ESS 2027 Submission Portal Now Open

​The submission portal for the 2027 Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting is now live! As per usual, the Sociology of Health Professions Education Collaborative will host a mini-conference (exact date TBD) at ESS, which will run from March 4-7, 2027, in Philadelphia, PA. Please consider submitting an abstract (submission link and call for proposals is below). Deadline in October 15, 2026.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to any of the organizers: Emily Ekl, Hana Gebremariam, Andrea Kelley, Michael O. Mensah, Lauren Olsen, and Nicole Anne Perez.

Submission link: ess2027.exordo.net 

Understanding Difference in a Divided Age

The LCME Standards removed structural competency and the AMA removed DEI considerations. The federal government is reifying cisheteronormative gender categories and reshaping which health professions qualify for loans. Understanding differences is not only important but it is also deeply under threat. How do we study, teach, and address difference when we can’t call it difference? With this year’s mini-conference, we focus on how health professionals conceptualize and experience difference, articulate narratives of difference and leverage them for political purposes, and initiate policy solutions oriented around fostering more equitable spaces. We are interested in papers with empirical foci on the social construction of knowledge and technologies within health professions education; downstream consequences of understandings of difference in healthcare settings on patients’ health and experience; deprofessionalization’s impacts on professional pipelines and experience; studying difference in a federal context that dismisses difference, with emphases on how working conditions shape the scholarship (e.g., by position, university, state, country). In addition to welcoming traditional research presentations, we are also very interested in pedagogy presentations about how scholars address understanding difference in the classroom, how researchers navigate a constrained research environment, and how practitioners engage in bridging difference in a divided age.