International Conference On Performing the Political, Politicizing the Performance-27th to 30th March 2018, Bangalore University

Concept Note:

Theatre has always been political in nature. The birth of theatre, as stated in Natyashastra, when analysed sounds highly political in nature today. Similarly the secular arguments about birth of theatre that it is rituals/religion which are responsible for emergence of performance based theatrical genres, would also become political in the light of what the socialist thinker Rammanohar Lohia says "politics is short-term religion and religion is long-term politics". Thus the theatre has always been political in nature, though we would like to call it as a means of entertainment. Even the seemingly apolitical entertainment oriented theatre would be political in the sense that they would be peddling the dominant political discourse of the day. Overtly political theatre, which claims that theatre has to respond to the present political system to build a better political future, is also found all over the world. The world has also witnessed from wielding of censorship weapon on theatre, banning the theatre altogether to killing or incarcerating theatre personalities.   Anyone who has witnessed the theatre culture from close quarters would also vouch for the fact that it is highly political in nature.

This conference aims to put-together research around the issues of politics and theatre, politics of theatre, political theatre, ideology and theatre, theatre of politics, politics in theatre, questions of representation in theatre, politics of performance, performing politics etc.

Sub themes:

1. Street theatre

2. Translating politically

3. Politics of Individual plays

4. Politics of a Dramatist

5. Role of a theatre group in political transformations

6. Suppression of Theatre

7. Censoring theatre

8. Attack on artists, performance, and screening

9. Ideologies of theatre

10. Theatre movements and Political movements

11. Politics of entertainment

12. Political issues on stage

13. Performing the Political

14. Politicizing the performance

Program:

27^th March 2018                        Inauguration and Staging of plays

28^th March 2018                   Plenary Session and staging of a play

29^th March 2018            Technical Sessions and staging of a play

30^th March 2018                          Staging of plays and Valedictory

Important Dates and other details

Abstract and full papers shall be sent to buconference@gmail.com on or before 15^th March 2018.

Registration fee- General Conference          : Rs. 2000/-

Foreigners delegates                                                  : $ 75

Research Scholars                                          : Rs. 1000/-

DD shall be drawn in favour of Prof. Nagesh Bettakote, Conference Coordinator, Department of Performing Arts, Bangalore University, Bengaluru – 560056.

For details please contact:

Dr. Pavithra 9738450401

Mr.Jagadish 9845172822

CFP: Convergence and Divergence: Indian Writing in a Global Context- March 15, 2018 to March 16, 2018 Pondicherry University

Focus of the Conference:

The focus of this seminar is to examine how the aesthetic and cultural parameters of Indian literature both writing in English and writing in translation are represented in a global context. The other investigation that the seminar would like to focus on is the reception and consumption of these literatures in India and academic departments devoted to Indian/South Asian writing in the West and other regions. We are interested in queries such as the role of academics and scholars in promoting Indian literatures and processing it in the global context; the nature of canon formations; the pedagogy of courses devoted to these areas nationally and internationally, the cross cultural interactions that follow and so on

Thrust Areas:

Paper Presentations related to the following possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:

Region and Nation; Gender and Sexuality; Translations

Indigenous/Aboriginal/Subaltern narratives; Pedagogical Methods; Canon Formations

Students are encouraged to present panel sessions on the following possible themes but are free to explore within the overall broad area of the conference:

The Role of Translation; The Relevance of Canons; The Process of Canon Formations;

The Importance of Bhasa/Regional Literature; The Inclusion/Exclusion of Other Literatures

Registration Fee:

Faculty Members (international): Rs. 7500; Research Scholars (International): Rs. 5000

Faculty Members (National and SAARC Countries): Rs. 5000

M.Phil & Research Scholars (National and SAARC Countries): Rs 3000

Students (National and International): Rs 1000

University faculty & scholars: Rs 500; Students of the Department: Rs 300

Abstracts: Word Limit for Paper presentations and Panels: 250 words. Note panel sessions should include names of all participants.

Dates to be noted:

• Last date for Abstracts: March 3, 2018
• Confirmation of Abstracts: March 6, 2018

Time Limit for Presentation: 10 minutes

Kindly note that TA/DA/ cannot be provided due to financial constraint. 

Contact Info: 

Dr.H. Kalpana

Associate Profesor

Department of English

Pondicherry University

PUDUCHERY 605014

Contact Email: 

indianwritingsseminar@gmail.com

CFP:Encountering the Archive: Simulations, Manipulations, and Debunking April 5-6, 2018 School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU.

Concept Note:

At an hour when China is deciding to rate its citizens based on digital data records and social media is beginning to look like quasi-archives of its users, one must return to questions of information keeping and the archive that plague our everyday. Both Foucault and Derrida remind us of the archive’s claim to authority, their architectural prowess, and their claims to the production of knowledge itself. Derrida traces the archive to its Greek roots of Arkhe as the site “..there where things commence- physical, historical, or ontological principle- but also according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given- nomological principle”. From the impressive Greek edifices, archives today have come to signify any process of storing and accumulating information, digital or analogue, electronic or otherwise, that can be tabulated, computed and phished out when demanded.

The archive is both dogmatically transparent and astutely concealed. On one hand, the archive organizes and stores its data with finesse, thereby inviting its users to glean from it. And yet, the archiving medium, made fragile by time, belies such an easy invitation. The archive encoded through specific medium, like data servers, paper, pen, tapes, microfilms etc., posit themselves as protecting, or concealing material, readily available for use. This dialectic between storage and retrieval complicates the objectives of an archive, so that every archive must find its own synthesis between these two purposes. This dialectic becomes all the more prominent when we view the troubled relationship between the contemporary and the archive, between the object’s waxing and waning in time. The contemporary, in many ways, averts historicization. It is both what we are intimate with, and yet remains in darkness, a relationship of profound dissonance, disjunction and anachronism. Therefore, to archive in the contemporary then is find ourselves in a temporal bind.

In art practice comprising visual, cinema, theatre and performance studies, we have explored the term “archive” through a multiplicity of methodologies. With the shift from artist-as-curator to artist as archivist, we investigate the realm of images (still/moving, analogue/digital, etc.) as they relate to the archive, and how they have charted a shift away from paper-based archives since the latter half of the nineteenth century. We study how their forms, the systems that produce them, the modes and techniques of perception and the circulation networks they engage in have produced a new imagination of the archive. In this we also ask where is the archive – are they the primary spaces from archives and museums, to newer modalities of cloud and hard drives, or the site and the field – the repository of all those unfound traces? With the coming of technologies of mechanical reproduction, archives collecting audio-visual documents such as photographs, films, videos and sound recordings are caught in the double bind of preserving the past, and the threat of preserving too much of it, generating only “an archive of noise”, which escapes the control of the archons, historians or artists who use them. We are persistently raising the question whether performance is that which disappears or that which persists transmitted through a non-archival system of transfer, a kind of knowing-in-the-flesh called the repertoire. These bring about a shift in our understanding of the archivist, who Ginzburg would now identify with the hunter, who is a reader of obtuse signs who had to reconstruct shapes and movements of invisible prey from detritus (foot tracks, excreta, etc.) and commit such knowledge to motor-reflex memory.

In a New historicist tenor where we embrace that “the real” is never accessible as such, this conference invites debates, performances and artwork around the spectral presence of the archive, which we must at the same time concretize and dissolve.

Suggested topics for these may include (though not limited to):

• Archive and the Field

• De-colonizing, de-brahmanizing and queering the archive

• Materiality of the modern archive

• Database aesthetics and the archive 

• The body and the archive 

• The artist as archivist 

• Archive and the production of knowledge 

• Memory and the archive 

• Waste/ Detritus/ Noise and its relation to the archive

• Found footage and documentary film-making

We invite proposals from ALL disciplines, in the form of 250-300 word abstracts or video clips or audio recordings of 6-7mins or in a visual template(interested participants will be mailed the template). Please mail your proposals saastudentsconference@gmail.com by 23:59 hrs. 15th March, 2018.

Due to paucity of funds, we would not be able to give travel allowance to outstation candidates. However, your food and lodging will be looked after. There is no registration fee to take part in this conference.

CFP:Archiving Feminist Futures – Temporality and Gender in Cultural Analysis, Nov-1-3 2018, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

A warm invitation to Berlin for the conference Archiving Feminist Futures.

We would like to approach this topic through

talks, roundtables, project presentations, and installations.

November 1–3, 2018

The Kommission Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde (dgv)

In cooperation with the Department of European Ethnology, HU Berlin and the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), HU Berlin

Organizing committee: Beate Binder, Silvy Chakkalakal, Urmila Goel, Sabine Hess, Alik Mazukatow, Francis Seeck

Throughout the recent German electoral campaign, affective invocations such as “Now is the Time!”, “Return to the Deutsche Mark”, and “Rehabilitate Democracy” were repeated continuously. As is so often the case with political events like these, one could observe how time was employed both as an idea and a resource. Images of a “fair future” stood alongside a “golden past”, and a present that—characterized by many as having gone haywire—was positioned as the main political target. Drawing upon concepts of time lies at the core of political campaigns that employ a strong request for action and change, be this progressive or reactionary. In future thinking as well as in a fixation with the past aimed at defending the status quo, time and temporality create powerful cultural orders and initiate processes of inclusion and exclusion as well as of collectivization and subjectification.

The conference “Archiving Feminist Futures” builds on current debates around “feminist futures” and “queer temporalities”, which encourage us to consider temporality from an intersectional perspective. Time, in this sense, is regarded as a gendered phenomenon. The conference theme thereby also refers to the persistent discussion within cultural anthropology about the nexus of “time and the other” (Fabian 2002). How are time and temporality being practiced, narrated, placed, and made tangible? Specifically, we aim to investigate the very parameters of power and inequality that arise from these constellations. The academic practices of ethnography and archiving include an important anticipatory element, as they always assume and imagine a future for which we describe, archive, and pass on. In this sense, we would like to approach the everyday, political, and methodological dimensions of time and temporality.

The following questions are of particular interest: What role do temporal practices play in the cultural analysis of gender studies? What are the effects of time understood as a classificatory category within fieldwork as well as during the process of scholarly exploration and evaluation? What is the speculative and anticipatory potential of a cultural anthropology informed by queer and feminist theory? How do we anticipate the future of the analysis of gender relations and structural inequalities from a perspective of European Ethnology? What do we understand by “queer futures” or “feminist futures”? What kind of spaces of power and possibility are we conceptualizing with such terms? Are we archiving for the future or can the future itself be archived? And, finally, the fundamental question: How are time and temporality intertwined with gender?

Academic debates about postfeminism, postcolonialism, and migration as well as broader discussions around Gender Shift and Womenomics address the idea of the future of gender within several social fields. “Archiving Feminist Futures” invites the interrogation of feminist futures, temporal practices, and processes of temporalization from a range of disciplines, to bring together scholars of politics, the economy, care, law, art and popular culture, as well as technology, sustainability, medicine, and biology.

We would like to approach historical, theoretical, and methodological imaginations of the past, present, and future, all of which articulate broader conceptions of society, making visible feminist and queer theory as social and political movements. In their approach to time and temporality, such discussions of the future constantly take into account the state and status of feminist and queer theoretical and methodological efforts (Halberstam 2005). Conflicts between various feminist pasts and their own specific historiographies come to the fore (Binder/Hess 2013; Hark 2005); the possibilities and desirability of feminist futures become apparent (Milojevic 1998). The intensified debate about the future raises the question of political agency in the “here and now” and leads to a critique of the so-called over-presence of the future within the present (Avanessian/Malik 2016). This discussion can also be productively informed by feminist and postcolonial perspectives, for example when connected with provocative concepts such as “feeling backward” (Love 2007) or “being anachronistic” (Zinnenburg Carroll 2016). Against this backdrop, thinking, designing, and envisioning futures goes hand in hand with the cultural analysis of past and present times.

We would like the idea of archiving futures therefore to be a productive approach for our conference. This empirical and ethnographic frame also includes the reflexive and anticipatory potential of European ethnology and its various methods and materials of cultural analysis.

We invite proposals for 20-minute talks or alternative forms of presentations (debates, short presentations, commentaries, exhibits, installations, performance). Prospective contributions may address, but are not limited to, one of the following areas:

• How do we make use of time?

Empirically informed research on temporal practices and temporal orders of the past and present, for

example analyzing gender (e.g. its constituting or stabilizing effects) from an interdependent perspective.

• Politics of/for the future:

Empirically informed research exploring fields in which time and/or the future are used as a political

argument with close study of its subjectivizing and gendering effects.

• Cross-boundary interventions:

Feminist science fiction, artistic and activist sketches of gender, time, and temporality.

• Research practices within Cultural Anthropology, European Ethnology, and Gender Studies: Temporal approaches to one’s own academic work: methodological and theoretical reflections on paradigms of development, genealogies, chronologies, linearities, legacies, or cultural heritage.

Please include the title of your talk or presentation, a short bio, and brief abstract of no more than 300 words (in German or English). Please send your proposal to future.archives.ifee@hu-berlin.de by March 30, 2018. We would like to emphasize the possibility to propose other media formats (film, exhibition, sound, photography, experimental writing, etc). There will be the possibility to present such works.

With kind regards from Berlin,

Beate Binder, Silvy Chakkalakal, Urmila Goel, Sabine Hess, Alik Mazukatow, Francis Seeck

 Contact Info: 

Prof. Dr. Silvy Chakkalakal 

Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Møhrenstraße 41, 10117 Berlin

https://hu.berlin/chakkalakal 

Contact Email: 

future.archives.ifee@hu-berlin.de

Call for Papers for an International Conference on Migration-"The Migrant and the State: From Colonialism to Neoliberalism", TISS, Patna, India

Call for Papers :

The latest Economic Survey (2016-17) of the Government of India has a full chapter devoted to interstate migration in the country. Titled ‘India on the Move and Churning: New Evidence,’ the chapter begins with a quote by B. R. Ambedkar: ‘An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.’[1] Clearly in its present outlook on migration the Indian government strives to make a positive connection between mobility of labour and large scale social transformation facilitated through the channels of this mobility riding on a new set of evidence from novel methods of enumeration like Cohort-based Migration Metric and Railway Passenger Data based Metric that show a considerable increase in the volume of interstate migration in comparison with the provisional D-5 tables in the 2011 Census. Notwithstanding the correctness of the estimates, we may infer that the Indian state is considering the phenomenon of migration not only as a means of economic development but also as an instrument of effecting social transformation by governing the flow and direction of the movement of the working population. The desire to identify and manage the potential workers on the move is also palpable in the two observations made in the study: (1) the female workforce is a highly potential agent of development and (2) the expansion and integration of the labour markets require portability of food security benefits, healthcare and basic social security provisions through better interstate coordination entailing re-imagination of the federal structure of the country.

It does not need saying that the relatively recent interest in migration has a long history that can be traced back to the days of colonialism, slavery and indentured labour. The relationship between the state and the migrant has gone through many a mutation since then; the mutuality of their existence has also been sifted by a range of seemingly external forces, institutions and processes. However, according to Timothy Mitchell, the debate about the elusive boundary between the state and the non-state entities has a tendency to assume inaccurately that the division is external to their respective forms and mechanisms.[2] The same division is again reinforced in the often contradictory understandings about the state either as an abstract concept or as an amalgam of well defined functions and material practices. The problem with this definitive position is that it often obscures the politics that contributes to the internalisation of the externalities between the state and non-state entities. It is therefore imperative to follow the trails of this elusive boundary as we live in a time when both the notions of a strong and a weak state can exist simultaneously and operate in the same plane of material interventions. Migration seems to be a potent site of studying these processes in the sense that it stages the enactment of flexing boundaries repeatedly and often in ways that reproduce the logic of externalisation of the non-state entities like the society or the economy. In the same token, it also reintroduces the state in our imagination as an effect of a boundary-making exercise where the limits of economic development, social churning and reordering of the state interact with each other and produce novel forms of governmental apparatuses.    

The International Conference on the dynamic and ever-changing relationship between the state and the migrant aims to meet the timely demand of chronicling these interactive, interspersed narratives of mutuality where the figure of the migrant is produced in the various domains of statist paraphernalia over the last two hundred years. At the same time, it will focus on histories of the reinforcement of the state – both as ideas and material realities – in our collective political imagination by eliciting various other flexible boundaries between the market and the state, the legal and the illegal, the formal and the informal and the mobile and the sedentary. The broad thrust of the conference will be on (a) how significantly different is the ‘postcolonial condition’ from colonialism with respect to the relationship between the state and the migrant; (b) what is the specificity of the neoliberal refashioning of the state in dealing with the mobile workforce; and (c) how new technologies of enumeration and intervention affect the state’s perceptions of and expectations from the migrant.

Individual papers and panels are welcome on any of the following themes and related areas:   

1.      Migrant labour in the colonial period

2.      Migrant and Postcolonial industrialisation

3.      Migration and gender

4.      Identity, violence, and displacement

5.      Changing agrarian relations

6.      New technologies of governance

7.      Trans-border migration

8.      Labour, informality and logistics

9.      Migration and urbanisation

10.  Social movements and forms of resistance

Important Dates

Submission of abstract: 31st May, 2018

Intimation of selection of abstract: 30th June, 2018

Registration of paper presenters: 1st to 15th July, 2018

[Registration Fee: Rs. 1000/- for Indian participants and $100 for international participants]

Submission of full paper: 21st October, 2018

Date of Conference: 29th and 30th November and 1st December 2018

To submit your abstract or for any query, write to patna.conference@tiss.edu

Contact Info: 

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Patna Centre

Delhi Public School Senior Wing 

Village: Chandmari, 

Danapur Cantonment, Patna - 801 502 (Bihar) INDIA

Contact Email: patna.conference@tiss.edu

URL: http://tiss.edu/view/5/mumbai-campus/centre-for-development-practice-and-research/call-for-papers-for-an-international-c...