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Saturday, July 15, 2017

International Conference on Endangered & Lesser Known Languages, 21 – 23 February 2018 CIIL, Manasagangotri, Mysuru,





CALL FOR PAPERS

About SPPEL

The Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL) was instituted by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India in 2013. The primary objectives of this Scheme are to document and archive the endangered languages of India. The scheme is monitored by Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL). The CIIL has collaborated with several academic institutions across the country for accomplishing this mission. Initially SPPEL has identified 117 languages to document and archive.






ELKL Conference Series 
The Endangered and Lesser Known Languages conference was begun to serve as a platform for academicians, researchers and members of speech communities to deliberate issues relevant to
language endangerment and share their latest findings. This annual conference aims to create interest and awareness in lesser known languages and train young scholars in documenting endangered
languages. The first ELKL conference took place at the University of Lucknow in 2012. The Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages, CIIL, Mysore is happy to announce that the sixth ELKL conference will take place at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore from 21-23 February 2018.






The Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL), CIIL and several other like-minded institutions across the globe are also working towards the sustenance of "angerment and language revitalization:policies, planning and practices”minor and lesser known languages. Scholars, policy makers and community members have often expressed anguish for the dwindling future of the endangered languages. Arguably and unfortunately the issue of language revitalization has not attracted the attention it deserves from the researchers and policy makers. Efforts towards language revitalization are inevitable for numerous languages that are on the verge of extinction. Therefore, the theme of the 6th ELKL-2018 is “Language Endangerment and Language Revitalization: Policies, Planning and Practices”. Abstracts are invited for oral and poster presentations on original, unpublished and substantial research relevant to the theme of the conference.





Sub-Themes
We invite submissions on the following and related sub-themes:
  • Documentation of endangered and lesser-known languages
  • Language ecology
  • Language endangerment scenario
  • Language policy and language planning
  • Language revitalization
  • Community’s participation in language revitalization process
  • Development of script and orthography
  • Mother tongue based multilingual education
  • Technologies for documenting endangered and lesser-known languages
  • Field ethics and case studies
  • Language archiving
  • Language contact, maintenance and shift
  • Linguistic human rights





Abstract Submission guidelines:
Abstracts of 750-1000 words (excluding references and data) in PDF format is to be uploaded by 15th September, 2017 using the EasyChair system at:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=elkl6

Abstracts should be completely anonymous for consideration.
Note: One author can submit a maximum of one single-authored and one co-authored abstract.
Please send your queries if any to: elkl6.2018@gmail.com

Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline : 15 September 2017 (Friday)
Notification of acceptance : 1 November 2017 (Wednesday)
Submission of full paper : 15 January 2018 (Monday)







Publication
An edited volume of the papers, key note address and plenary sessions of the conference will be published by CIIL. The concerned authors will have to modify their papers by incorporating the feedback, observations, comments and suggestions that come out during the presentation.







Travel & accommodation
Travel allowances may be provided for out-station and invited speakers from India. Participants from other countries and those located within the city of Mysore may kindly arrange travel on their own. TAto eligible outstation participants will be considered as per CIIL guidelines and is subject to the availability of funds. Modest accommodation will be arranged in the CIIL premises, only for outstation participants.
For further information on the conference, please visit www.sppel.org







Contact Info:
Sujoy Sarkar
SPPEL Coordinator
Phone Number: 091 - 9717225610
Email: elkl6.2018@gmail.com 

Thursday, July 13, 2017

National Young Researchers’ Conference On Victoriana . 14-15 September 2017, The University Of Burdwan

Organized by  
The Department Of English & Culture Studies (UGC-SAP-DRS-PHASE-II), 







Call For Papers:
The Department of English and Culture Studies, The University of Burdwan is going to organize its annual Young Researchers’ Conference on 14-15 September, 2017 on the focal area of Victoriana.

Queen Victoria’s regime in Britain, unlike any other preceding it, stood for paradigm shifts in what constituted Englishness within and without, in the world at large. With imperial Britain ruling the waves, scientific-technological innovations abounding, and exponential industrial growth rate, Britain became something it had never been before and after this moment — a politico-economic superpower and the cultural capital of the world.

The cultural capital generated by long narrative poems, novels, polemical essays, children’s fiction, crime narratives, life writings, women’s writing, writings reproducing alternate sexualities, workers’ narratives, mutiny novels, spiritual narratives, pornography, anthropological writings, juridical writings went hand in hand with extraordinary developments in material cultures. These ranged from printing, publishing, archiving, painting, photography and restoration of art to postal reforms and development of postal material such as pens, writing pads, desks, police reforms, development of technology to detect the criminal, and use of technology to map worlds beyond logic.







The reverberations of these changes were felt around the world that Britain had colonized and had not colonized. We are all, in a certain sense, post-Victorian.

The Conference uses the term ‘Victoriana’ in its broadest possible sense, inviting papers from areas not only from that period but also from our times that consciously recycle and recast Victorian tropes, looking back and beyond at the same time.







Some of the focal areas could be:

  • Queen Victoria: Myth and Reality
  • Condition of England Question novel
  • Christian Socialism and the Victorian novel
  • Representations in Art, Restoration and Victoriana
  • Crime, Criminology, the Rise of Detective Fiction.
  • Uncanny, the Rise of Spiritualism, Ghost Clubs, Spirit Societies, Parapsychology, Spiritual Narratives
  • Narrative Poetry, Browning, Tennyson and so forth
  • The Narrativized Play, Shaw, Galsworthy, etc
  • Print Victoriana
  • Neo-Victorianism
  • Photography and Victoriana
  • Victoriana and Translation
  • Victoriana and Pedagogy
  • Victoriana and Pornography
  • Victoriana and India
  • Victoriana and Food
  • Victoriana and dress/sartorial specificities
  • The Mutiny Novel
  • Victoriana and Travel Narrative.
  • Children’s Writing
  • Women in Victoriana
  • Alternative Sexuality and Victoriana
  • Postal Reforms and Victoriana
  • Colonial Modernity






We welcome young researchers (students, research scholars and young teachers) from different universities and institutions to the conference. They should send their abstracts (not more than 250 words) to the organizers, and, if selected, they will get 15 minutes for their presentations and 5 minutes for questions on their papers. 


Last date for receipt of abstracts is 24 July 2017. 

The abstracts will pass through a rigorous peer review process. Acceptance will be conveyed by 15 August 2017.
Abstracts should be sent to the following email id: yrcenglishbu@gmail.com.
 The names, contact numbers, email ids, and affiliations of those sending abstracts should be clearly mentioned in the abstracts.


There will be no registration fee.

Venue: The University of Burdwan, Golapbag, East Burdwan – 713104. West Bengal.






Special attraction:

The participants may be taken to the Museum and Art Gallery in the premises of Rajbati, the palace of the Burdwan Raj donated to the University of Burdwan in 1960. The Victorian art objects, sculptures, architecture, and other such cultural documents related to the Burdwan Raj, whose history dates back to the 17th century, would be of interest to the researchers in the field of Victorian Studies and also those interested in exploring India’s colonial modernity. To know more about the Museum and Art Gallery, please visit the website: http://www.buruniv.ac.in/campus/museum







Conference Conveners:

Dr Arnab Kumar Sinha 
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Culture Studies
The University of Burdwan

Dr Anway Mukhopadhyay
 Assistant Professor
Department of English and Culture Studies
The University of Burdwan 

International Conference on PRECARITY, POPULISM AND POST-TRUTH POLITICS 1-3 February 2018, Spain

In collaboration with Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, India






Call For Papers:
This three-day event—a two-day conference followed by a workshop on the third day— aims to interrogate the multiple and overlapping global processes underlying three emergent relational fields or modes of enquiry: precarity, populism and post-truth politics. As a network, we are committed to the pursuit of arguments and ideas that will foster articulation of research questions and positions and the construction of one or more interlinked, interdisciplinary projects. We seek to identify the interconnections between precarity, populism and post-truth politics in ways that will enable the development of cross-cutting thematic and theoretical approaches to these manifestations of global inequality, injustice and tension.

Judith Butler first introduced the concept of precarity in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), defined as a type of precariousness by which human life can be understood from a collective, communal and interdependently political point of view. Whereas all lives are born precarious—i.e. vulnerable and hence finite—precarity refers to a “politically induced condition” (2009, 25) derived from (in)action on the part of social and economic systems, usually maintained by nation-states, which fail to protect human lives from physical impairment for reasons such as disease, poverty, starvation, or political violence. In a similar way poverty also has been reframed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum,1 as not just material deprivation but a failure of the world system, due to social cultural exclusion, lack of agency and access to rights and capabilities.





In these contexts, a new form of populism has recently emerged, albeit not unprecedented in history, as a powerful social response, tainted by xenophobia, which emphasises the need for protection against perceived threats to national security, health and well-being, employment and living standards. More peripheral groups, often aided by Non-Governmental Organizations, independent associations, Refugee Councils or other transnational agencies, have traditionally been targets of populism; but recently more affluent social sectors have also begun to experience conditions of precarity, to demonstrate hostility towards immigrants, and to demand sovereignty, as with Brexit, or secession, as with Catalonia in Spain. Examples include the European austerity policies and the emergence of right wing political parties and pressure groups such as UKIP, the Front National (France), The Golden Dawn (Greece) and the Freedom Party (Netherlands), which both foster and are symptomatic of the opposition between the haves and the have-nots. This growing fracture entails the dehumanization and/or reification of the Other, rendering asylum seekers, illegal migrants or refugees—i.e.border subjects—considered outside national and ethnic boundaries, as unintelligible and unrecognizable.

This per se intricate situation of our contemporary moment is complemented by a third phenomenon, known as “post-truth”, a term which was awarded the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016.2 Post-truth, usually associated with the noun “politics,” is described by the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. The complex interrelationship between precarity and populism is thus marked by the unparalleled mass media impact on our globalized era and the tendency towards distortion of the news in the press and social media. Factual events are set aside; emotional appeals are foregrounded. This implies that reality is multifarious, kaleidoscopic and that multiple overlapping and sometimes colliding “truths” co-exist. Global issues of poverty worldwide (regardless of whether those areas are classified as developed or developing countries) are in danger of being overlooked and political governments and agencies are faced with ethical and aesthetic issues of representation, concerning aspects of voice, agency and authenticity.

In taking up the critical concepts of this three-field intersection, we suggest precarity, populism and post-truth politics can be interpreted through the lens of racial, gender, or ethnic discrimination, silencing, censorship and marginalization on the part of governments, corporations or other forces, leading to violence and terror and ecological degradation in the context of fierce neo-liberal capitalism.









This International Conference also proposes to examine precarity, populism and post-truth politics through multiple research disciplines, ranging from sociology, economics, ethnography, anthropology, literary and comparative studies, visual and media studies, translation, among others, by focusing on individual or collective cases, imaginative responses, and theoretical or experimental approaches. The aim of this conference is to provide a multi- and transdisciplinary platform which will allow delegates to (un)settle, (re)frame, and analyse the global issues from multiple viewpoints as well as their cultural representation.





 Themes:
We invite abstracts that focus on, but are not limited to, the following:
*  Global Health and Safety, starvation and housing
*  National and transnational terrorism, war, and violence
*  Subalternity, marginality, poverty, and economic inequality
*  Gender, sexuality, poverty, and precarity
*  Diasporas, immigration and global population trends and growth
*  Mass media representations of economy, democracy and global conflict
*  Depletion of natural resources, ecological degradation and the Anthropocene
*  Imperialistic globalization of cultures
*  Human Rights, refugees, asylum seekers, illegal migrants and social activism
*  Populisms and aesthetics
*  Global emergence of right wing ideologies
*  NGOs, UN and other corporate stakeholders
*  Racism, discrimination, and ontologies of the grievable
*  The role of censorship in mass media and cultural representations
*  Neo-liberal capitalism and human sustainability
*  The role of science and technology in poverty, populism and the post-truth era
*  The humanities and social sciences in the global world
*  Truthiness,3 Truth and Post-Truth Politics: political discourse and consciousness
*  Scapes of poverty and precarity and its representational practices
*  Contested representations of precarity, populism and post-truth phenomena
*  Political separatisms, populism and Brexit
*  Literary and visual representations of precarity, populism, post-truth politics
*  Ethics and aesthetics in the representations of poverty

CONFIRMED PLENARY SPEAKERS
Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, UK)
Tabish Khair (Aarhus University, Denmark)






ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
 Deadline: 30 September 2017.
Notification of acceptance: 31 October 2017.
We invite abstracts of 300-400 words for 20-minute papers which can be either oral or virtual. If virtual this should be stated on the abstract as instructions about content and delivery will be sent on acceptance. Proposals for 90 minutes panels, with a 500-word justification in addition to individual abstracts of 300 words, are also welcome. Please include personal information (name, affiliation, contact information) with the abstract, and send it to the following:
Om Dwivedi, Sri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, India (om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com)
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, University of Córdoba, Spain (cristina.gamez@uco.es)
Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK (Janet.Wilson@northampton.ac.uk)



Tuesday, July 11, 2017

International conference(Funds available) on The Experience of Faith in Slavic Cultures and Literatures in the Context of Postsecular Thought Warsaw, 16 – 17 October 2017








Organised by 
The Institute of Western and Southern Slavic Studies, University of Warsaw,
The Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw
The University of Warsaw
The Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences








Call For Papers: 

Our conference will focus on West and South Slavic cultures, which can reveal unrecognised but not unimportant areas of metaphysical subjects and experience that cannot be captured using the atheist/confessional dichotomy. Postsecular thought is particularly useful in this respect, as it requires adopting a new approach to relations between the sacred and the profane. At the same time, we are aware of different level of interest in postsecularism in different Slavic countries.


For this reason, our conference is not devoted to postsecularism as such, but to modifications of the picture of religiosity which can provide a more nuanced vision of the problem thanks to postsecular ideas. By examining religious phenomena in Slavic countries from this perspective, we wish to open a discussion about the modes of experiencing the transcendental that belong to the “grey zone” between atheism and institutionalised religiosity. We are particularly interested in the record of this experience in literature and art of Slavic countries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.





The proposed subjects include such issues as:
  • contemporary (literary and cultural) religious imagination transgressing religious orthodoxy
  • a specific nature of contemporary religious experience beyond postmodern interpretation; blasphemy, heresy and constructing hybrid idioms of faith
  • the phenomena of “invisible” and “weakened” religiosity
  • the phenomenon of “unserious” beliefs in Slavic countries and the state of research on non-confessional religiosity
  • the crisis of traditional language of Christian religions; the new languages of literary expression of religious experience; strategies of parody, irony and other forms of derision; Can we go beyond postmodern interpretation?
  • religious experience in gender perspective
  • communism and the Slavic experience of postsecularism
  • postsecular literature: fact or theoretical invention?
  • postsecularism in Slavic cultures: the state of research, interpretations of the phenomenon (timeline and characteristics)
  • the risks of postsecular approach to religious phenomena: how to distinguish between the right to freedom of religion and belief and the acceptance of potentially dangerous or criminal activity in this domain. 




Selected papers will be published in a volume of conference proceedings.

The abstract of your proposed paper (in English, 300 words maximum), including your affiliation, should be submitted to cfp.postsecularismstudies@gmail.com by 31 August 2017.

Conference proceedings will be held in English.

The conference receives financial support from the funds of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Poland) allocated for activities disseminating science (DUN)







Contact Info: 

Conference secretary:
Mgr Agnieszka SÅ‚owikowska,
Institute of Western and Southern Slavic Studies, University of Warsaw 

Contact Email: 

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Fulbright-Nehru Master's Fellowships for Indian Nationals -2018-19











The Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowships aim to provide Indian faculty, researchers, and professionals residing in India the opportunity to teach, conduct research, or carry out a combination of lecturing and research at a U.S. institution. Depending on the U.S. host institution, it is likely that the grantee may contribute towards developing curriculum and conducting workshops and seminars. These fellowships are for four to nine months. If you are applying for a Flex Award, the minimum length of the total grant is four months and the maximum is six months.









Applications are invited in the following fields only:

Agricultural Sciences; Bioengineering; Climate Change Sciences; Computer Science (with emphasis on cyber security and digital economy); Economics; Education Policy and Planning; Energy Studies; International Law; International Security and Strategic Studies; Materials Science (with emphasis on environmental applications); Neurosciences; Public Health; Public Policy; Study of India (limited to anthropology, history, sociology, and visual and performing arts); Study of the United States (limited to anthropology, history, sociology, and visual and performing arts); Urban and Regional Planning (with emphasis on waste management and smart cities); and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Research:
Applicants must demonstrate the relevance of the proposed research to India and/or the U.S., its benefit to the applicant’s institution, the feasibility of accomplishing the research goal within the stipulated period, and the need to carry out the research in the U.S.









Grant Benefits

The fellowships provide a round-trip economy class air ticket (two round-trip economy class air tickets for Flex), a monthly stipend, Accident and Sickness Program for Exchanges per U.S. Government guidelines, a modest settling-in allowance, and a professional allowance. Subject to availability of funds, in case of grantees on eight or nine month grants, a dependent allowance and international travel may be provided for one accompanying eligible dependent provided the dependent is with the grantee in the U.S. for at least 80% of the grant period. Flex grantees are not eligible for dependent benefits.






Eligibility Requirements

In addition to the General Prerequisites:
Faculty/researchers should have a Ph.D. degree or equivalent published work with at least five years of relevant teaching/research experience;
professionals outside academe should have a Master’s degree or equivalent published work with recognized professional standing and at least five years relevant experience;
you should upload a recent significant publication (copy of paper/article) in your online application; and
If employed, at the time of submitting the application, please follow the instructions carefully regarding employer’s endorsement. The employer must indicate that leave will be granted for the fellowship period. Please obtain the endorsement from the appropriate administrative authority on the FNAPE Employer’s Endorsement Form. 







How to Apply

Applications must be submitted online at: https://apply.embark.com/student/fulbright/scholars/30/
Please carefully review the FNAPE Applicant Instructions before starting your online application
Please refer to FNAPE Applicant Checklist before submitting the application. 
In addition, you must complete and upload the following documents on your online applicaiton: 


Application Due Date: July 17, 2017, 23:59:59 hrs (IST)


Timeline and Placement Process
July 17, 2017                             Application due date for 2018-2019 awards



August 2017  :Field-specific experts review applications to short-list candidates


End-October 2017 :National interviews of short-listed candidates in Delhi


Novemberr 2017:USIEF notifies principal and alternate nominees that they are recommended


December 2017 : USIEF forwards applications of recommended candidates to the U.S. for J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FFSB)  approval and placement


March-April 2018  :          USIEF notifies finalists
May-June 2018  :      Pre-Departure Orientation
August-September 2018   :       Program begins







IMPORTANT: 

You can apply for only ONE Fulbright-Nehru fellowship category during a competition cycle.

Plagiarism in the application will lead to disqualification.

Unless otherwise specified, Fulbright-Nehru applications are to be submitted online.

Applications received after the deadline will NOT be considered.

Extensions and transfers of visa sponsorship will not be permitted.