Swedish Institute Study Scholarships (SISS) 

The Swedish Institute Study Scholarships (SISS) are awarded to students from selected countries for full-time master’s level studies in Sweden starting in the autumn semester 2017.

The scholarships cover both living costs and tuition fees. An estimated 335 scholarships will be available.

The scholarship application period opens with a first application step 1 December 2016 – 24:00 GMT 16 January 2017, followed by a detailed second application step for successful candidates from the first step, on 1 – 10 February 2017.

To apply for a SI scholarship, you must first complete your separate application to the master’s programme(s) before the university deadline 16 January 2017. The application process and the selection criteria for the Swedish Institute Study Scholarships are separate from the application process to master’s programmes at University Admissions. Note that you should also look for scholarship opportunities from your Government or from other sources in your country, as well as for opportunities from Swedish universities, since the competition for SI scholarships is very fierce.

Who we are looking for

SISS is the Swedish government’s international awards scheme aimed at developing global leaders. It is funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden and administered by the Swedish Institute (SI). The programme offers a unique opportunity for future leaders to develop professionally and academically, to experience Swedish society and culture, and to build a long-lasting relationship with Sweden and with each other.

The goal is to enable the scholarship holders to play an active role in the positive development of the societies in which they live. Ideal candidates are ambitious young professionals with academic qualifications, demonstrated leadership experience and a clear idea of how a study programme in Sweden would benefit their country.

Priority will be given to applicants choosing study programmes with an emphasis on gender equality, sustainable development, democracy, human rights or poverty reduction.

Applicants from South Africa should apply within the Swedish Institute Study Scholarships for South Africa.

Selection and eligibility criteria

Applicants must be from an eligible country and have at least 3,000 hours of experience from full-time/part-time employment, voluntary work, paid/unpaid internship, and/or position of trust. Applicants must display academic qualifications and leadership experience. In addition, applicants should show an ambition to make a difference by working with issues which contribute to a just and sustainable development in their country, in a long term perspective.

Read more about the selection criteria, target countries, and eligible master programmes. Please note that the eligibility criteria for countries within special initiatives are different. Read more under the title “Special initiatives” on the page.

Application procedure and key dates

The application process consists of two steps. The first step will take place 1 December 2016 – 24:00 GMT 16 January 2017 through an online application form. Successful candidates will be notified by the end of January 2017 (preliminary date: 25 January 2017), and asked to submit a detailed application for the second step 1 – 10 February 2017. The two-step application process aims at offering transparency in the selection process.

To be considered for a scholarship, you must first complete your separate application to the master’s programme(s) before the university deadline of 16 January 2017. To be considered for a scholarship in the second step, you must pay your university admissions application fee (SEK 900) to University Admissions before 1 February 2017 (deadline for receipt of the fee). There is no application fee for applying for SI scholarships.

For the second step of the scholarship application you will be required to submit a Motivation letter, a Europass CV, a passport copy, one letter of reference and one proof of work and leadership experience. The documents must be in English. If any mandatory document is not used or completed in English the application is deemed ineligible.

Read more about the application procedure, including guidelines, important dates, document templates and what happens after submitting the application.

Scholarship benefits

The scholarship covers both tuition fees (paid directly to the Swedish university/university college by the Swedish Institute) and living expenses to the amount of SEK 9,000 per month. There are no additional grants for family members.

Travel grants

Scholarship holders from countries on the DAC list of ODA recipients receive a travel grant in connection with their scholarship. The travel grant is a one-time payment of SEK 15,000.

Insurance

Scholarship holders are insured by the Swedish State Group Insurance and Personal Insurance against illness and accident during the scholarship period.

Network memberships

All SI scholarship holders become members of the SI Network for Future Global Leaders (NFGL) – a network which offers exclusive opportunities for SI scholarship holders during their stay in Sweden. Together with other talented people from all around the world, the scholarship holders take part in and organise a variety of events, exchange ideas and create networks beneficial both to career and personal development. Scholarship holders are expected to be ambassadors for their country, and to demonstrate leadership skills and cooperation within the NFGL. When the scholarship holders return to their home countries they become part of the SI Alumni Network.

Scholarship period

The scholarship is intended for full-time master’s level studies of one or two years, and is only awarded for programmes starting in the autumn semester. The scholarship covers the whole duration of the master’s programme.

The scholarship period cannot be altered or extended beyond the study programme period, nor can the scholarship be transferred to a study programme other than the awarded one.

For further info please visit: eng.si.se.

Call for Papers:  "Asian-German Studies"

The German Studies Association:

Forty-first Annual Conference in Atlanta, October 5-October 8, 2017

Deadline for Submissions: January 25, 2017

At GSA annual meetings over the last few years, “Asian-German Studies” panels have produced lively discussions on various topics that have connected the German-speaking world with Asia. These panels have provided an important forum for comparing such phenomena as political issues, works of literature and art, and the theories and practices of transnational history. We would like to continue such efforts to comprehend relations between German Central Europe and Asia through a series of panels at the 2017 GSA conference. 

Scholars interested in "Asian-German Studies" are invited to submit proposals for panels or individual papers dealing with any aspect of Asian-German Studies, but we invite everyone to consider the list below as a possible way to start the creative flow. Proposals from all disciplines are welcome. Please send proposals (300-400 words) and a brief CV via email to Joanne Miyang Cho (choj@wpunj.edu), Lydia Gerber (lgerber@wsu.edu), and Perry Myers (pmyers@albion.edu)

Representative topics for Asian-German Studies include but are not limited to such ideas as the following:

• German notions of “Asia” or Geographical Areas of Asia (East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia)
• Genderizing Europe and Asia (Notions of Masculinity/Femininity, Gender relations/roles)
• German depictions of “Asians”/Depictions of “Germans” in Asia
•  German-Asian relations (alliances, business, colonialism)
• Cross-cultural influence (literature, film, translation, philosophy, art)
• Asians in Europe/speakers of German in Asia (immigration, Chinatown)
• Transnational Religion: Intersections and Influences
• Comparative Germanistik (the discipline as practiced variously in German-speaking world and Asia?)
• Asian Studies in the German-speaking world (Sinologie, Japanologie, Indologie, Koreanistik)

Please pass this CFP along to anyone else who might be interested. More Information regarding the conference can be found on the GSA's website https://www.thegsa.org/conference/current.html .

Joanne Miyang Cho (William Paterson University of New Jersey)

Lydia Gerber (Washington State University)

Perry Myers (Albion College)

#QueerAF: (Re)presenting Gender & Sexuality in History & Cultural Studies

5th Annual Dean Hopper NEW SCHOLARS Conference

May 5-6, 2017

The Ehinger Center, Drew University, Madison, NJ

“Queer” is such a simple, unassuming little word. Who ever could have guessed that we would come to saddle it with so much pretentious baggage–so many grandiose theories, political agendas, philosophical projects, apocalyptic meanings? A word that was once commonly understood to mean “strange,” “odd,” “unusual,” “abnormal,” or “sick,” and was routinely applied to lesbians and gay men as a term of abuse, now intimates possibilities so complex and rarified that entire volumes are devoted to spelling them out.” -David Halperin

#QueerAF is a hashtag used on Twitter and Tumblr by trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, androgynous and gender fluid users to celebrate content that is unapologetically queer, or “queer as fuck.” The use of “AF” in the title of this conference indicates our interest in exploring the power of language to form community in a digital space through the assignation of #QueerAF. The invocation of slurs such as queer, dyke, homo, slut, bitch, and tranny degrades individuals, and those same words have been subsequently reclaimed, yet not without deep controversy. Establishing a conference that is “#QueerAF” represents our resistance to societal politeness by participating in the reclamation of “queer” and disrupting the heteronormative discourse that terms certain behaviors and bodies dangerous or degenerate.

The conference theme draws on multiple disciplines and perspectives on gender and sexuality, inviting challenges to the heteronormative, cisgender, patriarchal discourse of history. Proposals are invited for papers on any aspect of Gender & Sexuality across all time periods and geographical locations. In particular, this conference will be centering around three major themes: Historical & Cultural studies, Linguistics & Theory, and Activism & Media. 

Areas include but are not limited to the topics below:

Historical & Cultural Studies:

Empire, colonialism and gender

Gender, Sexuality and the politics of Health Care & Psychiatry

Sex work

Holocaust & Gender

Intersectional feminism

Subaltern reading communities & Book History

Representations of “queer” and gendered “other” in literature and fanzine culture

Representations of queer and gendered other in underground music culture

Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Video Games

Diversity and Harassment in Video Game Culture

Gender and Online Abuse

Representations of queerness in film and media (Transparent, The New Normal)

Explorations of the horror genre and the “monstrous queer” (Hannibal, Penny Dreadful)

Reclaiming of queer figures “hidden from history”

Linguistics & Theory:

Gender as performance; queer as performance

Theoretical challenges to Foucauldian readings and post-structuralism

Heterosexism of Theory (Freud, Lacan, etc.)

The Gendered Body & Disability Studies

Sexology (Hirschfeld, Carpenter, Krafft-Ebbing, Ellis)

Radical Feminisms and the “queering” of language and theory

Reclaiming and reappropriation of slurs (Queer, dyke, slut, gay, feminist, bitch, tranny)

Misgendering as an act of violence

Activism & Media

Social Media Activism

Queerness and citizenship

Radical Gendered Activism, Fourth Wave Feminism, Riot Grrrl

Remembrance & Curating Queer History (Stonewall, national monuments, museums, archives)

Gender, Sexual Identity & the Law in the United States

Global/Transnational social movements, LGBTQ & Gender-based Human Rights

AIDS, Race and Gender

Deadline for Submissions is 1 March 2017!

Submit Proposals at https://sites.google.com/drew.edu/deanhopperconference.

International Conference

Protest and Dissent in Translation and Culture

organized by

Department of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures

University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS)

Warsaw, 11-13 May 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS

Though dissent and protest seem to be strongly linked with politics and with political actions, the range of their senses and uses is much broader and, as Amit Chaudhuri has noticed, dissent is inscribed in the very idea of the literary which, "in its resistance to interpretation, is a peculiar species of dissent." The common ground of protest and dissent is, very generally, a disagreement with what is, and an expression of the necessity of some change which seems to be standing behind the very gestures of dissension or protestation. This expression may take various forms and make use of various modalities coming from different cultures, states and places. Protest and dissent may sometimes be individual gestures, as seems to be the case with   Melville's Bartleby's famous "I would prefer not to", though the outdoor reading of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" organized by Occupy Wall Street supporters at Zuccotti Park in New York in November 2011 was an event which renarrated the story as "resonating quite well with the mission of the OWS protest" because it not only questioned the assumed hierarchy and expressed the strength of passive resistance, but also because it was set on Wall Street. Dominance and resistance seem to be inevitably speaking through various narratives and stories we live by, the stories which are narrated and renarrated, framed and reframed in different social, political and language communities and realities, through different media and means, and translated into different contexts and languages.  The notion of framing, Mona Baker claims in "Reframing Conflict in Translation", allows us "to see translational choices not merely as local linguistic challenges but as contributing directly to the narratives that shape our social world". The ways in which we name, rename, or label events, groups of people, even places have implications in the real world and may help us realize that the world is not made up of universally accepted norms, but that we also partake in negotiating its construction, its changing meanings and senses. Protest and dissent do not necessarily have to be an incentive to a revolutionary change, to a shift of the dominant, but may testify to there being what Edward Said called simply "something beyond the reach of dominating systems", something which limits power and "hobbles" it also through translatological resistance to finality.

We invite papers looking at protest and dissent from different theoretical and methodological perspectives (Translation Studies, Literary Criticism, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Discourse Analysis, Feminist and Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Philosophy, Sociology, History of Ideas, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies), papers not only theorizing  protest and dissent but also papers engaged in broadly understood disagreement, disapproval, critique or resistance, potentials of conflict management and/or the educational and pedagogical dimensions of dissent.  We also invite papers showing how narratives of dissent and protest (novels, poems, stories, histories, films, news, press articles, protest songs …) are renarrated/translated in different social and political contexts and the ways in which translators' choices may be oriented or disoriented.   If Jacques Rancière is right saying that "the essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one", then translation, as an inevitably divided activity, may be a kind of discourse which reveals that oneness may be one of those ideas which harbour consensual dominance and the end of politics, the end of dissensual plurality and the beginning of the police which, in different disguises, finds these days its way to the streets of numerous places of the world.

We suggest the following, broad, thematic areas as issues for disputes and highly probable clashes of ideas:

Rhetoric(s) of protest and dissent

Narrating/renarrating protest and dissent

Dissent and protest in intercultural contexts

Dissent and protest in the culture of global/local politics

Translating protest

Translating dissent

Translation-power-resistance

Empowerment and translation

Resisting power/power of resistance

Discourses of dissent and protest

Discursive strategies of protest and dissent

Discursive analyses of protest and dissent

Pedagogy/ies of dissent

Manipulating protest and dissent

Protest and persuasion

Conflict/protest/dissent

Translating conflict

Literature(s) of protest

Protest/dissent and media

Protest/attack/defense

Protesters/dissenters as friends

Protester/dissenters as enemies

Good guys and bad guys

Protest and activism

Activating/de-activating protest and dissent

Global dissents and/in translation

Solidarity in translation

Translating collectives/collective translations

Keynote speakers:

Professor Mona Baker (University of Manchester)

Professor Ben Dorfman (Aalborg University)

Professor Hanna Komorowska (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw)

Professor Tadeusz Rachwał (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw)

Venue: University of Social Sciences and Humanities, ul. Chodakowska 19/31, Warsaw, Poland.

Proposals for 20-minute papers (ca 250 words) should be sent to dissent@swps.edu.pl by 30 January 2017. We also encourage panel proposals (comprised of 3 to 4 papers, and an additional 100-150 words explaining how they are interlinked in addressing the panel theme). Panel proposals are due by 15 January 2017.

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 28 February 2017.

The deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: 31 March 2017.

The conference fee is 550 PLN | 130 EUR | 140 USD for all participants.

Conference organizers: Dr. Agnieszka Pantuchowicz and Dr. Anna Warso.

Conference website: https://portal.swps.edu.pl/web/protest-and-dissent-in-translation-and-culture

Scholarship  - MSc and DPhil in Sustainable Urban Development

Deadline 20 January 2017

Applications are invited for the part-time MSc and DPhil in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford.  

The next admissions round closes on 20 January 2017.  

The MSc Programme Scholarship also closes on this date (more information below).

We would be grateful if list members would share this information with students, colleagues and associates for whom it will be of interest.

The Sustainable Urban Development programme at the University of Oxford offers part-time master's and doctoral courses for practitioners and researchers engaged in cities and urban issues. It attracts architects, educators, engineers, lawyers, financiers and investment analysts, landscape architects, project managers, planners, property developers and surveyors.

• Flexible part-time master's and doctoral programmes – study while working
• Dynamic and thriving research, graduate and practitioner community
• International perspective and reach, drawing on Oxford's interdisciplinary expertise
• Strong associations with leading organisations, including the Prince's Foundation for Building Community and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
• Opportunities to network and to develop valuable cross-sector connections
• Access to Oxford’s internship schemes

 MSc Full Fee Programme Scholarship

The MSc Programme Scholarship will cover all course fees (and college fees) across both years of the MSc in Sustainable Urban Development for October 2017 entry. The Scheme is open to all new candidates for the MSc. No separate application process will apply, but candidates seeking to be considered for the Scholarship need to have submitted a full application by 20 January 2017. Candidates need to present a consistent record of excellence both academically and professionally.  Full details are available on the MSc website.

Please visit our website www.conted.ox.ac.uk/urban or contact us on sud@conted.ox.ac.uk and +44 (0)1865 286952 for further information about each course, funding opportunities and how to apply.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories

An International Symposium hosted by Power Institute, University of Sydney, Australia

11-13 October 2017

Proposals due 28 February 2017

Studies focused on gender in Southeast Asian societies have emerged, in recent decades, in approximate concurrence with the development of regionally focused Southeast Asian art histories. The founding premise of this international symposium is that there has hitherto been insufficient discursive intersection between these two fields.

Topics discussed may include:

• accounts of individual artists and collectives whose work engages with gender;
• investigations of gender in the exhibitionary, critical, and historiographical receptions of works of art, from any period
• considerations of the relationships between artists and/or works of art and larger Southeast Asian cultural constructs of gender, as enacted in political, economic, religious and other domains.

Proposals will be particularly welcomed for papers that address what new perspectives and methodological approaches are brought to the fore through studies that are attentive to gender, and/or that re-assess art historical narratives through the lens of gender. Histories of art from antiquity to the present will be considered, in the hope that intellectual exchange between scholars working on the “pre-modern,” “modern,” and “contemporary” will be mutually generative.

As the first symposium of its kind, Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories aims to establish the parameters of current research, and to develop inter-disciplinary and transnational frameworks for future studies in the field. To this end, proposals are invited from researchers working in and between a range of disciplines, including but not limited to: archaeology, area studies, comparative literature, gender studies, heritage studies, history, film studies and media studies, in addition to art history.

In addition to more established scholars, early career researchers (including postgraduate researchers) are particularly welcomed. The conference organizers are pleased to offer selected participants financial assistance toward the cost of travel and accommodation, with preference given to those based in Southeast Asia. In developing scholarly networks, the event organizers will also facilitate international collaborations and mentorships, in which early career researchers accepted for participation will be given feedback on their presentations, and encouraged to submit their papers to the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, the Asian Studies Review (indexed in Scopus).

The symposium will be launched by a keynote address from Professor Ashley Thompson, the Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at SOAS, University of London. Symposium participants and up to twelve additional attendees, on a competitive basis, will also be invited to participate in a half-day masterclass led by Professor Thompson, and a professional development workshop.

Abstracts in English of approximately 500 words, as well as biographical statements of approximately 100 words, should be sent to yvonne.low@sydney.edu.au before 28 February 2017. 

Applicants seeking support for travel and accommodation expenses should also include a short statement of financial need.

Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories is convened by Yvonne Low, Roger Nelson, Clare Veal, and Stephen Whiteman. The event is generously supported by the Asian Studies Association of Australia, the Power Institute, the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and the School of Literature Art and Media at the University of Sydney.