dynamic that generates change beyond the intentions of individuals, even of a capitalist class. This is what we’re caught up in and we don’t know exactly where it’s going. We’re also caught up in a significant destabilization of climate brought about by industrialization and capitalism’s dynamic and we don’t know where that’s going to take us or how we are going to be able to respond to it.

2. In this historical setting, I want to pose an alternative to left-wing academic responses that are primarily focused on critique. I never underestimate the importance of being able to offer, particularly to students, an alternative vision of how things work to that that’s the ordinary constructions of news media and even of the internet. But I want to put forward as a complement to critique: the development of research that explores how what we so ambiguously refer to as power is actually put together. Recently I’ve been working with community organizations and in particular on how community organizations can be effective in making changes within a municipal context. I’ve discovered something quite new to me, though not at all new to those who are directly involved. There’s a complex of organizations, not-for-profit, community, non-governmental – there’s a variety of terms, but basically all are part of what’s sometimes called the new civil society; Examples are: trade unions, Oxfam, The Sierra Club, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Vancity credit union etc etc. My interest isn’t in describing this complex of organizations and relations, fascinating as that might be. Rather, I’m interested in developing sociological methods of investigating what they’re up that would be relevant and useful to organizations that are attempting in various ways to bring about change that works for people. This means exploring how what we simplistically call power – particularly the forms of power identified with government or governance -- is actually put together in people’s daily work routines and the forms of their coordinating. I’m interested in a sociology that can help to discover how to work for change from below or from within.

3. I want to enhance awareness of the potential significance of the complex of movements through which people of our own and other societies are making their concerns actionable. And I want us to think further of how we can work as academics to further knowledge of the workings of societies that must, I believe, be changed from within or below.

A Keynote address by Dorothy E Smith

Join us at Congress on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon

on Thursday, May 31st at 2:45 pm.