The Graduate program at Simon Fraser University School of Communication hosts an annual conference, CONDUITS, this year entitled Structuration.

The 2023 CONDUITS Conference will take place on Friday, May 3rd, 2024, in-person at Simon Fraser University's Harbour Centre Campus in Vancouver, BC, Canada. 

Call for Proposals 

Structuration (strək-chə-ˈrā-shən): The process of creating social relations, mainly those organized around social class, gender, and race.

The Graduate Program at the Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication invites submissions for our annual conference, CONDUITS, this year entitled: “Structuration.”

Structuration is a theory originally articulated by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) to describe the mutually constitutive entanglements of human agency and social structure(s) that construct our world. Transcending the orthodox dichotomy between systems and subjects, Giddens accounts for the emergence and reproduction of social systems as the result of structured and habituated human action. The late communication scholar Vincent Mosco (2009) elaborated upon structuration in a political-economic mode, lending it a stronger social emphasis. By doing so, he focused scholars’ attention to the dimensions of race, class, and gender in the construction of social relations. In particular, he argues, “structuration calls on us to broaden the conception of class [...] to incorporate both a relational and a formational sense of the term” (16). Mosco advanced the political economy of communication beyond the study of media industries and strictly economic conceptions of class, expanding the field’s horizons to include all “social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources” (2). His work thus challenges the political economy of communication to become a more ambitious “study of control and survival in social life” (3).

To commemorate his life and work, our conference embraces Dr. Mosco’s imperative for the political economy of communication, and social sciences more broadly. We challenge scholars to tackle the hard problems of agency, social structure, gender, race, and class—and to do so ambitiously. 

Challenges include but are not limited to:

• Agency and social structure

• Social relations of sex, gender, race, and class

• Work, labour, and revolutions

• The Digital Sublime and the artificial intelligence

• (De)colonization as (re)structuration

• War, Political Economy, and Internationalism

• The end(s) of scholarship

The CONDUITS organizing committee values the interdisciplinary nature of the graduate program at the School of Communication at SFU, so we welcome submissions from a wide variety of disciplines including but certainly not limited to history, media studies, film production, geography and urban studies, education, philosophy and mathematics, economics and actuarial sciences, labour studies, Indigenous studies, international relations, health science, computer science and mechatronics, anthropology, gender studies, sociology, and political science.