The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS) annual meeting will take place from June 8 – 10 this year, and the organizers have published a call for papers. The call closes on 10 February. As readers may recall, the Bassetti Foundation participates in the INSS through the membership of Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Hankins, who will once again attend the meeting on behalf of the organization.

Following on form the successful experiment last year, the conference will once again take place over multiple sites, spread across the USA and Europe. Proceedings will also be streamed live, and the poster presentations will also be carried online.

The theme of this year’s conference is Communities and Connections, with presentations invited that address this field. The call for papers is as follows:

The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS) is a research coordination network funded by the National Science Foundation to stimulate interdisciplinary discussion about the often-overlooked social dimension of sustainability. For three years INSS has hosted conferences that bring together scholars and practitioners of social sciences, physical sciences, engineering, and the humanities to discuss such diverse topics as agricultural practices, disaster mitigation, coastal erosion, sustainability education, environmental racism, and theoretical issues of sustainability. In 2015, we inaugurated our first multi-site conference, with interactions across multiple physical locations.

The 2016 INSS conference theme is “Communities and Connections”. We invite abstracts for papers, workshops, panels, and other events, from multiple disciplines and locations, inspired by one of the following themes:

How can concepts of community and social connection help address environmental or economic challenges?

How are new technologies and the emergence of ‘the sharing economy’ changing our conception of community, and how does this inform action for sustainable development?

Additional topics addressing communities and social sustainability are also welcome.

Abstracts and proposals should showcase the experiences and expertise of the author(s), and should be original works. Proposals for roundtables, workshops, and other events are also welcome, and should include a list of participants or activities, expected length (ideally less than 1.5 hours), and relevance to the conference theme and INSS.

As with the 2015 conference, the organizers expect to edit a special issue of an academic journal from select presentations and events at all INSS conference sites. Submissions may assume a traditional scholarly format (introduction- literature review- methods- analysis- conclusion), but non-traditional formats and mediums such as visual art, short story, filmed documentary, or poetry are also welcome. Workshop and event organizers may want to collaborate with participants on a publication. Select submissions will be included in a special issue of an open-access e-journal.
Interested participants should submit a 500-1,000 word abstract about their submission by February 10, 2016, explaining the relevance to social aspects of sustainability.

Interested participants can submit here.

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