ICSSR Invites applications on

Research Programme on “Research Studies on Specific Issues in Special Regions”

The proposal of the study (app. 1500 words) should belong to a discipline of social sciences, and it may relate to political/social history; constitutional aspects of integration with India; bilateral treaties and agreements; issues of refugees, migrants and displaced persons; economic, political and social status of various sub-regions of these regions; state of Panchayati Raj institutions; status of women, children, elderly people and weaker sections; demographic changes; status of traditional and modern education; assessment of absolute and relative economic performance since independence and so on in respect of such special regions like J&K, North-East etc.

Details about eligibility/terms and conditions etc can be accessed and downloaded as under:

Application format (Click to view and download)

Guidelines (Click to view and download)

Last date of receipt of the application is 17th May 2017(Wednesday)

Applicants will require to submit the following:

1. Proposal of the proposed study in 1500 words.

2. Composition of the research team, including Co-Project Director,      Department and Institutions.

3. CVs of each Researchers.

4. Forwarding letter from the University/Institute of Affiliation.

5. Application form in prescribed format, and

6. Budget proposed.

7. SoftCopy of the proposal and CVs of Research Team should be sent through email at rpicssr@gmail.com

Contact: 

Member-Secretary

Assistant Director

RP (RPR & RPS) Division incharge

ICSSR

Aruna Asaf Ali Marg

New Delhi-110067

011-26742351/26716690 

For More Details Visit: http://icssr.org/

    Funded Coursework for  M.Phil/PhD Research Scholars by CSDS - Call for Applications: Researching the Contemporary 2017

CSDS-New Delhi 

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The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites applications for its two-month course on ‘Researching the Contemporary’. This cross-disciplinary course will critically examine the formation of the contemporary and its multiple histories, ideologies, forms and affects.  The following four courses offered this year will enable participants engage with concepts, theories and methods to critically understand and analyse the contemporary:

Theory and the Global South

Course Instructor: Aditya Nigam

Building on its earlier iterations, the course addresses some of the recent global concerns emerging in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which are variously expressed as projects of ‘decoloniality’, ‘epistemologies of the south’, ‘decolonization of theory’ and so on. These different impulses define a complex relationship with what can, for shorthand, be called ‘Western theory’.

This course starts with the recognition that Western theory itself emerges by drawing from diverse bodies of knowledge – both philosophical and scientific – from different parts of the world and there is little to be gained from its outright rejection. At the same time, it questions its universalist claims, which render specific European experiences of ‘modernity’ and its ‘constituent’ processes like ‘secularization’, ‘individuation’, ‘industrialization’, ‘capitalism’ into norms to be aspired to by societies across the world. Taking historico-philosophical work produced by scholars – past and present – from India, China, the Arab and Persian world and Latin America as its point of departure, this course seeks to put the very idea of ‘modernity’ itself under the scanner. Key concepts of modernity, as well as the knowledge produced under its banner – in virtual oblivion of the experiences of the non-European world – will be opened up for examination during the course. The course however, seeks to go beyond simply providing critiques of Western knowledge and theory for it will also centrally be concerned with the question of what it means to do theory in and from the global south.

Reading Media: Historical and Contemporary

Course Instructors: Ravikant, Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan

Building on its earlier avatars, the course will explore the historically constitutive role of media in shaping modern and contemporary human experience. The omnibus category of media will be broken into diverse devices, forms, materialities and their specific ways of producing social and cultural meaning in South Asia. Media will additionally be presented as an archive of itself as well as the world it seeks to represent and speak to. Its historical plurality and contemporary convergence places on us a demand that we also focus on intermediality or the relationship of one media with another.

The course will offer preliminary answers to basic questions about what it has meant to live in modern times; how cognition, sense perception, bodily and emotional engagement have been configured at key junctures through mediatised experience, including print culture (newspapers, novels, popular pamphlets, pulp and visual culture), sound technologies (gramophone, radio, cassette and digital formats), photography, film, and the broader ensemble called new media. Exploring media as a key site of historical experience, the course will explore what it has meant to read, listen, view, touch and feel, how this has constituted our everyday life and social and political engagement.

Media’s own humongous archive-now increasingly digitised and circulated on app-driven multi-media platforms-is well worth some reflection. What is the nature of archival databases? Of documents? What do media offer evidence of? How is authenticity ascertained if copy-culture and media-manipulation are the new normal? How are the publics constituted and reconstituted by divergent media forms and devices? We shall grapple with such questions and more in a collective class-room spirit.

Touch: Forms and Meanings

Course Instructor: Priyadarshini Vijaisri

The course offers an unconventional critical way of exploring caste and themes of hierarchy, form, ideas and experience. Unlike conventional approaches, the course is designed around touch as an epistemic category and interweaves the overlapping conceptual approaches and the overarching themes thereby inaugurating critical ways of thinking. Deploying the idea of touch, the course will engage with questions about how tactile and other sensory experiences offer a critical understanding of the body, consciousness, inter-subjectivity and being. These methodological and thematic issues will be addressed through eclectic episodes and accounts woven around the conceptual grid of the senses. These topics will be introduced through sites and moments of ruptures and paradoxes from diverse literary, historical as well as ethnographic narratives.

The course will also ask what implications such an approach has for thinking about and beyond caste. The primacy of the West in shaping the discursive universe, especially of caste, poses fundamental epistemological and ethical challenges. The basic aim of this course is to critically rethink basic issues like the possibilities of creative and meaningful approaches to caste and the challenges posed by complex affective histories. More importantly, it brings to the fore questions concerning intellectual self-reflexivity and cultivation of particular kind of disposition in such engagements.

Research as Practice: Issues in Method

Course Instructors: Hilal Ahmed, Sanjay Kumar, Sanjeer Alam

This additional component of the course aims at exploring some of the fundamental questions in social science research, which are not given adequate intellectual attention. The component, broadly speaking, addresses three types of questions: (a) Issues related to academic presentation such as proposal writing, academic essay and thesis writing, and referencing. (b) Issues related to the practicalities of doing survey research such as developing survey questionnaire and evolving sampling, data analysis etc., and finally, (c) the issues related to the identification of sources and usability of official statistics such as Census and National Sample Surveys (NSS).

This is an intensive course with compulsory readings and class discussions.  Course materials will be made available. Participants are expected to make presentations and participate in a workshop at the end of the course period. A participation certificate will be awarded upon successful completion of the course.

The course will be conducted over 8 weeks between 4 July-31 August 2017. Classes will be held at CSDS on week-day afternoons, three days a week, from 2.30-5.30 pm.

Applications are invited from M.Phil/Ph.D students as well as independent researchers.  As part of your application please submit your C.V. and a 1000-word description of your research question/topic. The candidate must indicate the category (SC, ST, OBC, GENERAL), to which s/he belongs, in the application. Selected out-station participants shall be provided with roundtrip travel expenses (3-tier AC) and a stipend of INR 25,000.

Total number of seats: 40* (Some seats are reserved for SC and ST categories).

Deadline:  10 May 2017

Applications may be sent to: teaching@csds.in

For further details check: www.csds.in

* The number of seats is indicative and may increase or decrease depending upon the quality of applications. 

IAFOR Funded-Asian Conference on 
Media, Communication and Film 2017 (MediAsia2017)

Art Center Kobe, Kobe, Japan

October 27 -29, 2017

Conference Theme: "History, Story, Narrative"

Historians are far from the only interested party in writing history. In a sense it is an interest we all share – whether we are talking politics, region, family birthright, or even personal experience. We are spectators to the process of history while being intimately situated within its impact and formations.

How, then, best to write it? Is it always the victor’s version? Have we not begun increasingly to write “history from below”, that lived by those who are not at the top of the power hierarchy? Are accounts of history always gender-inflected, hitherto, at least, towards men rather than women? Who gets to tell history if the issue is colonialism or class? How does geography, the power of place, intersect with history? What is the status of the personal story or narrative within the larger frame of events?

This conference addresses issues of writing history from literary and other discursive perspectives. That is to say: novels, plays, poems, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, travel logs and a variety of styles of essay. One thinks of Shakespeare’s history plays, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Shi Nai’an’s The Water Margin, Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. It also addresses oral history, the spoken account or witness, the Hiroshima survivor to the modern Syrian migrant.

Which also connects to the nexus of media and history. The great “historical” films continue to hold us, be it Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1925) or Gone with the Wind (1940). We live in an age of documentaries, whether film or TV. There is a view that we also inhabit “instant” history, the download to laptop, the app, the all-purpose mobile. How has this technology changed our perception, our lived experience, of history? What is the role of commemoration, parade, holiday, festival or statuary in the writing of history?

The different modes by which we see and understand history, flow and counter-flow, nevertheless come back to certain basics.

One asks whether we deceive ourselves in always asking for some grand narrative. Can there only be one narrator or is history by necessity a colloquium, contested ground? Is national history a myth? And history-writing itself: is it actually a form of fiction, an artifice which flatters to deceive? What, exactly, is a historical fact?

This conference, we hope, will address these perspectives and others that connect and arise.

In conjunction with our Global Partners, including Waseda University (Japan) and The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University (USA), we look forward to extending you a warm welcome in 2017.

– The MediAsia2017 Organising Committee

Deadlines

Initial Abstract Submission Deadline: June 07, 2017*

Final Abstract Submission Deadline: August 07, 2017

Registration Deadline for Presenters: September 14, 2017

*Submit early to take advantage of the discounted registration rates. Learn more about our registration options.

IAFOR's Grants and Scholarships

For information about IAFOR's new grants and scholarships for PhD students and early career academics, please visit: mediasia.iafor.org/grants-and-scholarships

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IAFOR Publishing Opportunities

Peer-Reviewed Journal: IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film

IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film (ijmcf.iafor.org) is an editorially independent journal associated with The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film. The editor of the journal will select the strongest papers from associated Conference Proceedings for consideration. This Open Access journal, which conforms to the highest academic standards, reflects the interdisciplinary and international nature of our conferences.

Conference Proceedings

After having your abstract accepted and presenting your research at the conference, you are encouraged to submit a full paper for inclusion in the official Conference Proceedings. Our Conference Proceedings are Open Access research repositories that act as permanent records of the research generated by IAFOR conferences. Further details are available here: mediasia.iafor.org/final-paper-submission

**THINK

THINK (think.iafor.org), The Academic Platform, is IAFOR's online magazine, publishing the latest in interdisciplinary research and ideas from some of the world's foremost academics, many of whom have presented at IAFOR conferences. Content is varied in both subject and form, with everything from full research papers to shorter opinion pieces, interviews, podcasts, film and photography.

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Join IAFOR at MediAsia2017 to:

– Present to a global audience

– Have your work published in the Conference Proceedings and considered for peer-reviewed, Open Access journals

– Hear about the latest interdisciplinary research in Media, Communication & Film and more

– Participate in a truly international, interdisciplinary and intercultural event

– Take part in interactive audience sessions

– Network with international colleagues

**Register now to take advantage of Early Bird Registration prices. Early Bird Registration is open until the end of July 13, 2017. Lunch is included in all conference registrations. 

Please see the registration page for details: mediasia.iafor.org/registration

*If you have attended an IAFOR conference within the past year, or belong to an affiliated university or institution, we offer additional discounts in appreciation of your support. 

Please contact us at mediasia@iafor.org for details.

International Conference on Film Studies Reading a Film, Watching a Book" 9 September, 2017 - London, UK

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Art and humanities research begins with a desire to understand the human condition. For centuries, literature has provided the source material for reflection on what it means to be human. While literature continues to enlighten us, for some time film has provided a visual alternative. Film not only offers a narrative similar to literature, it also provides an audio-visual feast for the senses.

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations.

Most people enjoy films; most are happy to make claims about how they make us feel (emotive claims) and what we think about them (evaluative claims). We might, for example, say that a particular film made us cry, or frightened us, or had us ‘on the edge of our seats’. We might say a film is a ‘must see’, that ‘it wasn’t as good as his last’, that it ‘stinks’, or that it was a great story.

Film Studies urges us to move beyond such claims to ask how and why films make us feel the way that they do, and why we think some films are better than others. It requires that we move beyond the story and look rather at the form of the film – how it is put together.

Film is a major form of cultural expression, and the study of film is the study of culture, like the history of art or the interpretation of literature. This conference aims to consider film studies from a variety of critical, theoretical, and analytical approaches.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

• Film making techniques 
• Cinematography 
• Film editing 
• Film and sound 
• Film theories 
• History of films 
• Film analysis 
• Film authorship 
• Film genre 

We also welcome poster proposals that address one of the conference themes.

The conference is addressed to academics, researchers and professionals with a particular interest related to the conference topic. Proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 15 July 2017 to: film@lcir.co.uk. Download paper proposal form.

Registration fee – 100 GBP

Venue: Monticello House, 45 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1B 4JP, UK

We welcome applications from prospective volunteers and interns and enquiries from potential visiting scholars. For more information please contact us:

Dr Olena Lytovka

Director

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Unit 210 - No: 11 Burford Road

London, E15 2ST, United Kingdom

www.lcir.co.uk

info@lcir.co.uk

International conference Nation, Gender and History: Asian Cinemas in Perspective

 Vilnius University, Centre of Oriental Studies, 

7-9 September 2017

Call for Papers

Asian Arts Centre and The Centre of Oriental Studies of Vilnius University invite scholars, film professionals and enthusiasts to Nation, Gender and History, an international conference on the cinemas of Asia.

The idea of a national culture has played a fundamental role in the definition, historiography and evaluation of Asian cultural practices for at least two centuries, and cinema is no exception. In today’s world, however, ideas of the nation appear as increasingly problematic. The same can be said of gender, the pertinence of which in individuals’ understanding of themselves and their history has, over the last decades, been challenged from many fronts. And yet both ideas of nation and gender continue to mark discourses about identities and countries, including and perhaps especially in situations of conflict. 2017 marks the 70^th anniversary of the independence and partition of India and Pakistan. The conference takes this opportunity to raise the question: can we still argue for the centrality of national cinemas? What role do notions of gender play in our appreciation of a nation’s cinema? And how do the interconnections between gender and nation in cinema help us understand the present historical moment?

The first aim of this conference is to create a dialogic space in which to revisit the ways in which, today and in the past, nation, gender and history interact(ed) and shape(d) one another in the cinemas of Asia. The term ‘Asia’ is used here as a short-hand to point to the cinema made in wide range of very diverse countries, rather than as a fixed, singular or homogenous entity – an invitation to look beyond the globalised canon of much film theory. Our second aim is thus also to explore points of convergences and trans-cultural forms and practices across this region. Has cinema ever been ‘national’ in Asia? What role does it play today, or did it play in the past, in constructing pan-Asian subjectivities? How does gender – the staple of nationalist discourses – function in specific trans-national or regional cinemas?

While we are interested in papers on the cinema of every Asian country, we particularly welcome papers on the all too often overlooked and still poorly researched cinemas of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, as well as on regional language formations such as Pashto, Sindhi, or Bhojpuri cinemas. We especially welcome papers on popular, low-budget genres (exploitation, B-grade, horror, sci-fi, and erotic films).

Below is a list of themes the conference will endeavor to address. It is not an exhaustive list and is intended as a guide, not as a set of limitations. We welcome suggestions and proposals on related topics.

• the representation of sexuality and/or its repression; cinematic images of a sexual nature, their censorship and their exploitation; the filmic displacement of representations of sexual desire;

• gender and film genres. We are particularly interested in papers examining gender in exploitation, B-grade, horror, sci-fi, low budget film productions;

• gendered allegories of the nation, including mythological representations;

• technical and/or narrative aspects of gender representations; male and female gazes; cinematography, editing, sound and gender;

• national and trans-national aspects of stardom, production and/or distribution; transnational connections; diaspora cinema;

• gender and the film industry, including directors, distributors and exhibitors.

Abstracts / proposals should be in English and of no more than 350 words, including a 50 word author biography.  Time for each paper: 20 minutes.

The conference registration fee is EUR 40 to be paid upon arrival and covers:

• conference folder and badge
• refreshments during scheduled breaks
• receptions

The deadline for abstracts is 30 April 2017.

Send your abstract / proposal to the conference organisers at nagehi2017@gmail.com

In your email, please specify academic or professional affiliation.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE DECEMBER 15-17, 2017

Organised by

Institute of Advanced Studies in English

Pune

DECEMBER 15-17, 2017

Preamble

The academic fraternity world over is preoccupied with various ways of understanding language, literature and culture. In addition to their interrelations and interdependence, the new ideas and approaches emerging from various disciplines like literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis alongside technological revolution and socio-cultural transformations, have a bearing on our study of language and literature. The conference aims at exploring this dynamics with a focus on the complementary nature of language, literature and culture and their centrality in human life.

This year, we especially encourage papers that examine the intersection of digital technology and the Humanities. What are the new methodologies, theories, and sites of study that are emerging from this intersection? What kind of collaborations between the Humanities and Sciences must we envision for 21st century education and research? Papers that take up these and related issues should be submitted under the Digital Humanities, New Media Studies, and Future of Humanities Studies tracks. 

Tracks for Discussion and Presentation 

The ICLLC December 2017 will address a range of important tracks including the following:

• Language, Literature and Ideology
• Culture, Communication and Identity
• Cultural Studies
• Postcolonial Literature and Theory
• Diaspora Identities
• Feminist and Gender studies
• Language, Gender and power
• Postmodernism
• Ecocriticism
• Pragmatics
• Discourse Analysis
• Contemporary Literature and Media
• Science Fiction
• Digital Humanities
• New Media Studies
• Film Studies
• Future of Humanities Studies

Submission of Abstracts 

Proposals (abstracts) can be submitted to iasepune@gmail.com as an attachment with 'Submission of Abstract' typed in the subject field. Proposals should include title, author's name/s, affiliation, contact email address and 150 word abstract of your paper. Approval/Acceptance of the proposal will be communicated in 10 working days. 

Abstracts received till December 01, 2017 will be scheduled in the printed program. Late submissions will be adjusted on the site. 

Publication of Conference Papers 

Conference presenters may choose to submit their full papers for publication. All submitted papers will be peer reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in two stages: 

1. Full articles received from registered participants by November 20, 2017, will be reviewed and published in the pre-conference issues of our refereed, international journals published at the Institute of Advanced Studies in English, Pune: Asian Journal of English Studies and Asian Quarterly: An International Journal of Contemoporary Issues (ISSN 2227-2606 and ISSN 2229-581X). 

2. Full articles received after November 20, 2017, will be reviewed and published in the post-conference issues of these journals. 

Authors need to observe the following guidelines for submission of articles for publication; 

1. Soft copy should be submitted in Microsoft Word format using Times New Roman 

2. Title: 15 words maximum, 14 pts centered 

3. Abstracts: maximum 150 words, 10 pts. italics and aligned on both sides 

4. References: please use MLA style for references 

5. Maximum permitted length is 3000 words 

6. Articles should be written as continuous expository narrative - not as lists of points or PowerPoint presentation 

7. Please ensure that the article is thoroughly checked and proofread before submission 

8. Please avoid using certain advanced word features like lines separating footnotes and titles, background or font colors, drawing objects, highlighting, embossing and other complex Word text formatting . 

Contact Person:
Dr Prabhash N Rath, 
Officer on Special Duty,
Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 
BMCC Road, Pune 411004. 

E-mail: gokhaleinstitute@gipe.ac.in / prabhash@gipe.ac.in 

Landline: +91-20-25650287/25678311 

For any assistance, please send an email to iasepune@gmail.com or call at 08308908349. 

International Interdisciplinary Conference on Gender Studies and the Status of Women 

Conference Dates: Oct 10, 2017 to Oct 11, 2017

City: Edinburgh ,United Kingdom

THIS CONFERENCE OFFERS A PLATFORM FOR:

•  Discussion relating to the current status of women, with a special focus on the following categories that constitute potential challenges to gender equality and women’s rights: the UK’s decision to leave the EU, the refugee crisis, rising levels of (and political legitimisation of) sexual violence and misogyny, cuts in child-care and services for disabled people, lack of access to paid parental leave, tax and welfare reforms, the gender pay gap, sexual harassment and the rise of zero-contract hours
•     International researchers and scientists from academia, industry and government to present their studies to a multi-disciplinary audience, exchange experiences, discuss proposals, and disseminate results on women’s and gender studies.
• Raising awareness and encouraging dialogue on the proposed topics, with the aim of creating lasting productive partnerships between the participants.

All submitted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, edited under the Creative Commons Licence (Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International/CC BY-ND 4.0), which will also contain a report and catalogue of activities. This book will be available on the Women Being webpage to download for free, and it will also be freely distributed to schools, institutions, research centres and individuals who request it.

The aim of this conference is to create an international forum for debate and exchange on the main challenges facing women in today’s society, and to reflect on the ways in which we can, individually and collectively, propose solutions to these problems.

The conference begins on the 10th of October – Ada Lovelace day – which celebrates women of the present and the past, whose achievements have contributed so much to humanity. Like Ada Lovelace, there are many women fighting for equality, for their rights, and for peace. In the last year, there has been a growing awareness of the need to address the problems that women are experiencing, to speak and to take action.

WomenBeing builds upon this momentum by providing a ‘loudspeaker’ for academics, civil servants, researchers, social activists, journalists and private individuals to make their voices heard on the main challenges that women are facing in 2017.

Important Dates:

Submission of abstracts: 1st of August 2017
Acceptance notification: 20th of August 2017

Submission of full papers: 20th of August 2017
Early bird registration: 10th of September 2017

Join us on the 10th and 11th of October in Edinburgh to enrich our discussions.

For More Details Visit Us at:

http://www.womenbeing.co.uk/contact-form/