Call for Articles: "Christian Missions and the environment" - Religions is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Religions deals with the relationship between Christian missions and the natural environment. Lynn White argued that Western Christian dominion theology has proved historically detrimental to the environment. [White 1967]. The Lynn White thesis has been extensively debated for the relation between Christianity and the natural environment. The purpose of this volume is to specify and focus the discussion by investigating the understanding and practice of Christian mission vis-à-vis the natural environment.

From the 18th century, the activities of Christian missionaries were entangled with European imperialism, and engaged with and reflected upon colonial environments. Missionaries left an ambivalent heritage. Whereas they participated in the colonial enterprise and embraced a theology that regarded natural environments as subservient to human needs, some of them also recognised the need for nature conservation. It is precisely in these colonial settings that some scholars have situated the origins of modern environmentalism [Grove 1990]. Studying missionaries’ engagement with the natural environment thus illuminates the historical roots of Western environmentalism more broadly. How does the missionary relationship with the natural environment help us understand modern Western environmental attitudes?

More recently, some scholars have identified a ‘greening of mission’ [Effa 2008; Robert 2011; Kapya-Kaoma 2015], illustrated by Emilio Castro’s reference to the natural environment as the ‘third missionary frontier’ [Castro 2000]. Others remain sceptical and believe Western Christianity at large is not fundamentally changing its lukewarm or even hostile position towards environmentalism [Konisky 2018; Zaleha and Szasz 2015].

Our understanding of the role of missionary and diaconal organisations in environmentalism is fragmentary. There is very little scholarly literature on the engagement of historical missionary societies or modern Christian NGOs with the environment. At the same time, there is a growing awareness of the necessity of global Christian missionary and diaconal organisations and communities to participate in the fight against climate change [Kidwell 2020]. There is also a need to connect theological and ecological views from the global church with Western perspectives. A better understanding of eco-theology in relation to mission is needed.

We invite contributions on the following themes:

The historical role of Christian mission in its engagement with the environment in the ‘colonies’;

The role of missionary societies in postcolonial environmental settings;

Policies of current Christian NGOs vis-à-vis climate change and loss of biodiversity;

Christian missionary eco-theology;

Contemporary theology of missions and environmental sustainability;

Churches, environmental change and sustainability in contexts;

Churches, mission stations, Christian architecture and place-making, and the natural environment.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–300 words summarising their intended contribution. The abstract must contain the main arguments addressing one or more of the themes, the purpose or goal of the topic, how the author intends to address the issues. Please send it by 15 April 2024 to the Guest Editors (David Onnekink david.onnekink@tuu.nl, Richard Darr rsdarr@earthlink.net and Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo bwkgolo@ug.edu.gh), or the Assistant Editor Ms. Violet Li (violet.li@mdpi.com) of Religions. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo a double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Rich Darr

Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo

David Onnekink

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024

Contact Email

David.Onnekink@tuu.nl

URL

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/YTT3ZI3U6X

#CFP: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice : Special Issue: ‘#Materiality in the Short Fiction of #Alice #Munro’

 Guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.’

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)

Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and Women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.

• Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.

• Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging

• The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.

• Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.

• Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.

• Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.

• Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.

• Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.

• Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.

• Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.

• Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.

• Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage by clicking the submissions tab.

For style guide and submission details please see: https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice

For further enquiries please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk.

The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2024.

Contact Information

Ailsa Cox

Contact Email

coxa@edgehill.ac.uk

URL

https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice#call-for-papers

Call for Papers :Thematic focus of the issue: #Evolutionary Aesthetics – #Aesthetic #Evolutions: Posthumanist Explorations with #Darwin-#TRANSPOSITIONES- new interdisciplinary biannual #peer-reviewed journal

 

Interdisciplinary Research Project “Non-Anthropocentric Cultural Subjectivity”

Coordinator: Prof. Paweł Piszczatowski

TRANSPOSITIONES

Zeitschrift für transdisziplinäre und intermediale Kulturforschung /

Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Culture Studies

ISSN 2749-4128 (print), 2749-4136 (online)

https://transpositiones.uw.edu.pl/en

Vol. 4, No. 1 (2025)

In the humanistic discourse of the 21st century, primarily where it tests its own limits and seeks a transdisciplinary opening, the work of Charles Darwin is an important point of reference. It is enough to mention Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter (2010) which  is fundamental for posthumanist research, and in which the author discusses in detail Darwin’s concept of the “small agency” of

worms or the monograph by Polish researcher Justyna Schollenberger Stworzenia Darwina. O granicy człowiek–zwierzę (2020).

In the context of the planned issue, the book Wozu Kunst? Ästhetik nach Darwin by the German comparatist Winfried Menninghaus (2011; English translation Aesthetics after Darwin: The Multiple Origins and Functions of the Arts, 2019) seems to be of particular importance.

According to Menninghaus Darwin was the first to explain the parallels between human and animal arts of singing and self-adornment using a general evolutionary model of aesthetic representation. Menninghaus presents Darwin’s reflections as an essential approach to a theory of arts that, in addition

to music, also includes rhetoric, poetry, and the visual arts. Menninghaus reads Darwin’s remarks against the background of today’s knowledge in archeology and evolutionary biology as well as in the light of philosophical and empirical aesthetics and complements Darwin’s analysis by examining the role of gaming behavior, technology, and symbolic practices in the hypothetical transformation of sexual courtship practices into human arts.

Based also on other concepts of evolutionary aesthetics, evolutionary musicology, Darwinian literary studies, and new-materialistic reading methods we will try to consider the possibilities for understanding human artifacts that may result from their diffractive view through the prism of Darwinian concepts. 

Proposals comprising a 250-word abstract in English or German and a brief

biographical note should be sent to: transpositiones@uw.edu.pl by April 30,

2024.

A decision will be made regarding the final selection by May 10.

Deadline for submitting completed manuscripts: September 30, 2024.

The issue is expected to be published in spring 2025.

Publication language: English and German.

TRANSPOSITIONES is a new interdisciplinary biannual peer-reviewed journal

correlated with the topics of the project “Non-Anthropocentric Cultural Subjectivity” realized as part of the Research Excellence Initiative at the University

of Warsaw primarily oriented towards interdisciplinary publications addressing

issues of posthumanist theories of the late anthropocene. It is published by the

German publishing house Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (imprint of BRILL

Deutschland GmbH).

More information: https://transpositiones.uw.edu.pl/en

Call For Papers: Cute #Ecologies: a critical-creative Symposium 7th June 2024 Online (Zoom)

 Hosted by AWW-STRUCK, this day of lightning talks and presentations on critical research and creative practice features a roundtable conversation between invited speakers (confirmed):

• Miranda Lowe (principal curator of Crustacea at the Natural History Museum London).
• Claire Catterall (curator of Cute at Somerset House, London)
• Hugh Warwick (author of Beauty in the Beast and spokesperson for The British Hedgehog Preservation Society)

Encountering cute forms of nature, from bunnies and hedgehogs to monkeys and deer, is an everyday experience for most of us. They appear on tea towels, cakes and images gone viral on social media. The cute nonhuman might even be our companion animal. The apparently simple, benign nature of cuteness means it goes unexamined, especially in the context of the environmental crisis where the aesthetic is likely to appear irrelevant, if not irreverent. This symposium challenges such thinking by asking: Can cuteness prompt care-giving behaviour for environments? What power dynamics exist in the ‘cutification’ of flora and fauna? What fate for ‘uncute’ species? 

Recent developments in cute studies demonstrate the power of cute to increase pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours. Conservation charities know as much, employing the cutest species to drive public donation. However, the bias toward charismatic megafauna is also known to be a problem. Anthropomorphism and domestication emerge again and again in our encounters with the nonhuman. And perhaps ourselves. As cute studies scholar Joshua Paul Dale recently suggested, Homo sapiens may well have emerged because women preferred cuddlier companions to cavemen. 

We welcome papers that address topics through critical research and/or through creative practice (poetry, film, performance, music, visual artwork). Topics or areas of research may include:

• Animal studies and plant studies
• Childhood culture and children’s geography
• Charismatic megafauna 
• Domestication and scale
• Conservation science and political ecology
• Popular culture, Disney studies, anime and manga studies
• Commodification, material objects and waste
• Technology, cyborgs and artificial intelligence 

Possible formats include: 5-minute lightning talks, 20-minute presentations.

Please submit abstracts and/or short proposals (300 words max), telling us whether you’d like to give a lightning talk or presentation to awwstruck.info@gmail.com by 19 April 2024. Please include a short bio (100 words max). If you are a creative practitioner, please include two samples of your work.

This event is organised by Dr Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham) and Caroline Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London) who founded AWW-STRUCK in 2021. This symposium is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Attachments

aww-struck-cute-ecologies-cfp-2-240419.pdf

Call for Applicants : Workshop on Women and Crime Fiction - June- 2024

 Ever since the genre established itself in the Anglophone world in the mid-nineteenth century, crime fiction and discussions of crime fiction have tended to underemphasize the role women play in it, unless they are victims or femme fatales. Yet women, as authors, major characters, and audience members, have been a part of the genre since the very beginning. Indeed, it has been about a century since one could have feasibly considered crime and detective fiction (written or otherwise) as a “male-dominated genre,” and scholarship has followed suit: from Kathleen Gregory Klein’s The Woman Detective to Sally R. Munt’s Murder by the Book?, from Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones’ Detective Agency to Gill Plain’s Twentieth Century Crime Fiction – the study of femininity and crime fiction has proved to be extremely fertile ground for analysis and debate.

Quite often, however, these studies and debates remain within clearly defined historical boundaries, with the result that the female detectives and authors of the nineteenth century only rarely come into scholarly contact with their peers from the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” the femmes fatales of the hardboiled mode, the feminist sleuths of the 1970s and 1980s, or the multimedial third- and fourth-wave-feminist contributions produced since the turn of the millennium. Additionally, the investigation of the contents of genre fiction are rarely combined with a study of female recipients.

Studies have shown that women seem to be the main audience for true-crime books (Vicary and Fraley 82). This interest holds true across various media; true crime is the most popular podcast subject in the US (Stocking et al.) and the audience for these highly popular podcasts consists mostly of women (Stocking et al., Greer 154–155). Women are also active as producers of such fare. For example, the genre-defining podcast Serial, hosted, written, and produced by Sarah Koenig, became the first podcast to win a Peabody Award in 2015. Further examples include the podcasts Drunk Women Solving Crime or My Favorite Murder, both hosted by women.

This workshop seeks to counteract the prevailing scholarly compartmentalisation and to bridge the aforementioned historical and disciplinary gaps by convening scholars to present and discuss their work on femininity and crime literature, film, television, videogaming, podcasting, fan fiction, etc., from any historical period. Not only does this approach serve to facilitate a more holistic approach to the long and varied history of crime fiction; it also allows for interdisciplinary and diachronic takes on the topic, bringing together perspectives from different branches of the humanities and social sciences.

Keynote: Dr. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (University of Bamberg): “‘She’s a woman, and women act in a silly way’: Policing and (Re-)Negotiating Acceptable Femininity from the Golden Age to Syd Moore” 

Papers: We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers in English covering texts from all kinds of media (literature, film, television, podcasting, videogaming, etc.), discussing topics such as:

• Female characters and stereotypes in crime fiction
• The femme fatale
• Women as audience for crime fiction
• Women as producers of crime fiction
• Intersectional approaches to issues of race, class, and nationality
• The rise of female-led podcasts
• The (physical) female voice of podcasts
• The fetishisation of the female victim
• Historical comparisons, from the 19th century to the 21st
• The ethics of true-crime fiction
• The reception of crime fiction by female authors
• Gender-bending in fan fiction
• etc.

Bibliography

Greer, Amanda. “Murder, She Spoke: The Female Voice’s Ethics of Evocation and Spacialisation in the True Crime Podcast.” Sound Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2017, pp. 152–164, https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1456891.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. U of Illinois P, 1995.

Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. Routledge, 1994.

Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Routledge, 2001.

Stocking, Galen, et al. “A Profile of the Top-Ranked Podcasts in the U.S.” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, 15 June 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2023/06/15/a-profile-of-the-top-ranked-podcasts-in-the-u-s/.

Vicary, Amanda M., and R. Chris Fraley. “Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers?” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 81–86, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550609355486.

Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. U of California P, 1999.

Contact Information

Please send your 250-300-word abstracts to alan.mattli@es.uzh.ch and olivia.tjon-a-meeuw@es.uzh.ch in a PDF file. Please also send a separate bionote of about 100 words. The deadline for abstracts is May 1st, 2024.

Contact Email

alan.mattli@es.uzh.ch

Attachments

Call for Papers

CFP: International Conference on #Bengal and its Neighbors: From Early Modern to Contemporary South Asia -Oct 2024.

 The aim of this panel is to initiate a broader dialogue with regards to the Bengal region, as it evolved from the early modern era — then, a region being ruled a motley of Sultanates with periodic eruption of Mughal expeditions against the independent Sultans — to an important resource extraction zone during the colonial era. Eventually, the region evolved into a contested terrain during the anti-colonial movement in the Twentieth Century that pitted two distinct nationalist projects against one another, as the post-colonial future of the region’s heterogeneous ethnic, linguistic and religious communities were being decided. Fast forward to the Partition, Bengal’s religious fault-lines became exposed, as the Muslim majority regions became part of Pakistan, while the Hindu dominated Western regions became part of India. 

However, this flared up communal fragmentation does not fully encapsulate the efforts undertaken by political forces, including the left-leaning ones, to oppose communalism’s impact on the widening gap between Hindus and Muslims. Interestingly, an echo of this anti-communal nation-building imperative can be traced in the movement leading up to the creation of Bangladesh, and, subsequently, the inscribing of the principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism in its founding constitution draw up in 1972 following its break-up from Pakistan in 1971. The country experiences coups and countercoups in the late 1970s and early 1980s that had shacked its attempt to build a new society out of the ruins of Partition. 

Moreover, the wider Bengal region has experienced further tensions due to the acceleration of the climate crisis, onset of neoliberal globalization, and new forms of social divides along caste, class, ethnicity, and religious lines in the recent years. Therefore, it would be more than useful to interrogate the region from a broad historical perspective so that dialogues can be initiated to understand the wider implications of today’s crises as well as the traces of the past in the Bengal region’s turbulent present. 

With an aim to investigating the various traditions of resistance, in literary writing, oral and public culture, plastic and visual arts, to dominant ideologies of nation, class, religion, and gender, the esteemed panelists seek to engage with the following questions in order to understand the complex changes in the region from a broader perspective: 

• How can we address the influences of various cultural forces — Arab, Persian, Indic, and European — in a primarily agrarian region?
• How can we reconceptualize the major changes that occurred in the region as it transitioned from the colonial era to the postcolonial present? What are some of the major outcomes of this transition including the Permanent Settlement, the Bengal famine of 1943 and the creation of the successor three nation-states of British India impacted the region? 
• How is the region shaped by political changes such as the solidification of Hindu nationalism in India, the India-China rivalry to extend regional influence, as well as the ethnic tensions in the bordering countries such as Myanmar? 
• How can the region’s longue durée shifts be addressed from an interdisciplinary angle? What are the stakes of bringing scholars together who explore the Bengal and its neighboring region from a range of disciplinary angles including anthropology, history, literature and religion among others?      

Contact Information

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio to the organizers, Auritro Majumder, Assistant Professor of English, University of Houston, amajumder@uh.edu &  Asif Iqbal, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Oberlin College, aiqbal@oberlin.edu by 30 March, 2024. 

Contact Email: aiqbal@oberlin.edu

CFP: International Conference on Understanding Authoritarianism/Fascism in South Asia -Nov 2024

 We are proposing a panel on “Understanding Authoritarianism/Fascism in South Asia” at the 52nd Annual Conference on South Asia, organized by the South Asia Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

While South Asia, a diverse and dynamic region, has witnessed various forms of governance throughout its history, in recent times, concerns have been raised about the rise of populism and/or authoritarianism. This panel seeks to explore the nature of fascism/authoritarianism in this region. Is the nature of fascism/authoritarianism the same in this region compared to Western/European counterparts? In response to Ramin Jahanbegloo's question "Is there an Indian fascism?" Ashis Nandy argues, “Indian civilization, which has no direct experience of that particular version [European] of authoritarianism and has always worked with ill-defined, open ended concept of evil, finds it more difficult to deal with various modern versions of authoritarianism” (Nandy 2006). 

This panel invites theoretical and/or empirical research that critically examines the features (distinct or otherwise) of authoritarianism/fascism in the South Asian context and beyond. We aim to identify and analyze historical antecedents contributing to the emergence of authoritarianism and to explore the socio-cultural factors influencing the development and sustenance of authoritarian regimes. Simultaneously we plan to investigate the role of technology, media, civil society, developmentalist narratives, nationalist discourse, discourse of national security and so on in shaping and reinforcing authoritarian tendencies. 

We invite 200–300 word abstracts with a short bio (100 words) on topics including but not limited to: 

• Authoritarianism/Fascism in South Asia (Any historical moment to now) 
• Biopolitics
• Manufacturing the consent 
• Nation-building and Authoritarianism 
• Extra-judicial killings 
• Resisting Authoritarianism (past or present) 
• Silencing the narratives
• Radical Alternatives 
• Democracy and Populism
• Anti-Authoritarian Political Thoughts in South Asia
• Secular/religious authoritarianism
• Vote Rigging to "Dummy" election (in the context of Bangladesh)
• Politics of Propaganda

Please send your abstract and short bio along with any questions, to zehsan@wisc.edu 

Submissions are due by March 28, 2024.

Accepted papers will be notified by April 05, 2024.

Contact Information

Zunayed Ehsan, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

Contact Email

zehsan@wisc.edu