The 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association - with personal insights

The European Sociological Association Conference 2019, held August 20 – 23 in Manchester, was the fourteenth in the organization's 27-year history. Interestingly enough, the first two conferences actually took place in our region with a significant Hungarian contribution: first in Vienna in 1992, then – as the only exception to the biannual rule, after three years – in Budapest in 1995. (The host institution of that conference happened to be the predecessor of the Corvinus University of Budapest.) Recalling the past is not an end in itself, as, based on browsing the documents of past conferences, the focal points have not changed fundamentally over the past two and a half decades. Just a few of the mainstream themes today include the social impact of environmental problems, gender studies, social inequalities, migration processes, and the emergence of “new” minorities: all topics that have not lost their relevance in the last few decades, and have even been incorporated into everyday social discourse. However, alongside the relatively unchanged core topics, the organizational background, the range, and the number of participants have changed over time. The number of attendees has increased five to six times in past decades: attendance has continued to grow, with the initial 600 participants having recently reached over 3,000. The circle of participating countries has tripled, obviously not independently of the restructuring (typically, fragmentation) of the continent's internal borders.