The Society for Socialist Studies Annual Conference
“Crises, Contradictions, and Collective Life”
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto
June 2-4, 2025
Our social will be held at the Duke of York pub on June 3rd (just around the corner from the conference). To register, please click here. Please note that you will have to register for the conference and social separately! Just click through the registration process twice – once for the conference, once for the social.
Downloads
2025 GAMM Draft Agenda
SSS 24-25 Financial Statements and 25-26 Proposed Budget
Proposed SSS Constitution and Bylaws for Decision at 2025 GAMM
Treasurer’s Report to 2025 GAMM
SSS Governance Committee Report 2025
Current SSS Executive with Vacancies 2025
Call For GAMM and Executive Nominations
The contemporary moment is defined by profound threats to collective life: from intensifying genocidal projects in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, to a resurgent fascism and militarism across the globe, to the undermining of Black and Indigenous life in shifting practices of racial and colonial domination, to capitalism’s broader threat to the ecological conditions of life as such. At the same time, new movements, new forms of struggle, and new modes of thought have emerged to answer these challenges. How can socialism – a theory and practice oriented toward the liberation of collective life from the stultifying, atomizing, and murderous tendencies of capital – answer these intensifying threats to collective life?
This year’s conference is therefore situated in and amid the contradictions of collective life, of intellectual life and political action in the context of scorched earth, genocidal politics. At the same time, we cannot decontextualize this conference from the broader politics of today; the urgency of the moment and its challenge to intellectual life was highlighted by universities’ attempts to repress protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine. What does it mean to have a conference negotiating the future of socialist thought and action in a setting undergirded by the funding of genocide and repression of critique? As such, the conference calls for contributions that ask how stretching our analyses – emphasizing new strategies, new tactics, and new frameworks – can answer this call.
We orient this conference by three linked tasks facing socialist politics and socialist analysis at present: the diagnosis of contemporary crises, the analysis of contradictions within frameworks, movements, and tactics that respond to these crises, and the examination of the multifarious and expansive reimaginings of collective life in and beyond socialist traditions. In this call for sessions and papers the Society invites reflections on strategy, tactics, and theory in the face of deepening crises, sharpening contradictions, and the problem of remaking collective life under threat. We especially encourage submissions that foreground expansive understandings of social struggle and social theory that widen our understanding of socialist study and socialist politics.
The Society welcomes proposals for sessions and papers that address, but are not limited to:
- Strategy, tactics, and theory related to climate crises
- Peace movements, anti-militarism, and anti-fascism
- Anti-imperialism and internationalism
- Racial and colonial capitalism
- Black and Indigenous analysis, struggle, and imagination
- Reconsideration of ‘classic’ socialist texts in times of crisis
- Queer anarchism and racial capitalism
- Queer and trans anti-Fascist struggles
- Analyzing and combating fascism and right-wing populism
- Geopolitical and international political economy
- Analysis, evaluations and critiques of ‘polycrisis’
- Work, workers and solidarity
- Disrupting institutions and ‘the law’
- Resisting financialization and urbanized accumulation
- Abolitionist praxis and carceral capitalism
- The role of the state in crises and transformation
Please submit a session proposal (detailing a theme, papers, and presenters) or a paper proposal by January 31, 2025, using this form.
Questions may be directed to 2025sssconference@gmail.com.
Please note that this year’s Society for Socialist Studies conference will be a standalone conference, not as part of the Congress for the Social Sciences and Humanities.