As contemporary social theorists continue to signal the need to
reconfigure our deliberations on the social through attention to
practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the
affective dimensions of human sociality, this conference takes as its
focus the objects and values which find themselves at centre stage.

And we ask, in the context of nearly two decades of diverse disciplinary
approaches to these issues, what matters about objects?
How are they inflecting our understandings of technology, of expertise,
and of social change? How has a focus on objects reconfigured our
understandings of how values inflect the ways in which people make
relations, create social worlds, and construct conceptual categories?
How have objects become integral to human enthusiasms and energies, to
transformational ambition, or to the transmission of values across time
and space? How do objects move between ordinary and extraordinary
states, shade in and out of significance, manifest instability and
uncertainty? How do moral and material values attach to objects as they
move in space and time? What dimensions do they inhabit and/or reveal?

To address these questions we welcome papers on the following themes:

The transformational work of everyday objects Object-centered learning
Materiality, Stability and the State Radical Archives – within and
beyond textual assemblages Conceptual Objects and Methods as Objects
Immaterial Objects – haunting, virtuality, traces.
Financial Objects
Affective Objects
Ephemera, Enthusiasm and Excess
Spiritual and/or Moral Objects
Controversial and Messy Objects

Please submit either (a) proposal for individual papers, or (b) panel
proposal including 3 papers by the end of February 2009. Guidelines and
Proposal Forms are available at
http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/conference2009/callforpapers.html and
should be sent to:

CRESC Conference Administration
178 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
Tel: +44(0)161 275 8985 / Fax: +44(0)161 275 8985

Conference Organisers:
Conference Administrators: Bussie Awosanya and Karen Ho Conference
Manager: Josine Opmeer
Email: CRESC.AnnualConference@manchester.ac.uk