The four themes below offer different ways into the symposium’s central question: how social worlds are structured, experienced, connected, contested, and transformed.
They move from institutions and governance, to diversity and justice, to globalization and collective futures, to organizations, technology, and social change. Together, they invite participants to think across the systems, relationships, identities, infrastructures, and publics through which collective life is made.
The themes are not intended as fixed boundaries. We welcome proposals that sit between them, challenge them, or use them as starting points for emerging questions, experimental methods, and new forms of social research and practice.
This theme explores the structures through which societies are organized, governed, and contested. It invites work on public institutions, civic participation, democracy, law, policy, social systems, public trust, citizenship, and collective decision-making.
It also welcomes inquiry into how institutions respond to crisis, inequality, technological change, social movements, and shifting public expectations.
This theme focuses on the social relations through which identity, power, belonging, exclusion, and justice are produced and contested. It invites contributions on diversity, equity, inclusion, migration, race, gender, class, indigeneity, disability, rights, recognition, and social change.
It also welcomes work on community action, activism, advocacy, public culture, institutional transformation, and the lived experience of inequality and resistance.
This theme considers how social worlds are shaped across local, national, regional, and global scales. It invites research on globalization, development, migration, security, conflict, borders, mobility, transnational communities, global governance, and planetary interdependence.
It also opens questions about how places are connected through histories, economies, media, culture, crisis, and imagination — and how communities negotiate futures under changing global conditions.
This theme examines the organizations, technologies, knowledge systems, and social infrastructures that shape contemporary life. It invites work on labor, leadership, organizational culture, platforms, digital systems, innovation, knowledge production, sport, media, institutions, and the future of work and public life.
It also welcomes work on how religious and spiritual traditions respond to social change, political conflict, inequality, migration, and questions of coexistence, meaning, and collective futures.
This theme explores the roles of religion, spirituality, ethics, and belief in shaping social worlds. It invites contributions on faith, secularism, ritual, values, morality, interfaith relations, identity, community, and the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary public and cultural life.
It also welcomes work on how religious and spiritual traditions respond to social change, political conflict, inequality, migration, and questions of coexistence, meaning, and collective futures.
Taken together, these themes position Imagining Social Worlds as a forum for work that is institutional, relational, global, organizational, and transformative. The symposium is intended to support dialogue across fields that are often closely connected in practice but separated institutionally or disciplinarily.
Imagining Social Worlds brings together several Common Ground Research Networks whose work intersects with questions of society, governance, globalization, diversity, organizations, justice, conflict, and public life.
Each year, one participating Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape the symposium’s particular emphasis within the wider theme of Imagining Social Worlds. For 2026, the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Research Network is the host Network for the event.
The symposium creates a shared online space where these related but distinct fields can meet in conversation, encouraging new connections across research areas that are often separated by discipline, profession, or institution.