During the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) Annual Conference held in Cardiff, UK from July 19-23rd, 2016, Dave Elder-Vass, Philip Gorski and Timothy Rutzou participated in a panel “Causal Powers in the Social Sciences”. This panel stemmed from the conference we hosted earlier this year on Causal Powers and Social Science in New Haven, Connecticut. Click here to read about the highlights of the conference from our Project Manager, Laura Donnelly.
In the video below, Dave Elder-Vass builds on his recent explorations and discusses the much overlooked and neglected status of the material dimension of the social within mainstream sociology. What would it mean for sociology to seriously investigate the material dimension of the social world, to understand the causal influence of the material upon the social, and even to understand the social as a subset of the material?