Social Futures?: the Sociology of Substance and Shadow

This is the second of two collections of papers from the British Sociological Association (BSA) Annual Conference 2003 to be published within Sociological Research On-Line. The conference was titled Social Futures: Desire, Excess and Waste. The call for papers invited delegates to interrogate currently dominant academic, political and media discourses within western societies which emphasise and celebrate the ‘progress’ and ‘freedoms’ associated with recent global ‘development’, technological change and contemporary cultural experience. Five conference streams were devised in order to pursue this overall aim: Belonging and Isolation; Consumption and Waste; Winners and Losers; Technological Dystopias; Escape Strategies. There was also an Open Stream. Over 120 papers were presented at the conference and there were two highly engaging plenary sessions, one presented by Beverley Skeggs (then at the University of Manchester) and one by George Ritzer (University of Maryland).