The Middle East and South Asia Studies Program invites paper proposals for a conference at Wake Forest University. Our chief aim is bring together scholars working on two questions often treated separately. The first day’s program will feature scholars working on questions generated by attempts in Muslim-majority contexts to grapple with minorities in their midst; the second day’s program will highlight research on the experiences of Muslim minorities throughout the world. Synthesis and dialogue will be facilitated by asking presenters from one day to serve as respondents on the other day and keynote speakers whose research explicitly addresses the intersections between the two areas of research. We plan to publish the best papers from the conference.
Among the topics papers might address are the following:
· philosophical, historical, contextual, and critical assessments of Islamic thought and practices that broach the challenges raised by minorities in Islamic contexts;
· analyses of the ways that minorities have contributed to the development and transformation of Islamic concepts of identity, citizenship, community, and/or the state;
· Islamic conceptions of, and approaches to, religious and ethnic minorities and other groups marginalized by gender or sexuality;
· strategies for negotiating difference at the level of state or society in Muslim-majority contexts;
· case studies of Muslims living in non-Muslim contexts or minority Islamic trends or sects within Islamic contexts;
· studies of the politics of communalism and the marginalization/radicalization or integration/ assimilation of Muslims as minorities;
· studies of transnational organizations and institutions and/or the use of new communication technologies to connect Muslims throughout the world; and
· assessment of the ways that Muslim conceptions of faith, citizenship, and community have been negotiated in Muslim-minority contexts.
Please send abstracts of under 500 words to both Michaelle Browers (browerm@wfu.edu) and Nelly Van Doorn-Harder (vandoopa@wfu.edu). Deadline: December 20, 2011.