Coordinators:
Rosalina Pisco Costa [Universidade de Évora & CICS.NOVA.Uévora]
Rita Gouveia [Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa]
Patrícia Coelho [Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve]
Changes in families and life courses in contemporary societies has been posing new challenges to sociological analysis, calling for continuous, scientifically based and comprehensive reflection on the inequalities, mobilities, and uncertainties that shape “futures in the making”. Aligned with the theme of the XIV Portuguese Congress of Sociology, the ST-FCV invites the sociological community to engage in a critical reflection on families and lifecourses, articulating with the theme of futures in the making and sociology in the public sphere, in a context in which narratives of uncertainty intersect with narratives of the future.
In a scenario marked by the pluralisation of family structures, demographic ageing, migration, labour precarity and multiple crises - financial, housing, political, climatic and energy-related - it is important to understand how individuals think, construct and experience their relationships and lives in the present, but also how they desire, imagine, long for and plan their personal and family futures the life course. Socialisation plays a central role in the formation of values, expectations, and dispositions from the early years of the life course. Embedded in specific sociocultural contexts and framed by public policies that regulate fundamental dimensions of social life, such as education, work, gender, sexuality, parenthood, identities and care, individuals construct their family trajectories within a context of socially structured opportunities and constraints.
Agency enables individuals to interpret, negotiate and, at times, transform these conditions, opening space for trajectories that are not limited to the reproduction of the past, but which challenge, resignify and reinvent representations, practices and discourses about family life and the life course. Therefore, if on the one hand, the future does not emerge as a pre-determined destiny, but rather as a field of possibilities in the making, where different voices, experiences and choices contribute to plural ways of living family life and the life course, asserting margins of freedom, change and social innovation. On the other hand, national and global realities are permeated by strong social inequalities associated with structural coordinates such as gender, age, social class, ethnicity, sexuality and geography, among others. Such vulnerabilities, combined with unanticipated events, disasters and multiple crises, threaten the perception of predictability of the future and the capacity of individuals, families and communities to respond and adapt, demanding a constant adjustment and reformulation of plans and expectations over the life course.
In this regard, the sociology of families and life courses intersects with the sociology of the public sphere, by producing knowledge that sheds light on these experiences and contributes to their collective problematisation, gaining even greater relevance in a mediatic arena where disinformation, fake news, and actors and discourses driven by specific agendas proliferate and contaminate the scientific debate. It, thus, becomes essential to give visibility to these dynamics, promoting a critical reflection grounded in the scientific method, which highlights how individual and family experiences are articulated with broader societal processes, which can inform public debate and the design of public policies and social responses that are more sensitive to uncertainty and to the diversity of lifecourse trajectories.
For the XIV Portuguese Congress of Sociology, the ST-FCV invites the submission of multi-format communications, both completed and ongoing work, which aim to discuss, in a non-mutually exclusive way, the following topics, among others:
- Risks, uncertainties, (in)equalities and vulnerabilities over the life course
- Redefinitions and pluralisation of the idea of family
- Families and returns to the past: challenges for the social and political future
- Families, migration, and transnational and culturally diverse lives
- Families and life courses in contexts of wars and geopolitical conflicts
- Democracies, birth and end of life: ethical dilemmas of living and dying
- Technologies, digitalisation and the online world: disconnections and reconnections
- Human rights and identities: between inclusion and family exclusion
- The weight of the past in the future of family precarity: health, housing, education, employment and care
- Families in times of multiple crises: vulnerabilities, risks and responses
- The future of families: policies and agents in the making
- Families powered by AI: possibilities between reality and fiction
- Family life and life courses beyond normativity: visibilities and invisibilities
- Families, eco-anxiety and climate change
- Theoretical and methodological debates in the study of families and life courses
- Violence(s) within families and across the life course
We invite you to submit proposals for research summaries located in academic and non-academic contexts in response to this call for proposals.
Proposals, in addition to theoretical essays, must be formulated presenting their theoretical framework, objectives, methodologies used, results and conclusions.
Professional contributions can take the form of experience reports, including context, objectives, actors involved, methodologies, activities developed, and key learnings.
Proposals must be submitted via the personal area by the deadline specified in the submission guidelines.
Proposals may be submitted in Portuguese, English, Spanish or French.
The maximum length of the abstract is 2,500 characters (excluding spaces).
Evaluation will consider the clarity of objectives, methodological adequacy, relevance of results, and the overall quality of the proposal.
The Congress will take place in person at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Algarve, in Faro, from 23 to 25 March 2027, and may include online sessions on 22 March. At the time of submission, authors must indicate whether they intend to participate in person or online.
All the authors will be invited to submit the full papers for publication in the Congress Proceedings.
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