About IACR Conferences

IACR has run conferences on a yearly basis since 1998, so this will be the 26th. Conferences on Critical Realism were also held prior to IACR’s inception, including one held at Warwick in 1997 (organised by Professor Margaret Archer). Though the conference’s ‘home’ country is the UK, the conference is a global phenomenon with last year’s held in the Philippines and previous venues in Europe, North and South America, and South Africa. Covid presented a challenge but the conference was held successfully online in 2020 and 2021. IACR is an international body with a Council of 14 academic members spread throughout the world, a President in the USA and a Secretary in Australia. The current President is Professor Douglas Porpora, Department of Sociology, Drexel University. IACR is a purely academic body which exists solely on contributions from its membership and on surpluses generally made by its conferences. Critical Realism is a philosophy that defends the possibility of scientific knowledge in both the natural and the social sciences and affirms the importance of ontology to the understanding of epistemology. It has under-laboured for the sciences across a whole range of disciplines, some of which are mentioned below.

Warwick 2024

The theme for this conference is to 'look back in order to look forward'. Next year (2024) marks the first anniversary of the death of Maggie Archer, former Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at the University of Warwick. Her work on social morphogenesis and social ontology is well-established in the social sciences. It also marks the tenth anniversary of Roy Bhaskar’s death, a philosopher who was instrumental in establishing IACR and developing the original philosophy of critical realism and making it relevant to amongst other things environmental issues and interdisciplinarity. We would like to honour both Roy Bhaskar and Maggie Archer as they would have wished, by taking seriously their thought and where it sits in Critical Realism going forward. In considering intellectual challenges in a range of disciplines, we will reflect on their distinct contributions to critical realist thought.

The conference will be held in hybrid mode and different prices are available.

View the Programme

The IACR 2024 programme will be made available here shortly.

Call for Papers

Announcement: the deadline date has been put back until 17 May 2024

IACR is an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference based in critical realism.

The theme for this conference is to 'look back in order to look forward'. 2024 marks the first anniversary of the death of Maggie Archer, former Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her work on social morphogenesis and social ontology is well-established in the social sciences. It also marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roy Bhaskar, who was instrumental in developing the philosophy of critical realism, establishing IACR and making it relevant to amongst other things dialectics, metaphysics, environmental issues and interdisciplinarity. We would like to honour both Roy Bhaskar and Maggie Archer as they would have wished, by taking seriously their thought and where it sits in critical realism going forward.

As the world stumbles from crisis to crisis, what role can critical realist approaches play, and how should the spiritual elements developed by both Archer and Bhaskar be aligned with Critical Realism’s more social scientific dimensions?

We are interested in papers and panels in a wide range of fields from a broad range of critical realist approaches including in its original, dialectical and metaReal forms together with approaches to social ontology. Critical realism has been influential in many branches of the social sciences, including sociology, philosophy, gender and environmental studies, political theory and economics. New or under-treated topics such as artificial intelligence, aesthetics and psychoanalysis are also of interest.

Plenary roundtables are planned on Bhaskar (contact: Alan Norrie) and Archer (contact: Ismael Al-Ahmoudi), on environment (contact: Leigh Price) and gender (TBC), on international political economy (contact: Karim Kniou) and on law (contact: Henrique Carvalho). Confirmed speakers include: Ismael Al-Ahmoudi, Michael Bhaskar, Henrique Carvalho, Karim Kniou, Doug Porpora, Leigh Price, Alan Norrie, Onur Ozmen, Craig Reeves, Amanda Wilson.

We invite papers and panels on the following thematic streams:

• Business and economics
• Critical realist philosophy and methodology
• Education
• Environment and climate studies
• Gender studies
• Law, justice and social justice
• Politics and political theory

Additionally, we welcome proposals for panels outside of these streams.

Please submit your abstracts and panel proposals via the Oxford Abstracts systemLink opens in a new window.

The deadline for submissions is Friday 17 May 2024 at 4pm.

Apply for Bursary

Information on how to apply for a bursary will be made available here shortly.