Call For Papers: Re-framing the Archive: The Reuse of Film and Photographic Images in Postcolonial Southeast Asia (London, June 2017)

Abstract Deadline: February 17, 2017

Location: SOAS University,United Kingdom

In recent years, the decision to engage with colonial and postcolonial archives has become increasingly commonplace within Southeast Asian film, photography and visual culture. Whilst this renewed interest in archival materials has resulted in an increased awareness of the complexities of lens-based media, it has also allowed practitioners to challenge both the dominant narratives of colonialism and their neo- and postcolonial legacies. In the case of Cambodia and its diasporas, this archival impulse – and its accompanying modes of (re-) appropriation – is exemplified by films such as Rithy Panh’s La France est notre patrie [‘France is our Homeland’] and Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers. Whereas the former offers an insight into the hypocrisies of French colonial rule, the latter takes its lead from the development of twentieth century Cambodian cinema. Yet despite differing in their aims and emphases, these projects share a number of common characteristics – namely, a desire to foreground the importance of preserving and revisiting archival materials: two imperatives which have acquired a particular significance in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Taking its lead from these recent developments, this symposium will explore the ways in which colonial and postcolonial film and photographic archives have been rearticulated within a range of Southeast Asian political and aesthetic contexts. How have artists and filmmakers sought to subvert existing power relations through the use of colonial images? To what extent have archival materials and technologies allowed for an investigation into the emancipatory potential of the lens? How have these techniques been utilised by diasporic populations? Though preference will be given to submissions which focus on Southeast Asia, we also welcome papers that draw comparisons with other postcolonial contexts. Possible lines of enquiry include:

• The political and aesthetic implications of re-situating images
• Hindu-Buddhist aesthetic conventions and their use/subversion in colonial and postcolonial lens-based practices
• The ethics, politics and artistic innovations of documentary work
• Contemporary artistic practices which explore the themes of space, place and home
• The return of European filmmakers and photographers to the postcolony.

The symposium will be accompanied by screenings of two feature-length films by Cambodian filmmakers and a series of short films by emerging filmmakers from Southeast Asia. This programme, we believe, will provide a further opportunity to address the themes raised by the symposium.

The conference and screening programme are organised by Dr Joanna Wolfarth, Dr Fiona Allen, and Annie Jael Kwan independent curator, The Asia Projector.

To submit a paper, please send paper titles, abstracts of c. 500 words and a 2-page CV to reframingthearchive@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: 17th February 2017

Contact Info: 

Dr Fiona Allen, Dr Joanna Wolfarth and Annie Jael Kwan

Contact Email: 

reframingthearchive@gmail.com

URL: 

https://www.soas.ac.uk/cseas/events/01jun2017-reframing-the-archive-the-reuse-of-film-and-photographic-images-in-postcol...

CFP: Funded Conference on City and the Process of Transition – from Early Modern Times to the Present

University of Wroclaw, June 8th – 10th 2017

Deadline: Extended up to February 28, 2017.

Location: Poland

Subject Fields: European History / Studies, Humanities, Modern European History / Studies, Urban History / Studies, Early Modern History and Period Studies

The Doctoral Adam Galos Circle for the History of the 19th and the 20th Centuries invites PhD students and early career scholars to participate in the international conference titled City and the Process of Transition – from Early Modern Times to the Present to be held at the Historical Institute of the University of Wroclaw, June 8th – 10th 2017. The intention of the organizers is to challenge questions concerning the behavior of the city dwellers who faced the lack of stability, resulted primarily from the progressive urbanization and globalization since the early modern era.

We propose to focus on the following issues:

1) Authority and Citizens

We encourage to consider relations between state power and municipal self-government, as well as the attitudes of both of these authorities towards city dwellers. The proposals may address the impact of the policy applied by different levels of officials in terms of: hygiene, health, safety, justice, culture (education, art, fashion), customs (beliefs, mentality, values) or interpersonal relations (clientelism, rivalry, conflicts of interest). Lastly, the question of political and social emancipation of different groups of inhabitants will be equally important.

2) Multicultural Relations

A city was (and still is) an area of a constant inflow of people from outside. One may recall the history of Jewish settlement or the 19th and the 20thcentury migrations. Hence, the cultural diversity in the urban space was present in different spheres: public, private, intimate. Therefore, the key topics and themes of this part of the conference will include attitudes towards migrants and the coexistence of different ethnic, religious and cultural groups (their adaptation, assimilation, integration).

3) Between Ideal and Reality

People have always created a vision of "ideal city": Atlantis, Heavenly Jerusalem, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, Niemayer’s Brasilia until today's Jing-Jin-Ji. We would like to confront the idea of the ideal city and real transformations of the urban space, but also to elucidate the consequences of the city’s 'expansion' into suburban areas together with the influence of urbanization and economic changes on daily life.

The aforementioned perspectives suggest the main directions of discussion, although other proposals dealing with the main theme of the conference are also invited.

We are committed to establish an interdisciplinary forum, hence the invitation is addressed to representatives of various scientific disciplines: historians, art historians, architects, urban planners, ethnologists, anthropologists, cultural studies experts, sociologists, literary scholars, psychologists etc.

Conference languages: Polish, English

The submission of paper proposals (the limit of words: 350) should be done by 28th February 2017 via the registration form below:

https://cityandtheprocessoftransition.wufoo.com/forms/z1nf6fwi0ydkrie/

Applications will be considered by the members of the Faculty of Historical and Pedagogical Sciences of the University of Wroclaw. The notification as to whether the proposal has been accepted will be sent by 15 th March 2017.

The organizers do not cover accommodation or travel expenses, but they are responsible for conference materials, meals and publication. There is no additional conference fee.

Academic Advisory Board:

Prof. Grzegorz Hryciuk

Prof. Malgorzata Ruchniewicz

Prof. Krzysztof Ruchniewicz

Prof. Grzegorz Strauchold

Prof. Leszek Ziatkowski

Contact Info: 

Enquiries regarding any aspect of the conference:

Magdalena Gibiec magdalena.gibiec@uwr.edu.pl

Please visit our website for more information:

https://cityandtheprocessoftransitionconference.wordpress.com/

Dorota Wisniewska dorota.wisniewska@uwr.edu.pl

Contact Email: 

magdalena.gibiec@uwr.edu.pl

URL: 

https://cityandtheprocessoftransitionconference.wordpress.com/

International  Conference on Formation of Culture in Diaspora

General problematics of the conference

The definition of the concept of «diaspora» is one of the major questions under discussion in contemporary social sciences, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. Different fields of research, such as history, ethnology, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science tend to use the term with different meanings. As a consequence, some specific definitions of the word “diaspora” can occasionally contradict one another. The present project does not pretend to solve these problems of terminology nor does it intend to present the whole spectrum of diasporas existing in the modern world, or known from historical sources. The material of our project will deal with three diasporas usually considered as classical examples of this phenomenon, as “stereotypical ethnic diasporas” which have long and complex histories: the Jewish, the Greek and the Armenian diasporas. As is well known, the word “diaspora” (from Ancient Greek: διασπορά) was first employed during the Hellenistic period to designate the scattered Jewish population, and it was, later on, also used for Armenian and Greek communities. This choice of material has the advantage to narrow down the broad problematics of research about diasporas in order to precisely formulate the core problem which this project intends to discuss: the mechanisms presiding over the formation of culture in classical (prototypical) diasporic societies (in “mobilized diasporas”, to use the terminology of the American scholar J. Armstrong; or, as the Israeli specialist G. Sheffner calls them, in “diasporas with historical roots”).

The problem thus defined can be treated both at the level of macro-phenomena and at the level of micro-phenomena. On the one side, the studies involved in the conference will take into account the larger context and address some of the central questions of contemporary research concerning the evolution of a culture in a multiethnic, multiconfessional and multilinguistic society. The formation and the cultural particularities of diasporic societies offer a unique material to study the following phenomena: the general trends of contemporary culture towards heterogeneity; the processes of cultural divergence, convergence and synthesis; the coexistence of centripetal (archaizing, conservative) and centrifugal (innovative, assimilatory) orientations in the development of communities. On the other side, the conference will aim at defining the concept of diasporic culture and at distinguishing it from other forms of culture having some typological similarity. It will focus on the following preliminary hypothesis: a diasporic community develops a particular type of culture based on specific social, religious and communicative practices, textual traditions, symbolic interpretations of historical events (charged with ethnic or religious significations), etc.

The increased geographic mobility of people and the easier access to developed means of transportation has stimulated the formation of diasporas in the contemporary world: the number of diasporic communities and the rhythm of their creation have grown. In the last decades, the process of globalization has tended to erase the old frontiers between ethnic groups. It has caused a homogenization of national economic, political and cultural differences and, finally, a diminution in the significance of national identities for small communities as well as for some more numerous ethnic and cultural groups. Nevertheless, the reality of the beginning of the 21st century witnesses a contradictory trend: the economic and political globalization in Asia and in Europe has led to the growth of diasporas which goes hand in hand with the intensity of migratory processes and with the slow political and cultural adaptation and assimilation of the migrants. These new diasporas have created new mechanisms of social development; they have developed new forms of dialogues between religious and ethnic groups and they have also, without doubts, engaged in new conflicts. In these conditions, a study of the processes which lead to the development of a diaspora are all the more actual that it is nowadays necessary to predict the evolution of smaller social and ethnic groups within a society.

The core idea of the planned conference is based on the hypothesis that there exist universal processes of cultural development in classical diasporic communities. One of the tasks of the conference is directly linked to this first stance: to create a methodological basis to describe diasporic cultures and to produce a typological comparative analysis of the social and ethnic processes in the three diasporas under study. The methods which will make possible the resolution of the fundamental questions of this conference will also have to be innovative. Only an interdisciplinary approach can lead to the exhaustive study of diasporic communities in all their variety.

Other more specific issues addressed by this project have received little, or no attention from contemporary research. The study of the development of classical diasporas in recent times supposes to deal with the following themes: 1) repatriation and the representations it implies about the “new” and “old” homeland; 2) the role of modern technologies such as the development of social websites and media, and impact of new tools and means of communication in the evolution of diasporic cultures; 3) the formation of virtual communities united by an ethnic or ethno-religious belonging and their contribution to diasporic identities.

Methodological approaches:

The very topics of the present conference calls for the interdisciplinary approach for implementation of the project's objectives. The conference organizing team plans to invite experts who apply methods drawn from culture studies, literature studies, ethnology, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and special linguistic methods. For some more certain issues the organizing team plans to invite experts in historical research, dialectology, contact studies approaches. The conference's results may be further applied to work with other language groups and culture phenomenon being results of excessive intercultural contacts.

Please send your abstracts (maximum 300 words, including references) to the conference committee, by email (ilmen2005@yahoo.com) by March 1, 2017.

NB: It's advisable to authors to state what research method(s) they apply in their work.

Authors will be notified of paper acceptance or non-acceptance by March 20.

The conference will be held from 4 to 9 September 2017 at the Saint-Petersburg State University, Institute of Philosophy.

The conference is hold within framework of the project supported by the grant from the RSCF.

Contact Email: 

ilmen2005@yahoo.com

CFP: The  International Conference on Gender and Sexuality Studies , 2017

Due date: May 7th 2017

Venue:

Skirvin Hilton Hotel

1 Park Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73102

September 28 – 30, 2017

IGSS Call for Papers

The International Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference is hosted by the Women’s Research Center and the BGLTQ+ Student Center at the University of Central Oklahoma. “The Center” hopes to promote intellectual engagement with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality issues by hosting annual conferences.

The Center invites proposals for presentations at the Second International Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference. This international interdisciplinary conference welcomes proposals for presentations in a variety of formats that address issues of gender and sexuality in the social sciences, humanities, fine arts, and STEM fields. We invite students, faculty, staff, scholars, and activists to propose papers, panels, roundtable discussions, and poster presentations. We also welcome proposals to present or perform creative work including creative writing, drama, music, and visual art.

Instructions for submission

Paper, workshop, panel and round table discussion submission guidelines:

1. Initial submissions should include a 350-word abstract.

2. You may submit your abstract in Word or PDF format.

3. If The Center has questions on the proposal, we will reach out to you via email.

4. Include your name, affiliation, phone number, and email address in your document.

Creative art submission guidelines:

1. Creative art includes art displays, writing, drama, music and visual arts.

2. If your work falls into one of the above categories, you are required to submit a 350- word description of your creative artwork.

3. If The Center has questions on the proposal, we will reach out to you via email.

4. You may submit your abstract in Word or PDF format.

5. Include your name, affiliation, phone number, and email address in your document.

General instructions

1. Abstracts should be submitted to thecenteratuco@gmail.com.

2. The deadline to submit your paper for consideration is May 7, 2017, Sunday, before 11:59PM.

3. The Center’s decision is final.

For more questions, please reach out to Dr. Lindsey Churchill, Director of the Women’s Research Center and the BGLTQ+ Student Center, at lchurchill@uco.edu.