Events - Event View

Contemporary social life is increasingly shaped by permacrisis: an extended condition of ecological breakdown, political volatility, economic precarity and social fragmentation. Crisis is no longer simply episodic; for many, it has become an ambient condition of everyday life. In this context, emotions are neither peripheral nor private. Care, hope, grief, anxiety and exhaustion shape how we endure uncertainty, build solidarities and imagine what might still be possible.

Co-produced by TASA’s Sociology of Emotions and Affect Thematic Group and RMIT’s Social Equity Research Centre (SERC), this half-day symposium turns attention from diagnosing crisis towards the emotional and relational practices that sustain social life within it. Through two provocation lectures, short presentations and informal collective discussion, we will explore how care circulates under conditions of precarity; how hope is sustained, deferred, contested or remade; and what emotional labour is required to live through permanent instability.

Creative practice: The afternoon will be deliberately informal, participatory and creative. Art materials will be available throughout the afternoon for drawing, writing and creative sense-making, without any expectation of producing a finished outcome.

The altar of care and hope: Participants are also invited to bring a small material object that, for them, symbolises care or hope. Together, these objects will form a temporary Sociology of Emotions and Affect installation—an altar of care and hope assembled and reassembled across the afternoon.

The symposium welcomes scholars, practitioners, HDR candidates, ECRs and anyone interested in emotion, affect, care, crisis, climate, social movements and collective futures. Come to listen, think, make, connect—and consider what enables care and hope to remain possible in difficult times.


Event Details:
Date: 20th October 2026
Time: 1pm - 5:30pm
Location: RMIT City Campus
Format: This is an in-person event

Your Speakers

 

Rebecca Olson

Rebecca Olson is Professor of Sociology, University of Queensland. Her research intersects the sociologies of health and emotion, focusing on topics ranging from palliative care, to cancer caregiving, interprofessional care and parents managing climate anxiety. As Co-Director of SocioHealthLab, she makes an academic home for doing health/care research differently: more socially aware, more relational, more inclusive and just. She is Joint Editor-in-Chief of Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine (Sage). As a leading innovative qualitative researcher, Olson employs video-based, participatory, reflexive, post-qualitative and post-paradigmatic approaches to inform translational inquiry.

 

Leanne Higham

Leanne Higham is a scholar of slow violence, nonviolence, and affect in the Monash School of Education and Culture. She examines slow violence and nonviolence in schooling and education. She is particularly interested in the potential of civics and citizenship education as nonviolence. Leanne's research is informed by queer and feminist affect theories, new materialisms, and critical posthumanities.
Leanne's work has been awarded the Australian Association for Research in Education's Ray Debus Award (2025); University of Melbourne Chancellor's Prize (2025), Doctoral Research Prize (2025), and Freda Cohen Prize (2016); and the Australian Educational Researcher's Best Paper Award (2024).

Call for Papers: Submissions Close 2nd October 2026

We welcome presentations engaging with questions such as how care circulates under conditions of crisis and precarity; how hope is sustained, deferred, reconfigured or contested; the emotional labour of living through permanent instability; and the relationship between affect, political imagination and collective futures. Contributions might engage with climate and ecological crisis, care economies, health and mental health, social movements, inequalities, institutions, migration, everyday life, or other sites in which care and hope are being negotiated.

We particularly encourage HDR candidates and ECRs to contribute. Rather than conventional conference papers, we invite short 5–10 minute PechaKucha-style presentations designed to open conversation, test an idea, share emerging research or offer a provocation.

Submission Guidelines

To express interest in presenting, please send:
• a presentation title
• a short bio
• a 150-word abstract

The symposium will also include two invited provocation lectures and an informal creative component. Participants will be invited to bring a small object symbolising care or hope, contributing to a temporary collective installation created across the afternoon.

We are interested not only in how permacrisis is diagnosed and described, but in the affective conditions under which alternative futures remain imaginable.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT