Funded International Conference- Discourses of Weakness and the Futures of Societies 28-June 30th 2018 Goethe University Frankfurt

Call For Papers:

Reflecting one’s own weakness and putting it into words almost always includes a certain amount of willingness to change. Or, to put it the other way round: for a historical formation, the willingness to develop its own abilities or to find new orientations towards the future quite often is linked to the establishment of a variety of discourses of weakness.

Adopting such a perspective has an impact on assessing processes of social innovation: the motivation to employ something “new” is less related to the question of genuine innovation but much more to the wish to change a social formation, since one’s own current status has been recognized as “being weak” in one or several respects. Innovation thus needs to be related not only to ingenuity but rather to the willingness to change oneself or the social formation to which one belongs, which in turn often is a consequence of perceived weakness.

In order to better understand how societies prepare themselves for the future, how they deploy and adjust resources and the role of assessments of weaknesses in this process, the conference will discuss the following topics:

1. Regional specifities and global entanglements.

2. How are discourses of weakness articulated in the domains of politics, economics, law, knowledge and other fields of the humanities?

3. How were discourses of weakness articulated in different historical periods including the distant past?

4. How are discourses of weakness related to cultural heritage, memory and imaginations of futures (past and present)?

Funds:

We especially would like to encourage junior scholars from all region and affiliations to apply. We will provide reimbursement of traveling expenses and provide accommodation for researchers without financial support from their home institutions.

Proposals in German or English (max. 500 words) should be sent together with a brief CV by February 16, 2018 to:

Prof. Dr. Iwo Amelung (Amelung@em.uni-frankfurt.de) OR

Prof. Dr. Moritz Epple (Epple@em.uni-frankfurt.de) OR

Prof. Dr. Hans Peter Hahn (Hans.Hahn@em.uni-frankfurt.de)

Selected presenters will be informed by March 16, 2018. Working languages of the conference will be German and English.

Contact Info: 

SFB 1095 – Schwächediskurse und Ressourcenregime

Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main

Postfach Juridicum 104

Gräfstr. 78

60486 Frankfurt am Main

Contact Email: amelung@em.uni-frankfurt.de

URL: http://www.sfb1095.net

Winter School & Workshop on "Religions of India: Transformations of Values, Practices and Identities" - IIT Delhi -19-23 March 2018

Organised by: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and University of Groningen (NL)

Dates: 19-23 March 2018

Venue: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

 Call For Applications:

With a population of more than 1.3 billion, India is home to some of the major religions of the world such as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. While according to the recent Census, 80 per cent of India’s population are Hindus, India is also home to second highest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. Moreover, the history of Christianity in India is much older than Europe. Multiple religions, ethnic communities and cultures have interacted with each other. The result of such interaction has been mixed; while on the one hand it has produced a pluralistic and syncretic culture, it has also sometimes led to religious conflict.

Global events and process of globalization has had a significant influence on the cultural lives of people. Over the years, we have experienced major transformations in religious and cultural values, practices and identities. This winter school (19-21 March 2018) aims to bring together a group of MA/M.Phil Students with interests on religion to discuss some of the major changes in the religious and cultural sphere of India brought about by both domestic and global factors.

Connected to the winter school, the workshop(22-23 March 2018) intents to investigate different fields of religious dynamics in India, to exchange ideas about ongoing research and to look into possibilities and challenges for future studies. As such we intend to include research that is concerned, for instance, with processes of “modernization” or “re-traditionalization” of religious traditions, or that deal with the changes or contestations of indigenous or otherwise subaltern traditions in relation to “mainstream”culture or state policies. Furthermore, we aim to discuss ideologies, institutions and practices that would not easily be associated with “religion” in the strict sense, but that are operative in the name of “education”, “administration” or “development.” As such, courts, schools and political parties are as much in the focus of our interest as are NGOs, Adivasi associations or indigenous communities that negotiate and redefine their religion in the face of changing societal conditions.

Invited Speakers:

Prof. Frank Heidemann (University of Munich)

Prof. Rowena Robinson (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)

Prof. Piers Vitebsky (University of Cambridge)

Prof. Chad Bauman (Butler University, USA)

Dr. Peter Berger (University of Groningen, NL)

Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)

Who can Apply: MA/M.Phil Students of Social Sciences

Requirement: One page proposal on any aspect of religious transformation in India

Last date of Proposal Submission: 15 January2018

Please send your proposal to: winterschool.iitdelhi@gmail.com

http://hss.iitd.ac.in/event/winter-school-workshop-religions-india-transformations-values-practices-and-identities

Funded Graduate Student Conference on Politics of Movement: Racialization, Religion, Migration - April 5-6, 2018 Illinois, Morocco.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

Politics of Movement: Racialization, Religion, and Migration

Whether discussing the management of refugees by nation-states, Brexit, the ever-expanding carceral state, the fugitivity of unarmed Black bodies captured on film fleeing the police, or the organized assemblage of citizens protesting the neoliberal regimes, one could argue that the problem of Movement is one of the most pressing themes of the 21st century.In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the international travel ban, questions about religion, race, and migration have moved center stage. The racialization of Islam and Islamophobia have become transnational phenomena in the politics of secular nation states. Elsewhere the (necro)political aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the mudslides in Sierra Leone have put into relief the politics ofmobility when natural disasters displace thousands. The rise of carceral regimes and police states raise questions about the afterlives of slavery and the continual confinements that render Black Life precarious. Taken together these challenges invoke new and important questions about national security, immigration policy, the logic of coloniality, antiBlack violence, secular law, border patrol, and sovereignty.

The Politics of Movement: Racialization, Religion, and Migration graduate conference will bring students and faculty together to facilitate an interdisciplinary exploration of the multiplex ways of theorizing the politics of movement—broadly defined in the US and abroad. This not only includes various forms of mobility—migration, diasporas, refugees, settlements, travels, transportations, etc.—but also the often racialized political techniques that restrict, contain, indoctrinate, limit, manage, or move people to create various forms of im/mobility—dislocation/removal, borders, prisons and confinements, ghettos and reservations, militaries and policing, colonies and camps, etc.

The conference will feature keynote speaker

Dr. Darryl Li (Anthropology, University of Chicago)

Organizers of the Politics of Movement invite graduate student papers from a wide range of disciplines that explore issues such as (but not limited to):

• Diaspora
• Transnationalism, global politics
• Ethics
• Gender/Sexuality
• The Politics of Religion/ Political Theology
• Secularism, secularity, secularization
• Refugees
• Undocumented, “Illegal”, and “Alien”
• Settlement, indigeneity, settler colonialism
• Militarism, Policing
• Empire
• Political economy
• Citizenship
• Race/racialization/ racism
• Afro-Pessimism/Afrofuturism
• Mass incarceration, carcerality
• Solitary confinement/Carcerality, torture
• Surveillance, national security
• Necropolitics
• Coloniality of Space
• Climate change
• Law
• Performance

 Deadlines and Funding

Please submit an abstract of your proposed paper (maximum 300 words) to buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/grad-conference 

The deadline for submission is December 1, 2017. Acceptance notification is January 15, 2018.

The Buffett Institute will provide hotel accommodations and will subsidize travel costs (fully for US-based graduate students and partially for international students)

Co-organizers:

James Hill, PhD Student (Religious Studies)

Hafsa Oubou, PhD Student (Anthropology)

Matt Smith, PhD Student (Religious Studies)

Contact Email: 

hafsaoubou2020@u.northwestern.edu

URL: 

http://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/grad-conference/index.html

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/