Symposia

The DoingIPS has organised an annual symposium on research topics in International Political Sociology since 2023. The Symposium is held at Queen Mary University of London and organised by members of the institutionally based Research Group on International Political Sociology. 

DoingIPS Symposium 2026 ‘Enchanting the Social: Rituals for Collective Life’

In this one-day symposium, we will explore how rituals—broadly conceived—help produce, stabilise, and transform collective life. While some panels will examine explicitly ceremonial or spiritual practices, we are equally interested in the more ordinary, patterned repetitions through which social worlds are made. From habits of care to public performances, from activist repertoires to institutional routines, these practices shape how people imagine futures, sustain solidarities, and navigate political and ecological uncertainty. Through round-table discussions and moments of participatory practice, we aim to develop sociological reflections on how rituals—whether spectacular or mundane—organise social relations, generate affective bonds, and materialise forms of collective agency. By bringing together scholars who study everyday social processes with those examining more overtly symbolic or aesthetic forms of ritual, the event opens space to consider how repetition, performance, and shared practice give political life its texture. We hope this conversation will connect critical sociology with practitioners and thinkers experimenting with new ways of remaking social and ecological relations. 

Organisers: Giulia Carabelli and Jamie Matthews

More information and the full programme will be available soon on the Symposium page.

DoingIPS Symposium 2025 'Haunting Histories': An IPS Symposium

This symposium invited participants to reflect on the role of history in shaping world politics and the ways we understand, (re)construct, and are moved by the past. Overarching questions include: How do legacies of empire and colonialism continue to haunt world politics in the twenty-first century? How can we balance fine-grained historical scholarship with interconnected histories that cut across spatial or temporal boundaries? How might our histories be animated by more-than-human forces from the natural to the supernatural to capitalism? How might the ‘return’ of geopolitics threaten current global political norms, institutions, and solidarities? This symposium brought together an interdisciplinary, international team of senior and early-career scholars working at the cutting edge of these questions.

The symposium was co-organised with and sponsored by the Research Group on International Political Sociology (SPIR, QMUL), the LTDS programme Mobile People: Mobility as a Way of Life, and the School of Politics and IR at Queen Mary University of London.

Organisers: Jaakko Heiskanen and Joanne Yao

Details on the programme can be found here. 

DoingIPS Symposium 2024 ‘Navigating catastrophic times’

This symposium interrogated discourses and imaginaries of intensified crises threatening the survival of individuals, nations, species, and the planet. The menace of multiplying catastrophic events, such as global wars and extinction, can lead to pervasive defeatism and depression or end-time forms of hedonism and thinking. We explored if and how navigating catastrophic times can also reenergise political discourses and practices as a means to re-assign meanings to a life in peril and to re-locate deflated hopes. We were interested in how apocalyptic horizons move individuals to take action in the present, which is all we have against a felt-approaching end-time. In other words, we were interested in how end-thinking and urgency play a role in politicising environmental challenges, migration, global health, and other issues. In so doing we wished to interrogate the politics of catastrophic thinking to activate imaginaries that stretch, re-write, re-think the future anew. To unpack these dynamics, the symposium brought together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences around three thematic roundtables on the Planthroposcene, military imaginaries and theories of time.

The symposium was co-organised with QMUL, IHSS Environmental Future Programme and the Theory Lab.

Organisers: Giulia Carabelli, Jef Huysmans, Mirko Palestrino and Elke Schwarz

Details on the programme can be found here.

DoingIPS Symposium 2023 ‘Transversalising the social and political: writing time; making space’

This symposium explored practices of both space and time making and how they transversalise the political, social and international. IPS inherited the dominance of spatialising the social and political from IR and its concerns with drawing lines between insides and outsides, separating levels and thinking geographical politics. However, IPS has also been one of the scholarly sites for creating new concepts and methodologies that explore how space is not given but always made and in motion. And then, there is time. It is a bit a cliche to say that space and time are always combined. But what would it mean to give analytical and political primacy to time rather than space in IPS? The symposium explored current developments in space and time making in IPS. More specifically, it had two main aims: 1- set up a debate on how modes of space making, and the spatial concepts and methods that are being used to analyse them, fracture positionality and identities in contemporary international politics; 2- to explore if giving primacy to temporalities leads to distinctive transversalising approaches in international politics and IPS.

This event was funded by a British Academy Writing Workshop Grant (WW20200143), the LISS-DTP, and the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.

Organisers:

Details on the programme can be found here.