Thursday, June 26, 2014

CFP: Islamism in the Post-Arab Spring World

Conference Theme: Islamism in the Post-Arab Spring World

Conference Co-chairs: Dr. Edip Asaf Bekaroğlu (Istanbul University) & Dr. Halil Ibrahim Yenigun (Istanbul Commerce University)
Deadline to submit an abstract: July 15, 2014

Istanbul Think-House (İstanbul Düşünce Evi [IDE]) invites you to send an abstract for theIslamism 2014 Conference, an exciting three-day themed event to be held on October 24-26, 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. We welcome paper proposals about various aspects of Islamism ranging from its artistic manifestations to its economic premises.
Islamism has been one of the crucial topics for the last two centuries in international politics and culture. Some have demonized it as an ideology hostile to free societies and modernity; others have emphasized its emancipatory aspects. Some have declared the end of Islamism; others have argued that its adherents remain the dominant political players in contemporary Muslim-majority societies. There is, however, a wider consensus on its critical influence upon the contemporary Muslim world's internal and external relations.
The Islamism 2012 and Islamism 2013 conferences, also convened in Istanbul by the organizing committee, sparked a new Turkish debate on this trend in which several leading thinkers and scholars participated for several months. Islamism 2014 seeks to take this critical spirit further by opening up the conversation to the global audience by arranging an international themed conference. Certain sessions will be held in English. In addition to the specific conference theme, Islamism in the post-Arab Spring world, papers on the following topics are also welcome.
  • Islamist experimentations with government and power
  • Islamism and opposition
  • Islamism and secularity/secularism
  • Competing Islamisms
  • Islamism and Muslim nationalism/Muslimism
  • Comparative case analyses of Islamist movements
  • Relationships among Islamist movements
  • Post-Islamism
  • Islamism and locality vs. universality
  • Islamism and art
  • Islamism and social justice
  • Islamism and foreign policy
Please email your maximum 500-word abstract by July 15, 2014, to the organizing committeeislamism2014@ide.org.tr along with your name, affiliation, address, and phone number.
The conference is organized by Istanbul Think-House, an independent think-tank that seeks to foster knowledge-production processes free from vested power and the distortions caused by organized capital. For more information about IDE, please visit our webpage or read our manifesto. You can also e-mail us at contact@ide.org.tr.
Busra KIRKPINAR
Istanbul Think-House
Uncular Cd. No: 28/4 Uskudar, Istanbul, TURKEY
Phone: +90 216 532 83 68
Email: islamism2014@ide.org.tr
Visit the website at http://www.ide.org.tr/detay.asp?ac=haber&id=110

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Research Fellowship: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien and the Dahlem Humanities Center of Freie Universität Berlin kindly announce 3 research fellowships in the framework of the research program: 
Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship for the academic year 2014-15 in Berlin. Applications must be submitted by 25 June 2014.

Zukunftsphilologie is a Berlin-based research program, which supports research in marginalized and undocumented textual practices and literary cultures with the aim of integrating texts and scholarly traditions from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as well as from Europe itself. The program takes as its point of departure the increasingly growing concern with the global significance of philology and the potential of philology to challenge exclusivist notions of the self and the canon. The program encourages research in the following areas: the genealogy and transformations of philological practice, philology’s place in the system of knowledge (e.g. its relation to science, theology, and jurisprudence), philology and the university, and philology and empire. For a detailed description of the program and its past and current activities, please visitwww.zukunftsphilologie.de

Individual research projects should fall within the intellectual framework of Zukunftsphilologie. Projects should have a comparative perspective, whereby the plurality of textual practices, polyphonic textuality, and the trajectories and genealogies of philological traditions are explored. Research projects focusing on intellectual debates, polemics, correspondences, and transregional encounters are especially welcome. In revisiting important philological debates, the goal is not to merely evaluate the argumentative worth of these debates, but rather to reflect on the wider cultural and political context in which these debates emerged and how they have shaped our knowledge of the past. Moreover, an examination of philological debates will shed light on marginal philological traditions and undocumented intellectual positions as well as the ways in which canonical positions were consolidated and normalized.

Successful applicants will be fellows of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin and the program Zukunftsphilologie at the Forum Transregionale Studien, and associate members of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies. Through this association they will have access to an academic milieu of transregional, literary and philological studies as well as to libraries and other research facilities.

For further information, please take a look at the call here. We would be grateful if you would forward the announcement to your colleagues.

Yours sincerely,

Islam Dayeh
Academic Coordinator Zukunftsphilologie
(Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin)
Georges Khalil
Academic Coordinator
Forum Transregionale Studien
Wallotstrasse 14, 14193 Berlin

Monday, June 2, 2014

CFP: The Quotidian Anthropocene: Reconfiguring Environments in Urbanizing Asia


DATE  
:
16 – 17 October 2014
VENUE
:
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Tower Block Level 10, 469A Bukit Timah Road
NUS @ Bukit Timah Campus
Singapore 259770 [Map]
WEBSITE
:

Asia’s urban transition has radically transformed the region’s societies and its ecologies. The evidence is everywhere: factories and concrete tarmac have replaced Bangkok’s wetlands; Japan’s coastal communities are surrounded by ever-growing seawalls; and in China, smog has become a major political concern. If we are indeed living in a period marked by the deep effects of humans on our environment, what many have called the Anthropocene, then such phenomena would seem to exemplify the stakes associated with these changes at their broadest levels. Yet, closer inspection reveals that such macro-level environmental changes are in fact enmeshed in micro-level social shifts, political contestations, and cultural transformations.

For individuals and communities living in Asia’s burgeoning mega-cities, growing provincial centers, and changing hinterlands, social and environmental rupture has become constant and routine, its logic embedded in everyday practices and emerging policies. In many parts of the region, disaster is no longer relegated to acute, isolated, untoward events; it is now the “new normal.” Even when not coping directly with an ongoing disaster’s impacts, many Asian communities are engaged in either pre-disaster preparation or post-disaster recovery. Moreover, state and non-state actors strategically invoke the memory, or threat, of changing environments in order to justify their own agendas, projects, and policies. Patterns of migration and resettlement, urban infrastructure development, capital investment, and social policy are co-produced along with these shifting environments, modifying social relations, exacerbating inequalities, and generating fierce political struggles. At stake in these conflicts are normative, pragmatic and theoretical questions about citizenship, about the shape and relations of the built and natural environments, about the respective roles of local and expert knowledge, and about the constitution of just and resilient communities, in an age of unprecedented transformation. The lived experience of such contestations, the disruption that provokes them, and the practices that produce that disruption, shows how the epochal Anthropocene is found in the normal, the routine, and the quotidian.

We are calling for papers to explore The Quotidian Anthropocene in a focused workshop 16-17th October, 2014 at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. This call is open to scholars from a wide variety of disciplines including the Social Sciences and Humanities presenting diverse analysis from a variety of situated vantage points from across urbanizing Asia. Potential papers may address, but are not limited to, the following areas:
  • How do quotidian practices in Asian communities produce or respond to the massive ecological transformations? What sorts of contestations emerge out of our changing environment? What might these struggles tell us about new political practices and emerging forms of environmental/disaster governance?
  • What ruptures or sites of socio-political conflict expose the new hybridities and engagements between humans and the planet?
  • What are the consequences of living in an age of environmental change marked by chronic and periodic disasters? What are the politics of space, place, and memory in a world of frequent disruption? How does the threat or experience of disaster come to inflect contests over the right to the city?
  • What kinds of projects—social, technological, infrastructural, economic, political—arise from and/or emerge in response to the changing planet?What forms of knowledge, contestation, and practice are invoked or produced by such projects?
  • How do experts and officials engage with the diverse sorts of constituencies likely to be caught by such shifts? How do publics engage with experts and authorities? How do all these actors deal with ongoing material and ecological transformations?

Workshop presenters may explore these issues through studies of contemporary and historical cases from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. In exploring such topics, The Quotidian Anthropocene: Reconfiguring Environments in Urbanizing Asia will offer a window into the production and re-ordering of local, regional, and global ecologies.  We will consider how, even as seismic ecological rearrangements occur, human actors — including experts, authorities, and citizens — produce, feel, respond and adapt to such changes. This workshop will interrogate these changes from situated vantage points across Asia’s urban-rural matrix as a means of considering how the Anthropocene is experienced in everyday life and how past and present struggles are shaping its future. It will provide insight into how such political endeavors reimagine the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, as well as the roles played by local and expert knowledge, in re-making the new Asian city and preparing it for life in this precarious era. 


SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

We invite those interested in participating in the workshop to submit original paper proposals. We expect to publish selected papers from those accepted for presentation in a monograph/special journal issue.

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250 words, a short biography of 150 words, and should be submitted on the attached form and sent to Mr Jonathan Lee at jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg by 30 June 2014. For a copy of the submission form, click here. Successful applicants will be notified by August 2014and are required to send in a completed draft paper (5,000-8,000 words) by 16 September 2014.

Based on the quality of proposals and the availability of funds, partial or full funding will be granted to successful applicants. Participants are therefore encouraged to seek funding for travel from their home institutions. Full funding will cover air travel to Singapore by the most economical means, plus board and lodging for the duration of the workshop.

CONVENERS

Eli ElinoffAsia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E|
 arieae@nus.edu.sg

Earl Tyson VaughanUniversity of Pennsylvania, USA
E|
 arietv@nus.edu.sg