Kathmandu University - Centre for Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute is pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications for our Tibetan, Sanskrit and Nepalese summer intensive language courses. The courses include beginning and intermediate classical Tibetan, three levels of colloquial Tibetan (beginning, intermediate, and advanced), beginning and intermediate Sanskrit, and beginning and intermediate Nepalese. An introductory Buddhist studies intensive, combining study and a meditation practicum at a retreat center in the Kathmandu Valley will also be offered.
In addition, this year CBS is offering a new graduate-level, for-credit Advanced Tibetan Reading Seminar to be taught by Professor Klaus-Dieter Mathes from the Univ. of Vienna and Professor Yaroslav Komarovski from the Univ. of Nebraska.
The spoken language courses, which are structured to offer full immersion in the local languages and cultures, offer the opportunity to live with Tibetan and Nepalese families. All classes are held at Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery, just a few minutes’ walk from the Great Stupa of Boudhanath in the Kathmandu Valley. This summer's courses begin June 13 and end August 10.
News making and the influence of sources on news production have been a focus of interest of scholars since 1970s when Sigal published his seminal study on news sources. Much has changed since then and while routine sources such as Government’s press releases and other information still influence news agenda, entrepreneurial sources such as charities and NGOs are also making a momentum in acting as sources to journalists. In part, charities became sources because of newsworthiness their work adds to journalists who can argue they are serving the public by reporting on charity activism and raising awareness of charitable causes. However, journalists also report using contacts when sourcing news, and many academic studies reported increased reliance on PR content, because of which journalism also earned the nickname “chournalism”.
In addition, growing number of studies report that women are not as present in newsrooms as much as men, and that newsrooms still remain a place for blokes. Nevertheless, some studies reported that not only women do not participate in main news writing as much as men but that when something moves from traditional “female” sections (such as health, lifestyle and food) to news then it is again men who write on these topics and not women.
Major political debates revealed question of media ownership and influence of editorial policies on news content and sourcing stories. For example, during the Brexit debate in the UK newspapers such as The Guardian took a pro-remain stance while newspapers such as The Daily Mail and The Sun pushed for the leave vote. Therefore, the question is also who creates editorial policy, and how these editorial policies influence the agenda of each newspaper? What does having an editorial position means for news and journalism? How do we understand news and news making? Is impartiality truly a myth?
Nevertheless, SEO also had an impact on journalism because media organisations now need not only serve as watchdogs of democracy and inform the public on current events, but they also need to create content that their audiences are searching for on search engines. Some argue that this has had a negative impact on journalism as media organisations are producing content their audiences want to consume rather than serving the public by informing them on what they find relevant and newsworthy. Whether we see SEO as negative or positive, it is a fact that it changed journalism and brought to a stakeholder orientation within media organisations, with which it also diminished media’s traditional gate keeping function.
These and other issues are the subjects of our conference. Papers are invited (but not limited to) for the following topics, Exploration of sources in creating news Agenda setting studies Women in journalism Editorial policies and news making Media ownership and its influence on news making Impartiality in news reporting Journalism education Journalism and public opinion Journalism freedom Fake news Fact checking Reporting the truth SEO and its influence on journalism Reporting standards Investigative journalism Social media as a source of news stories The role of social media presence in building a career in journalism Citizen journalism The role of PR in news production
Both researchers and practitioners are welcome to submit paper proposals.
Submissions of abstracts (up to 500 words) with an email contact should be sent to Dr Martina Topić (martinahr@gmail.com) by 15 October 2018. Decisions will be sent by 1 November 2018 and registrations are due by 15 December 2018. In case we collect enough abstracts earlier, we will send decisions earlier.
Conference fee is GBP 180, and it includes The registration fee Conference bag and folder with materials Access to the newsletter, and electronic editions of the Centre Opportunity for participating in future activities of the Centre (research & co-editing volumes) Meals and drinks Sightseeing for second day of the conference WLAN during the conference Certificate of attendance
Centre for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences is a private institution originally founded in December 2013 in Croatia. Since July 2016 the Centre is registered in Leeds, UK.
Participants are responsible for finding funding to cover transportation and accommodation costs during the whole period of the conference. This applies to both presenting and non-presenting participants. The Centre will not discriminate based on the origin and/or methodological/paradigmatic approach of prospective conference participants.
Information for non-EU participants:
The Centre will issue Visa letter to participants with UK entry clearance requirement. The British Home Office has a very straightforward procedure, which is not excessively lengthy and the Centre will also issue early decisions to participants with Visa requirements.
Feminists started to advocate equality and fight for women rights decades ago, and so far we have experienced several waves of feminism. While at the beginning of activism, the issue was in women’s equality in general for women were banned from exercising even basic rights such as the right to vote or work, current feminism is standing up against issues such as glass ceiling (where women can only progress in their careers up to a certain point, but fail to obtain managerial positions), wage gap (where women are paid less for same positions as men), as well as traditional battle against patriarchy that is clearly still alive and well. For example, even though it is legally possible for men to take paternal leaves and stay at home to take care of children and household, it is still women who have these requests approved more often than men, which testifies that patriarchal views of expected roles are still present. In addition, in some countries women are still banned from exercising basic rights such as the right to vote, work in all positions and even the right to drive. While there is a number of men that experience family violence, it is still women who mostly suffer from this type of abuse, while those men who do suffer from it fear reporting it due to expectation that the men is the boss in the house. Nevertheless, with the rise of Far Right political candidates and public speakers started to question Feminism and argue that it fulfilled its purpose, while at the same time re-introducing old prejudices and practices against women where an emphasis is based on their appearance, etc.
The questions the conference addresses are how far have we got, and what needs to be done to achieve true equality of both men and women, and a society where there are no expected roles? Has Feminism failed?
Papers are invited (but not limited to) for the following panels: Patriarchy Women and the rise of Far Right Women and labour Women and discrimination Women and sexual violence Women and religion Women in the media Women and politics Women and sexuality Theory and methodology in women’s studies Women: East vs West Women and reproductive rights Women and education Women and leadership Men’s rights
Prospective participants are also welcome to submit proposals for their own panels. Both researchers and practitioners are welcome to submit paper proposals.
Submissions of abstracts (up to 500 words) with an email contact should be sent to Dr Martina Topić (martinahr@gmail.com) by 15 October 2018. Decisions will be sent by 1 November 2018 and registrations are due by 15 December 2018. In case we collect enough abstracts earlier, we will send decisions earlier.
Conference fee is GBP180, and it includes, The registration fee Conference bag and folder with materials Access to the newsletter, and electronic editions of the Centre Opportunity for participating in future activities of the Centre (research & co-editing volumes) Meals and drinks WLAN during the conference Certificate of attendance
Centre for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences is a private institution originally founded in December 2013 in Croatia (EU). Since July 2016 the Centre is registered in Leeds, UK.
Participants are responsible for finding funding to cover transportation and accommodation costs during the whole period of the conference. This applies to both presenting and non-presenting participants. The Centre will not discriminate based on the origin and/or methodological/paradigmatic approach of prospective conference participants.
Information for non-EU participants:
The Centre will issue Visa letter to participants with UK entry clearance requirement. The British Home Office has a very straightforward procedure, which is not excessively lengthy and the Centre will also issue early decisions to participants with Visa requirements.
Travel is simply seen as the process of getting from point A to point B. And often, in everyday practices, it may be just that. But when looked at from the intersectional vantage point of transcultural and transnational negotiations, travel indeed demands a greater engagement. With the explosion of means of travel, websites, tour groups, travel writers and bloggers, tourism promos by countries and individual states, places have moved closer and hence the need to take the road less travelled has become compelling, making the narrator an explorer seeking a uniqueness quotient, urging one to examine the rubrics of social and cultural engagement, while factoring in race, class and gender. Travels are often deeply personal and even if participatory they retain a certain degree of exclusivity of experience. Therefore, travel narratives are often presented as existential or soul searching and hence have the flavor of confessions and assume a hybrid state between fiction and ‘truth’. Travel writing thus occupies a nebulous position as a genre as its one sidedness and politics of writing the self make it fictional, while the anxiety of disseminating ‘knowledge’ mandates that it be non-fiction.
Travel writing enjoys a rich history, extending beyond antiquity. Narratives of travel are present extensively in classical and Biblical traditions in the west and the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions in the east. Explorations of lands and cultures new continued without a break through the first millennium. Our knowledge of the period between the ninth and fourteenth centuries has been enriched by a corpus of narratives by renowned Arab and Chinese travellers. These writings coupled with the imaginative presentations of trade carried through the silk, spice and incense routes have provided an economy of knowledge of great relevance in contemporary academic discourse. The current interest in travel writing is only rivalled by the proliferation of narratives in the sixteenth century where such writings formed the basis of knowledge gathering and ultimately, the colonial enterprise.
Travel writing is a genre which celebrates heterogeneity in its form and content. The sense of place evoked by any narrative is hinged on the dialogic nature of the self and the other. The self of the narrator / reader is a palimpsest which intensifies the subtleties of the text. Hence, where we position ourselves within these roles profoundly modifies our perception of a place. Such a politicized sense of agency requires linguistic and narrative flexibility where a field as divergent as wine writing becomes part of travel writing.
It is this rhizomatic discourse of travel writing which we intend to explore through this seminar.
The seminar aims to
examine the accounts by explorers / traders / colonizers / scholars /pilgrims to better understand the cultural and geopolitical relations today
look into the dialectics of travel narratives as a response to the increasing need for visual, auditory and gustatory stimulations of the contemporary age and the way this has brought about a revolution in the technologies used to define the self
interrogate the reasons behind the increased mobility of people and how it has calcified cultural impressions 4) derive an understanding of the process of identity formation and representation in the midst of modern / postmodern configurations.
The thrust areas would be, but not limited to
1. Theorising travel writing
2. Travel narratives across history
3. Travel and the Indian subcontinent
4. Arab and Chinese travel narratives and India
5. Colonial travel narratives and India
6. Travelling lives, writing lives
7. Gendering travel writing
8. Travel and the body
9. Visual politics of travel narratives
10.Travel in the age of globalization
11.Travel and the new media
12.Reification of travel
Well researched papers are invited from academicians, teachers, research scholars and students on the areas of interest specified. Please send an abstract of 300 words with your bionote to the following email: travelseminar2018@gmail.com
Important Dates
Deadline for submitting abstracts: 16 February 2018
Confirmation of acceptance of abstracts: 21 February 2018
CALL FOR PAPERS:
We propose to examine Virginia Woolf’s relationship to history by reflecting on her reading and writing of history,[1] be that the history of her own time, of the past, women’s history or literary history. This will involve analysing how the literary and historicity are interlinked not only in her novels, but also in the essays, letters and journals. This in turn might lead us to consider the question of anteriority and tradition, engaging both the po-ethical and political dimensions of a Woolfian writing of history and of pre-history, such as that which informs her late essay “Anon,” but is also present throughout her writing in the attention it accords to a cultural unconscious, subtending the present of language like a sometimes conscious, sometimes not yet conscious memory of the past.[2] We might also be led to see Woolfian historiography from the perspective of materialist revisionism, a feminist rewriting of the past, or an infinite working through the library of her father, Leslie Stephen. Other possible perspectives would be to consider her work as that of an archivist writing against the archives of patriarchy in search of her own arkhe,[3] or examining how she reinvents the historiographical, biographical and literary traditions. Woolf’s engagement in the history of Modernity might in turn be considered from a Benjaminian perspective, as a form of historiographical reconfiguration anticipating post-modern philosophy.
The question of Woolf’s hermeneutics of history might lead us to define the different forms of her engagement in women’s history, in the history of class, of her queering of history, her heterodoxy. We can also read her writing as a form of archeology delving into the written and non-written traces of history, attentive to the emergence of spectres and forms of survival or survivance[4] but also as a response to what Woolf herself called, in Three Guineas, “history in the raw.” Thus addressing how Woolf arrests the kairos of historical moment, her own inscription of two world wars as if in negative, might lead us furthermore to consider her writing as a form of resistance, nonetheless steeped in the Real of history, the present and the body. We invite papers which address these questions among others from a variety of theoretical, literary and cultural approaches.
Possible topics may include:
• Virginia Woolf as a reader and interpreter of history
• Virginia Woolf as an apprentice historian
• Virginia Woolf’s revisionist historiography
• Virginia Woolf’s counter literary histories
• Virginia Woolf’s complex relations to past and present historiographical traditions
• Virginia Woolf, Historicism and New Historicism
• Virginia Woolf, historicity and the new biography
• Virginia Woolf’s feminist take on history and literary history
• Virginia Woolf, history and its “effect upon mind and body” (Three Guineas)
• Virginia Woolf’s writing of history and pre-history
• Memory, the immemorial, oral tradition
• History, historiography and chronotopes in Virginia Woolf’s works (libraries, museums, monuments…)
• Archeology, material artifacts and the archive
Proposal submission deadline: February 20th, 2018
Contact Info:
Paper proposals (a 300-word abstract with a title plus a separate biographical statement) should be sent by February 20th 2018 to Anne Besnault-Levita (anne.besnault@gmail.com), Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (amdibiasio@neuf.fr) and Marie Laniel (marie.laniel@gmail.com)
“The fourth world is at present incipient, not fully realized; seeds, not yet wholly grown. This fourth world of aesthetics needs to organize itself as “non-aligned,” neither capitalist, whether of the US, European, or Chinese brand, nor communist/socialist, nor fundamentalist-religious whether Islamic, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or whatever. The vanguard of this new fourth world are — and here I hope you won’t think me too arrogant — performance theorists and performance artists who practice collaborative performance research; persons who know that playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge. What would be the manifesto of this Performance Fourth World? It has four axioms:
To perform is to explore, to play, to experiment with new relationships.
To perform is to cross borders. These borders are not only geographical, but emotional, ideological, political, and personal.
To perform is to engage in lifelong active study. To grasp every possibility as a script — something to be played with, interpreted, and reformed/remade.
To perform is to become someone else and yourself at the same time. To empathize, react, grow, and change.”
Richard Schechner, from “Performance in the 21st century”
Folk memory on the one hand carries over the wisdom of the former age to newer constitutions of identity and on the other seems to be unaffected by institutional forms of inequality based on class, caste and ethnicity. It is the unique capacity of folk culture to address the universal from its vantage form of the local that makes it an indispensable part of contemporary Indian society. In spite of the distinctiveness of the specific tribal ways of life, the spirit of tribal folklore underlines global values that natural religion can offer to other faiths. From performatives of their daily social and religious life to performances of entertainment – all presentations of tribal culture express the organic interrelatedness of god, man, nature and spirit. Representations of these forms appear not to be suitable for traditional models of theatre that – a la Richard Schechner – regard the spectator merely as a customer and divide space into exclusive hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity and aesthetic forms. Folklore in eastern India is a cultural category that accommodates non-confrontational coexistence as much of cultivated and folk traditions as of Brahmanical, caste Hindu, Muslim, tribal and Christian cultural practices. Folkloric performance therefore becomes a tool of cultural intervention or a crucial site for juxtaposition of cultures. It blurs the boundary between the oral and the literary. Mahasweta Devi, for example, re-constructs the “Book of the Hunter” (“Vyaad Kaand”) of Mukundaram’s medieval Bengali epic Chandi Mangala to bring to life the lost oral tradition of the Shabar tribe. Nilakanth Ghoshal uses the folklore of Bhadu to rewrite Bhumi Kanya (Earth maiden). Some of the oral forms are inscribed, creating a gap between the word and the speaker for creative imaginations to fill. A sort of post-modern endeavour is required to ensure that folk forms can be sustained as living traditions in which collective identities are constructively affirmed.
This conference seeks to address issues related to the sustenance of tribal folk art forms of eastern India in performance. It will recognize the necessity of informing these forms with epistemological ideas born of new researches in performance art and theory as well as scour the possibility of how elements of these forms in turn can contribute to the enrichment of performance art in totality. Abstracts (250 words) for papers of 15 min duration are invited on the theme of the conference. Presenters can use the following sub-themes (not inclusive) as guidelines:
Tribal identity, folk art and performance
Performative, Performance and Performativity of Tribal cultural practices
Religious equity and tribal folkloric performance
Gender equity and tribal folkloric performance
Globalization and tribal folklore in performance
Colonization and tribal folk performances
Nation, Resistance and tribal folk performances
Borderlands and tribal folk performance
Psychogeography and tribal folk practices
Traditional history and tribal folklore in practice
Publication: The Conference Proceedings will be published in the Rupkatha Journal (indexed by Scopus, EBSCO, MLA, ERIHPLUS)
Selected papers will go into an anthology to be brought out by an international publisher.
Registration Fee:
Rs 500/- per head.
Accommodation:
We cannot provide but we can suggest places to stay in like (name a few hotels etc).
Contact:
Send your abstracts for consideration to any of the following members by 15 Feb 2018:
This two-day International Conference brings together scholars and graduates researching the intersections of cultural studies, imagology and translations, with a focus on cultural images constructions, various ways of approaching the concept of ethnicity and translation practices in a friendly and welcoming atmosphere of “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University in Bucharest.
In the context of globalization, the issue of cultural identity has aroused increasing attention. Cultural Translation, as means of cultural (de)construction supports the cultural differences and enriches both cultural identities. We encourage the cultural identity approach to translation, in expectation of treating ethnic cultural identity construction from a wider perspective, measuring the literary reception, investigating different layers of cultural identities and revealing both self-images and the images of the Other.
International Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture intends to blur the limits of conventional discourses and approaches, and features densely theoretical and analytical writing that focuses on the aspects of English language and literature in any or all possible contexts, employing interdisciplinary approach to address / approach the research problems with methods of and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers, scholars and students from all areas of language, literature, culture and other related disciplines. You may participate as panel organizer, presenter of one paper, chair a session, or observer. All submissions to the conference will be reviewed by at least two independent peers for technical merit and content.
Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:
Anthropology and ethnography in cultural studies
Classical Literature
Collaborations in Language Teacher Education
Contemporary Literature
Critical Race Theory
Cultural identity
Culture and the social construct of gender
Diasporic Literature
Drama and Dramaturgy
Effective Teaching Methodologies in Language and Literature Classrooms
Interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism in Translation
Interdisciplinarity in Language Teaching and Translation
Intersectionality and Identity Politics
Intersections of the translations and cultural studies in literary reception
Language and Gender
Language and Popular Culture
Language and Power
Language and the New Media
Language Varieties
Language, Culture and Translation
Language, Identity and Culture
Language, Power and Ideology
Literary Criticism
Literature and Film
Literature and Gender
Literature and History
Literature and Other Arts
Machine learning for natural language
Media
Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Memory, place and belonging, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities
Multicultural past and present
Multicultural Poetry and Prose
Nation and Nationality
Overlapping culture-areas
Poetry and Prose
Policies of diversity
Practices of Language Teacher Education
Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts of Language Teacher Education
Teaching of Language and Literature
Text analysis, understanding, summarization and generation
Text mining and information extraction, summarization and retrieval
The analysis of language and language use as providing a window into non-linguistic
cognitive processes and structures
The Knowledge Base of Language Teacher Education
The transformative nature of the role of language and communication in human cognition
Transculturalism
Translating human values and social traditions
Translation Studies
Women’s Writings
A 200-word abstract and 5 keywords for a 20-minute paper should be submitted as an email attachment to LLC2018conference@gmail.com. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, phone number, title of the paper, abstract, 5 keywords and a brief bio data.
All participants are requested to submit a proposal by April 20, 2018.
The papers presented at the conference will be published in a volume.
Should you need further information, please contact the organizers at LLC2018conference@gmail.com or visit http://limbi-straine.ucdc.ro/llc-bucharest.php or http://www.elts.cankaya.edu.tr/call-for-papers/
