The Center for Arab & Middle Eastern Studies, American University of Beirut, The Institute of Social Sciences – Lebanese University, The International Network for Arab Societies Study cordially invite you to a hybrid seminar “Social Love and the critical potential of people : when the social reality challenges the sociological imagination”.
Talk is in English with a translation in Arabic – discussion in English and Arabic
Speakers:
– Silvia Cataldi (Associate Professor of sociology, Sapienza University of Rome)
Silvia Cataldi is Associate Professor of sociology at the Department of Psychology of Development and Socialization Processes of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). Since her PhD, she teaches sociology and research methods at bachelor’s and master’s degree courses and doctoral school. Her research focuses on methodological aspects of social research, emerging cultural and social identity models, being involved in many European projects. She is board member of the European Sociological Association 20RN Qualitative Methods, and the coordinator of the international research network Social-One. Among her publications she co-edited with Gennaro Iorio two books on social love: Love at the time of accounting (2015) and Culture of Peace (2016).
– Gennaro Iorio (Professor of sociology, University of Salerno (Italy))
Gennaro Iorio is Professor of sociology. He is Director of Department of Political and Social Studies of the University of Salerno (Italy). Expert in the history of sociological thought, he teaches sociology of innovation, common goods, and sustainable development goals at bachelor’s and master’s degree courses and doctoral school. His research projects include urban resilience and prosociality, empathy between sociology and neuroscience, north-south inequalities and social innovation. For almost twenty years he has been studying social love and has published the first avant-garde books on the subject, such as Sociology of Love (2015) now published in three languages: Italian, English and Portuguese.
Tuesday April 5 |1-3 PM (GMT+2)
IFI Seminar Room- 4th floor (Green Oval), AUB
Attendance on campus is restricted to those who are vaccinated or have a recent PCR test
You can also join us on this Zoom link:
https://zoom.us/j/91896461387?pwd=Q0FFbCtOOWhidFJGY1FQTHhRVHhwUT09
Meeting ID: 918 9646 1387
Passcode: 797353
Abstract
For a long time, love has been confined to the private sphere and its social dimension has been overlooked. Instead, love is a force capable of generating social bonds and change in human sociability. While classical sociologists, such as Simmel, Weber and Sorokin supported this idea, sociological schools of thought have long relegated this topic to the intimate and pre-social sphere. Nevertheless, in the last decades contemporary sociological theory and scholars have re-evaluated love as an essential element of public life.
Adopting a sociological perspective, the seminar will be structured in two parts. The first part unveils the concept of social love as a kind of ‘Karst River’ that flows through the history of sociology, reassessing it as a form criticism by social actors of everyday life. Breaking the logic of instrumentality, calculation and standardization, love enables people to enter in a regime of overabundance which recognizes the irreducibility of the other. In this sense it can be a key element in the promotion of solidarity and recognition in current plural and inequal societies. The second part of the seminar will be devoted to show the results of empirical studies on social love, such as case studies, survey, and also the construction of an innovative World Love Index which aims to measure the level of unconditionality and overabounding present in different countries around the world.
