ICSSR NRC sponsored International seminar: Policing in South Asia: Dilemmas of Governance and the Making of Participatory Communities 6th January 2018 Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India

Concept Note

The police play a key role as an interface between the people and the state. Yet despite this, studies of the institution from a sociologically- and historically-informed perspective, especially in the context of South Asia, are relatively scarce. The state has been studied as embodied in everyday practices and the interactions of various institutions, and thus as actively shaped by experiences and practices of those who perform it (Gupta 1995; Fuller & Benei 2010), as well as of the role it plays in shaping, and of the ways it is shaped by, society (Skocpol 1979, Mann 1993, Migdal 2001).The role of the police in such processes is, however, unclear, since the linkages between police institutions and structures and the socio-historical context of their operation have received little scholarly attention. This is particularly the case in post-colonial contexts in which the police first emerged as a colonial institution. The aim of this seminar is to begin to address such a scholarly lacuna by bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to consider the role of the police in shaping both state sovereignty and social order in South Asia. It will do so through considering the following key questions: How has the state historically been embodied in everyday practices of policing in South Asia, and what are the legacies of such practices; what role has the police played in shaping both the state and society; and in what way has society in South Asia shaped the institutions and practices of policing?

The seminar will explore such questions through considering four key issues. The first is the relationship between crime, punishment and state formation. Crime and social control have been concerns of human history prior to the modern era, and the South Asian sub-continent has a long history of disciplining techniques rooted in indigenous texts and traditions that pre-date the formation of modern nation-states – colonial and post-colonial – in the region. The principle of Danda in the Arthashastra tradition, for example, focused on the crucial role of punishment in statecraft (Troutman 1979). However, the colonial institution of the police as it emerged by the mid-nineteenth century discarded such traditions and introduced a model of policing based on the principle of ‘colonial difference’ (Chatterjee 1993) that prioritised the maintenance of the security and sovereignty of the colonial state rather than serving the interests of South Asian subjects. This seminar aims to shed new light on the nature of both pre-colonial and colonial policing by examining how concerns with crime control and security have historically worked out in practices of policing, and how they have been influenced by local texts and traditions, colonial rule, national-state formation and the emergence of constitutional democracy.

The second issue that the seminar aims to explore is the role of policing as a mechanism of social control and an institution of coercive power, in particular its relationship to, and role in shaping, marginal groups, including women. Marginalization is a process of exclusion resulting from material, social or gendered resourcelessness on both sides of the divide between state and society. In considering how marginalization is produced through practices of governing, the seminar aims to consider how to move towards a democratization of the means of making societies more secure, and how to ensure participation of all sections of society in the development of a cooperative social fabric. 

The third issue that the seminar will interrogate is that of the ‘margin’ as a locale. In a deliberation on policing with an awareness of the marginality that exists on both the side of the police and the policed, the seminar also hopes to throw light on the concerns of the geographical margins, such as slums, that are sought to be rationally classified and organized (Das & Poole 2004) by police work.

Such an engagement with the historical, sociological, geographical, political and administrative aspects of policing as an institution and policing as a practice in South Asia would not only address a gap in the presently available literature on policing, the state and society, but would also offer valuable policy insights into how to effectively police societies in the postcolonial world. The seminar therefore aims, lastly, to offer policy perspectives on democratic policing in South Asia. Bringing together scholars and practitioners to develop comparative understandings and to propose long-term sociological and systemic changes, this seminar would be an important contribution to the study of the police in South Asia.

Tentative themes of the seminar include but are not limited to the following:

• Indigenous traditions and colonial impact on policing in South Asia
• Policing and marginality
• Gender and policing
• Justice, Law and police work
• Policy framework for effective policing and for generating trust

Please email 250-300 words abstracts to khanikarsantana@gmail.com

Last date for receiving abstracts: 30th November 2017

AC 3tier train fares would be reimbursed to selected participants travelling to Delhi from other parts of India. International travel funding is not available. Food and lodging will be arranged by the organizers. 
If selected, full papers will be due by 20th of December 2017. 

For any queries feel free to send an email at khanikarsantana@gmail.com 

CFP: Matter(s) of Fact, 20th Annual Graduate Student Conference at Western University, Ontario -March 15-17, 2018

Call For Papers:

“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” –

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism

In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle details three principal means by which an orator can attempt to persuade an audience: by appealing to credibility and authority (ethos), by engaging the emotions of the audience (pathos), and by deploying logic and fact (logos). While Aristotle believes that presenting a strong body of proof is the most effective way of persuading people given what he argues to be humanity’s natural inclination towards Truth (Rhetoric I.1, 1355a15f.), he also concedes that those who have a masterful command of rhetoric can use their skills to arouse incendiary emotions, distract attention away from the subject, and override the rationality of any given audience. In drawing attention to the problematic manipulability of truth perceptions, Aristotle invites us to consider the epistemological affinity between belief and experience, as well as the ethical implications of all forms of communication.

Coinciding with such diverse phenomena as the rise of digital culture, the upsurge of political populism, and the hyper-technologization of modern life, competing narratives of factuality and truth have gained frontline visibility in our day-to-day reality. The discussions surrounding truths and facts have even inspired the Oxford English Dictionary to declare “post-truth”—an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—as 2016’s Word of the Year. This parallels, in a supremely ironic way, the fabricated epigraph that Jean Baudrillard uses to open Simulacra and Simulation, the insight of which resonates even stronger now in our day with the accelerating digital age: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” In the age of artificial intelligence, social media, and reality television, the notions of simulacra and creation of narratives impact ever more strata of our lives and bring to the fore questions such as: What kind of “new reality” exists in the era of post-truth, and how is that translated in cultural production? Is postmodernity, given its constant interrogation of realities and truths, the most productive way of helping us make sense of shifting epistemes? What responsibilities and challenges arise with the novel ways that knowledge—and perhaps by extension, truth—is produced and communicated? Are we, indeed, in an era of “post-truth”? Are we done with facts?

Furthermore, in the realm of narratives and material production, questions around literariness and fiction arise: if fiction is inevitably infused with a certain degree of reality, then is fiction, in turn, able to modify the Real? How are facts integrated into fiction and what happens when fiction interpenetrates with facts? In what ways can we speak about literariness as a post-factual regime? What have been some of the literary strategies deployed towards fictionalizing facts, truth, or epistemes? On the flipside, in what ways has fiction been historicized as fact, truth, or “real”? How have these polyvalent strategies evolved, if at all, over time?

This conference invites papers on literary, historical, and theoretical investigations of narratives, hermeneutics, and myths of facts and truths. Topics of discussion may include but are not exclusive to:

1) Myths and narratives: literary/historical/theoretical intersections of mythification; postmodernism and truths; hyperreality; simulacra-as-truth; rhetorics; “Post-truth”; hermeneutics of suspicion; populism and propaganda; emotion vs. logic; demagoguery and xenophobia; opportunistic narratives; the trans/de-valuation of facts-as-truths and truths-as-facts; truth-value; philosophy of language; trans-human, post-human, alternate ecologies

2) Wikileaks and whistleblowing in the digital age: digital humanities; ethics in the digital world; truth in the digital age; piracy and hacking; AI; AI and paranoia narratives

3) Critique of institutions: (post-)faculties; ideology, institutions and institutionalization; writings on art history and literary history; approaches to history writing; museums and art history; capitalism; avant-garde theory; culture industry and the Frankfurt School.

4) Material culture in the post-truth era: virtual objects; mythical and/or “real” and/or virtual artifacts; material culture and virtuality; artifacts and their faculties; art forgery; facts and things; representation of objects, objects as representation; surrealism and its legacies.

Related fields of interest may include but are not limited to: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory; Critical Theory; English, French; and Spanish Studies; Studio arts; Sociology; Anthropology; Political Science; Queer Theory and Gender studies; Interdisciplinary Studies; Digital Humanities; Cultural Studies; Linguistics; History; Philosophy; Film and Media studies; etc.

We are asking those interested in delivering 15 to 20-minute presentations to submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to themattersoffact@gmail.com by January 3, 2018. Please include your name, abstract keywords, institutional affiliation, technical requirements, and a 50-word bio in your email. Abstracts and presentations in English, Spanish, and French are welcome.

Abstract submission deadline: January 3, 2018

Expanded versions of conference presentations will be considered for publication in The Scattered Pelican, the peer-reviewed graduate journal of Comparative Literature at Western University.

Contact Info: 

Busra Copuroglu
bcopurog@uwo.ca
Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature
Western University
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Arts and Humanities Building Room 3R02
London, Ontario

Contact Email: 

themattersoffact@gmail.com

URL: 

https://mattersoffactblog.wordpress.com/

CFP: Love in Translation - Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature Graduate Conference, March 2-3, 2018

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Keynote by Professor Sandra Bermann (Princeton University)

Translation workshop by Professor Susan Bernofsky (Columbia University)

The biennial graduate student conference at the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature seeks to understand how love figures in and is transfigured by translation. The conference invites participants to think about how love disrupts and transforms the ways in which literary imagination functions across languages, time, space, borders. Some of the questions we aim to address are: How is love translated? Can love be a methodology in translation? Is it a hindrance or is it generative? Is love a theme or a product of translation?

Graduate students interested in presenting their research at Love in Translation are asked to submit an abstract of 300 words that addresses the conference theme.

• Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Love and the ethics of translation
• Love and literary pedagogy as translation
• Love in the text
• Love, translation, popular culture
• Love, translation, world literature
• Love, translation, activism
• Love, translation, gender
• Love, translation, environment
• Love, translation, genre
• Love, translation, borders (textual, epistemic, geographical/geopolitcal)

The deadline for paper proposals is 11:59 PM on December 15th, 2017. Please e-mail all proposals to Conference Co-Chairs Penny Yeung or Rudrani Gangopadhyay at rucomplit2018@gmail.com . All submissions should include the title of the paper, the abstract, and the name, affiliation, and email of the author.

Contact Info: 

Rudrani Gangopadhyay and Penny Yeung

Conference Co-Chairs

Contact Email: 

rucomplit2018@gmail.com

URL: 

https://loveintranslationconference.wordpress.com

Sponsored AIW Workshop- April 10-13, 2018. -Ghent University

Concept Note:

The 2018 AIW is titled “Arrows of Time: Narrating the Past and Present,” and the organizers want to explore this theme on three related fronts.

Firstly, the organizers would particularly like to highlight the historical connections –political, cultural, and academic – between the Low Countries, modern day Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Interest in Early Modern Indigenous interactions with the Dutch in New Amsterdam is growing, but some lesser-known intersections have recently begun to draw wider attention. For example, in 2016, Ghent played host to a popular exhibition on Father Pieter-Jan de Smet and his mission to the Americas. At the same time, the city’s football team came under fire for its use of an ‘Indian’ logo and mascots, giving rise to debate regarding its origins and appropriateness. Other connections, such as Margaret of Austria’s collection of artefacts from the New World kept at her court in Mechelen, or Frans Olbrecht’s fieldwork among the Eastern Cherokee, have garnered comparatively little scholarly attention.

Secondly, the 2018 AIW organizers invite contributions that problematize the uses and notions of ‘history,’ especially with reference to present day conflicts. This a very timely subject as the contested past is increasingly coming to the fore in the contested present. For example, the Idle No More and NoDAPL movements of the last five years rely heavily on the relatively recent past in their discourses about the present, and projected/envisioned/anticipated futures. Meanwhile, research published in Nature in 2017 that may push the peopling of the Americas back by 100,000 years has ignited a firestorm of controversy among the scientific community, and it may well become more widespread. The Clovis First and Bering Strait Land Bridge theories already play a prominent role in public discourses regarding ‘indigeneity’ in North America, and the possible impact of these new findings on ongoing debates remains to be seen. Additionally, there is growing interest in how non-Western and syncretic communities conceptualize such notions as ‘the past.’

Thirdly, the organizers wish to explore the pedagogical and institutional side of history. The decolonization of academia is starting to gain traction, with increased discussion among educational policy makers on how to diversify curricula. How can this be achieved with reference to secondary and university history classes without trivializing the subject material and how can these topics be presented to a wider audience? Additionally, how can we accomplish the decolonization of the past within academia itself – especially in light of the recent controversies surrounding appointments at Dartmouth and elsewhere?

Papers are welcome from any field on any topic relating to history and the Native Peoples of North America. However, priority will be given to those that also address the 2018 conference’s central themes. The organizers particularly wish to invite submissions for paper, panels, and poster presentations on – but not limited to – the following subjects: 

• Contested histories
• Discourses on the past in function of present conflict
• Low Countries connections
• Reception and representation of the past
• Time and history as concepts
• Memory communities
• Practices of history
• Philosophies of history
• Decolonizing academia, and the field of ‘history’ in particular
• Decolonizing museums
• Pedagogies of history and decolonizing classrooms

Submission Deadlines:

The submission deadline for paper/panel proposals is December 15, 2017. 

The submission deadline for poster proposals is January 31, 2018. 

Paper/panel presenters will be notified of acceptance by January 15, 2018, and poster presenters by February 15, 2018. 

Proposals for papers/panels and posters (max. 400 words) should be submitted together with a short biography (max. 250 words) to ThomasDonald.Jacobs@ugent.be.

Venue & Sponsorship:

The 39th edition of the AIW, titled “Arrows of Time: Narrating the Past and Present,” will be held in Ghent, Belgium. It is being hosted by Ghent University, and is being sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, the History Department, Institute for Early Modern History, and TAPAS – Thinking About The Past. The workshop will take place from April 10-13, 2018. 

For more Details: https://aiw2018.org/

Funded International Conference 'Modalities of Displacement in South Asia' - June 7-8, 2018

Call For Abstracts:

The displacement of large numbers of people is a central feature of the rapid economic expansion that characterises contemporary South Asia. Rooted in violent processes of state formation, including partition, militarisation, and the repression of regional secessionist movements, South Asia’s modern polities are actively consolidating and incorporating erstwhile economically and politically marginal spaces. These processes of consolidation have been accompanied by the emergence of religious nationalisms and ethnic identity politics that legitimize the ideological or even physical segregation of ‘others’, conjoining land struggles and development projects with socio-cultural contestations around home and belonging. The conference ‘Modalities of Displacement’ interrogates some of these complexities through the notion of ‘displacement’.

While displacement has emerged as a keyword across research in historical, anthropological, geographical, and cultural studies, as well as in fields of migration, urban and rural development, and memory or heritage, inter-disciplinary dialogues are often rare. In this conference, we intend to bring together different disciplinary perspectives and empirical case studies, to think about what the modalities of displacement in contemporary South Asia can be. We think of physical displacement (e.g. in migration studies), ideological displacement (e.g. in anthropological discussions about the politics of belonging), emotional displacement (e.g. in considerations of the ‘unheimlich’ in cultural studies), economic displacement (e.g. in studies of land issues and dispossession), and aesthetic displacement (e.g. in urban geography). The panels of the conference will be organised to produce interdisciplinary conversations on these different and overlapping modalities of displacement, providing a platform for established and emerging researchers to connect and share insights.

This two-day conference is organised in the context of the projects Postcolonial Displacements: Migration, Narratives and Place-Making in South Asia (LIAS/CA-DS) and Rerouting Relations (IIAS) at Leiden University. We particularly welcome submissions that address perspectives from urban peripheries, rural hinterlands, borderlands, transnational contexts, and the margins of national imaginations. Apart from a select set of panels dedicated to the modalities of displacement, we will also host a workshop at IIAS (upon invitation) on residential segregation and religious politics. Furthermore we invite presentations based on audio-visual materials, such as films or art works.

Send your abstracts (300 words) to: displacement@hum.leidenuniv.nl, along with key-words, a short bio, contact details, and, if applicable, information about the duration and nature of the audio-visual materials.

Deadline for submissions: 22 January, 2018.  

Selection: Mid February 2018 (tentative).

Funding: Very limited partial funding is available for a small number of participants.

Convenors:

Dr. Erik de Maaker, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CA-DS), Leiden University.

Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason, Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University.

Dr. Sanderien Verstappen (coordinator), Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University, fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden.

Contact Email: s.b.verstappen@hum.leidenuniv.nl

URL: 

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2017/11/call-for-papers-modalities-of-displacement-in-south-asia

Funded UK - US Early Career Research Collaboration Workshop,10th–Sunday 11th February 2018, USA

Saturday 10th–Sunday 11th February 2018

136 Irving Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Call For Applications:

The British Academy, in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, is inviting applications for early career researchers in the humanities and social sciences to attend a research collaboration workshop on the broad theme of violence. The workshop format will enable the exchange of ideas across disciplinary as well as national boundaries with the aim to help create and build exchange, cooperation and partnership between the researchers attending in the short- and long-term.

Purpose and Focus

Violence is a near ever-present reality for much of humanity, but there are significant limits to how narratives and experiences of violence are understood in the public imagination and policy process. This workshop will investigate how violence is defined and conceptualised by fostering an interdisciplinary discussion of some key themes related to our understanding of violence, and considering the implications for research and policy engagement.

Some seed funding will be made available at the end of the workshop to support collaborations between UK and US scholars on a competitive basis for research proposals formulated by participants, which will be presented in a group session on the final afternoon of the workshop. This funding is only one of the ways in which the Academy will provide mechanisms for participants to continue the conversations and research ideas developed through the workshop and of course the participants will be welcome to discuss and collaborate outside any Academy support.

The Workshop

The workshop will take place in Boston from 10th–11th February 2018. The British Academy will meet the costs for travel, accommodation and subsistence for all participants over the course of the workshop. 

Application Process

Applicants should provide a CV which should not exceed two sides of paper. Applicants are also asked to provide a justification (not exceeding two sides of paper) explaining:

• Why they are interested in violence based on their research and/or teaching areas;
• What disciplinary and interdisciplinary skills and/or experience they would contribute to the workshop; and,
• How the workshop could help to develop their own research and career development.

Applications should be sent to c.moorhouse@britac.ac.uk no later than 5pm (GMT) on Wednesday 6 December.

Contact Info: 

Christina Moorhouse

c.moorhouse@britac.ac.uk

Contact Email: c.moorhouse@britac.ac.uk

URL: 

https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017-10-17%20Call%20for%20Applications%20-%20UK-US%20ECR%20Violence%20Works...