Tag Archive for CFP

CFP: Salvage and Salvation: Religion, Disaster Relief, and Reconstruction in Asia

04/13/2012 CFP No comments

CALL FOR PAPERS – Salvage and Salvation: Religion, Disaster Relief, and Reconstruction in Asia

Dates:      22 (Thursday) and 23 (Friday) November 2012

Venue:      Asia Research Institute, Seminar Room, Tower Block Level 10, 469A Bukit Timah Road, National University of Singapore, Bukit Timah Campus

Organisers: Dr Philip Fountain and Dr Levi McLaughlin

What does it mean to offer sal­va­tion in the midst of cat­a­stro­phe? What dynam­ics are in play at the inter­sec­tion of reli­gion and dis­as­ter relief in Asia? Over the past few years, Asia has wit­nessed fre­quent mas­sive and high pro­file dis­as­ters, notably the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), the Kashmir earth­quake (2005), Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (2008), the Pakistan floods of 2010, and most recently the 2011 earth­quake, tsunami, and nuclear dis­as­ters in north­east Japan. In the wake of these tragedies – and the numer­ous smaller-scale dis­as­ters that also afflict the region – reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions have played piv­otal roles in dis­as­ter response ini­tia­tives. Millions of relief work­ers and bil­lions of dol­lars in aid have been mobi­lized through their net­works. However, despite hav­ing a pro­found impact on the lives of dis­as­ter vic­tims, these ini­tia­tives have gone largely under-reported, and there has been no com­pre­hen­sive attempt to present research on reli­gion and relief in con­tem­po­rary Asia. ‘Salvage and Salvation’ will be the first inter­dis­ci­pli­nary con­fer­ence to bring together researchers, human­i­tar­ian work­ers, and pol­icy mak­ers to address this theme.

Analysis of reli­gion and dis­as­ter relief intro­duces prac­ti­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns. Understanding the full ram­i­fi­ca­tions of dis­as­ter requires atten­tion to spe­cific reli­gions involved in recov­ery and the dif­fer­ent posi­tions they assume. Additionally, it can­not be pre­sumed that Asian states are reli­giously neu­tral.  Disasters and relief efforts open new forms of com­mu­nal­ity among affected pop­u­la­tions, thereby alter­ing reli­gion and pol­i­tics and inspir­ing novel social and spir­i­tual tra­jec­to­ries.  Humanitarian actors and grass­roots mobi­liza­tions are also deeply impli­cated in these shifts.  Even self-consciously sec­u­lar human­i­tar­ian orga­ni­za­tions inevitably engage with the reli­gious real­i­ties they encounter in their dis­as­ter responses through vary­ing strate­gies of col­lab­o­ra­tion, accom­mo­da­tion, or exclu­sion of dif­fer­ent reli­gious activ­i­ties. A region-wide com­par­a­tive approach to dis­as­ter and recov­ery should be con­cerned with the broad­est pos­si­ble spec­trum of what ‘sal­va­tion’ may com­prise, whether asso­ci­ated with the state or non-governmental actors or whether des­ig­nated ‘reli­gious’ or ‘sec­u­lar.’
Read more

CFP: Moving boundaries in mobilities research, University of Cagliari, Italy

03/06/2012 CFP No comments

Moving bound­aries in mobil­i­ties research

Organised by the University of Cagliari in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Cosmobilities Network
Venue: University of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy)
Dates: 5 – 7 July 2012

Keynote speak­ers

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (Roskilde, Cosmobilities Network)
Sven Kesselring (MoRE, Munich, Cosmobilities Network)
Mimi Sheller (mCen­ter, Drexel, Philadelphia, Pan American Mobilities Network)

Background

Mobilities is a dis­tinct strand of the­ory and research in social sci­ence, an evolv­ing approach that syn­the­sises in an orig­i­nal way exist­ing and new writ­ings on the com­bined move­ments of peo­ple, objects and infor­ma­tion. The mobil­i­ties turn addresses con­cep­tual and method­olog­i­cal chal­lenges posed by old and new trans­for­ma­tions in trans­port and com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems and their impli­ca­tions for con­tem­po­rary lives and natures.

Over the last decade the mobil­i­ties turn has gen­er­ated enthu­si­asm across dif­fer­ent fields and informed stud­ies in a wide range of top­ics and prob­lem­at­ics, from tourism, migra­tion, trans­port, urban plan­ning and mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion to logis­tics, cli­mate change, con­sump­tion and inequal­ity. In the Anglophone world inter­est is par­tic­u­larly evi­dent in soci­ol­ogy and human geog­ra­phy. One among many anec­do­tal exam­ples is Tim Cresswell’s arti­cle ‘Towards a pol­i­tics of mobil­ity’ which cur­rently fig­ures as the most down­loaded paper in the last twelve months in Environment and Planning D: Space and Society.

While research has, up to date, tended to focus on the daily micro­mo­bil­i­ties of peo­ple and objects, atten­tion is also being directed towards his­to­ries of mobil­ity, the mobil­ity of ideas, large scale cir­cu­la­tion sys­tems, build­ing mate­ri­als and resource con­sump­tion and cir­cu­la­tion. As an approach with mov­ing bound­aries, mobil­i­ties research is also devel­op­ing method­olo­gies and meth­ods that respond to both con­cep­tual inno­va­tions and the empir­i­cal real­i­ties of a world on the move. Innovations in ‘mobile meth­ods’ are open­ning up promis­ing prospects and still unful­filled pos­si­bil­i­ties some of which are related to the way new ICTs rou­tinely gen­er­ate, col­lect and dis­sem­i­nate data. The mobil­i­ties turn, like most social sci­ence, still has to come to terms with these trends and cre­ate syn­er­gies with streams of research that are suc­cess­fully exploit­ing these oppor­tu­ni­ties. At the moment, major advances in net­work the­ory, one of the back­bones of com­plex­ity the­ory, are com­ing not so much from the phys­i­cal sci­ences but from research on the social, draw­ing on vast amounts of data gen­er­ated by intel­li­gent net­worked infra­struc­tures and mobile tele­phony.
Read more

CFP: Special Issue “Progressive Evangelicalism” in Religion

03/01/2012 CFP No comments

See more details here.

A spe­cial issue of Religions (ISSN 2077 – 1444).

Deadline for man­u­script sub­mis­sions: 30 June 2012

Description

Although the Religious Right has rep­re­sented the pop­u­lar face of American evan­gel­i­cals’ polit­i­cal engage­ment since the late 1970s, a minor­ity of polit­i­cally pro­gres­sive evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers have pro­moted an alter­na­tive pub­lic agenda over the past four decades. Representatives such as Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, Evangelicals for Social Action’s Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo have insisted that Christians have a reli­gious respon­si­bil­ity to pri­or­i­tize reforms of injus­tices and inequal­i­ties in their polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion. In recent years, pro­gres­sive evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers have increas­ingly cap­tured the atten­tion of evan­gel­i­cal audi­ences, jour­nal­ists, politi­cians, and schol­ars. In the process, they have rein­vig­o­rated debates within American evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles about the nature and pri­or­i­ties of Christians’ social and polit­i­cal activism. Yet socially and polit­i­cally pro­gres­sive evan­gel­i­cal­ism is nei­ther a recent nor uniquely American phe­nom­e­non. Thus this spe­cial issue of Religions explores both his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary expres­sions of pro­gres­sive evan­gel­i­cal­ism, not only within the United States but also in inter­na­tional con­texts. Scholars are invited to con­tribute arti­cles from a broad range of method­olog­i­cal approaches that ana­lyze pro­gres­sive evan­gel­i­cals and their efforts to con­front social injus­tices and inequal­i­ties.
Dr. Brantley W. Gasaway
Guest Editor

Read more

CFP — Foodways: Diasporic diners, transnational tables and culinary connections

02/16/2012 CFP No comments

I got hun­gry just think­ing about this CFP.

CALL FOR PAPERS

FOODWAYS: DIASPORIC DINERS, TRANSNATIONAL TABLES AND CULINARY CONNECTIONS

Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Please join us for the 2012 Annual Conference of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Thursday October 4 – Sunday, October 7, 2012
Abstracts due: March 16, 2012

More infor­ma­tion on the con­fer­ence can be found on the Diasporic Foodways blog

Click here for online sub­mis­sion of abstracts and reg­is­tra­tion. (see below for instructions)

On Facebook or Follow us on Twitter

Description:
This con­fer­ence seeks to address ques­tions sur­round­ing the dynam­ics of the food ‘we’ eat, the ways in which ‘we’ eat, the mean­ing ‘we’ give to eat­ing, and the effect of eat­ing in a transna­tional world. Recognizing that culi­nary cul­ture is cen­tral to dias­poric iden­ti­fi­ca­tions, the focus is on the place of food in the endur­ing habits, rit­u­als, and every­day prac­tices that are col­lec­tively used to pro­duce and sus­tain shared senses of cul­tural iden­tity. Yet even as it does this work, food and the prac­tices of pro­duc­tion, prepa­ra­tion and con­sump­tion that revolve around it, can­not help but be drawn into wider cul­tures and cul­tural pol­i­tics of con­sump­tion increas­ingly grounded in the pur­suit of qual­i­ties of dif­fer­ence, acts of dis­tinc­tion and ques­tions of jus­tice. This focus on food, cook­ing, and eat­ing in dias­pora and its role in con­nect­ing and chang­ing peo­ples, places, tastes, and sen­si­bil­i­ties around the world yields insight not only to sub­stances that peo­ple con­sider essen­tial to the main­te­nance of iden­tity, but to the pro­duc­tion of new cul­tural polit­i­cal for­ma­tions in a transna­tional world and to the role of cul­tural (re)production in the expan­sion of con­sump­tion under con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism. A focus on food also reveals the dynamic role of his­tor­i­cal path­ways in under­stand­ing cul­tural for­ma­tions as they have existed through time, and in posi­tion­ing the present as a moment in a con­tin­u­ing process of struc­tured mobil­ity that directs the move­ment of peo­ple, what they eat, and how they under­stand them­selves and the world around them. It also yields insight into the mul­ti­ple places and ways in which food assumes value and how that value is often reliant upon the con­tin­ued repro­duc­tion of ties that bind peo­ple, place, and prac­tice across space and time. A great deal of aca­d­e­mic work explores this inter­play of food, prac­tice, iden­tity and sub­ject for­ma­tion, much of it bound together by a com­mit­ment that through a fuller under­stand­ing of those rela­tions, we bet­ter under­stand our­selves, our pasts, and the com­plex­i­ties of the spaces and lives we inhabit and enact in a transna­tional world. This con­fer­ence seeks to enhance that under­stand­ing.
Read more

CFP: Working the frame: comparative approaches to Asian Canadian literature & culture, McMaster University

01/26/2012 CFP No comments

Call for papers
Working the Frame: Comparative Approaches to Asian Canadian Literature & Culture
John Douglas Taylor Conference 2012
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
October 25 & 26, 2012

Call for Papers
The emer­gence of Asian Canadian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture as an iden­ti­fi­able force over the last twenty years is abun­dantly clear: Asian Canadian fic­tion and poetry have won major lit­er­ary prizes, there are sev­eral active Asian Canadian the­atre groups in major cities, and film fes­ti­vals on Asian and Asian Canadian film are held annu­ally. Despite the grow­ing promi­nence of Asian Canadian arts, how­ever, the broad pub­lic per­cep­tion that we are liv­ing in a post-racial or even a post-national world makes it dif­fi­cult to estab­lish insti­tu­tional ground­ing for a field founded on explor­ing racial, eth­nic, and national iden­tity; to date, no uni­ver­sity pro­gram or depart­ment devoted to Asian Canadian Studies has emerged. Yet, as the recent Macleans arti­cle Too Asian? and the strong responses it has gen­er­ated demon­strate, racial iden­tity pol­i­tics are nei­ther obso­lete nor dead, although new pos­si­bil­i­ties for coali­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties have arisen between and among dif­fer­ent racial­ized groups in Canada, and between dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties in the Asian dias­pora. While the pol­i­tics of race and iden­tity have shifted over the last two decades with the turn to dias­pora and transna­tional approaches in crit­i­cal race stud­ies, eth­nic stud­ies, post­colo­nial stud­ies, and cul­tural stud­ies, it is pre­cisely this shift that demands atten­tion to new devel­op­ments in the cir­cu­la­tion of knowl­edge about and the expe­ri­ence of race and nation­al­ity in Canada.

The pur­pose of this con­fer­ence is to explore the cur­rent for­ma­tion and future devel­op­ments of Asian Canadian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture in a comparative/relational frame, exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties and respon­si­bil­i­ties of coali­tional pol­i­tics and col­lab­o­ra­tive cul­tural pro­duc­tion, as well as the very def­i­n­i­tion of the term Asian Canadian. We invite pro­pos­als that engage with Asian Canadian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture and are espe­cially inter­ested in research that inves­ti­gates cross-cultural rela­tion­ships, col­lab­o­ra­tions, and antag­o­nisms recounted in, enacted by, or in con­ver­sa­tion with Asian Canadian cul­tural prod­ucts.
Read more

« Older Entries