International and interdisciplinary workshop at Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics”, University of Munster, Germany

Date: October 16th – 17th, 2020

The project team “Religious Fundamentalism” at Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics”, chair of sociology of religion at University of Munster (Germany) organizes a workshop on “Religious Fundamentalism: New Challenges in Theory and Empirics across Religions and Cultures“.

The central aim of this workshop is to create a platform of interaction and dialogue between the project team of the Cluster of Excellence (see below) and external experts in the field of religious fundamentalism. By taking part in presentations and discussions, the participants will not only get a deep insight into research on fundamentalism in various world religions and cultural contexts but will also receive constructive feedback from this team of experts for his/her own studies.

Recent contributions to the field have been challenging common definitions, measurements, as well as explanatory approaches of religious fundamentalism especially against the backdrop of various world religions and of an increasing globalized world. On one hand, this calls into question the relationship between religious traditionalism, fundamentalism, and (acceptance of) violence. On the other hand, research on religious fundamentalism beyond Christianity and Islam as well as beyond the North-American and Western-European context is usually neglected. In this workshop, we want to bring experts together, who contribute to these contemporary issues of fundamentalism research from a theoretical or an empirical perspective.

With this announcement, we want to call for abstracts from scholars, who are highly motivated to present and discuss their scholarly work by participating in a two-day interdisciplinary and international workshop of experts in this field. We are interested in both papers that deal with the phenomenon of fundamentalism on a theoretical level and papers that empirically approach the phenomenon on the basis of (a) selected case(s). Contributions from sociology, psychology, religious studies, political science, theology, or related fields are highly welcome. With this workshop, our objective is to constitute a starting point for future collaborations and dialogue from which the participants can sustainably benefit (e.g., future research projects, publications).

Together with a CV, a convincing abstract of a maximum of 500 words is requested by April 15, 2020 and should be submitted by email to:

• Dr. Sarah Demmrich, project leader of “Religious Fundamentalism“ at Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics“: kabogan@uni-muenster.de

Successful applicants are going to be informed shortly after. All expenses for attendance, travel, and accommodation of accepted participants are going to be covered by the project. For any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the project leader. We are looking forward to your applications.

With our very best regards,
Dr. Sarah Demmrich
Prof. Dr. Detlef Pollack
Dr. Olaf Müller

Abstract deadline extended to April 8, submit to Tatiana Rabinovich (trabino@ncsu.edu).

Please consider submitting an abstract for the proposed panel “Laboring Hearts: Religion, Humanitarianism, and Volunteering in Uncertain Times” at the AAA Meetings in St. Louis, MO, Nov 18-22, 2020.

This panel is organized by Dr. Tatiana Rabinovich (North Carolina State University) and Dr. Alisa Perkins (Western Michigan University). Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words.  Please send your abstract to Tatiana Rabinovich (trabino@ncsu.edu) by April 8. We will let you know if your paper has been selected for inclusion in the panel by April 13. Please see description below. We would be happy to answer any questions about the panel as it develops.

In times when many states are redefining their social responsibilities and embracing austerity, individuals are often called upon to help vulnerable populations by giving  their time, money, and labor to help those in need. Some who respond to these calls are driven by faith. This proposed panel studies intersections between religion, social justice, and power to understand the kinds of ethical subjectivities that are constituted through faith-driven volunteering, charity, and humanitarian work, broadly defined. The goal is to theorize how faith-inspired giving of time, resources, expertise, and labor illuminates the exigencies of late capitalism, as it pertains to citizenship, belonging, justice, and collective life. We will examine how political mobilizations, moral economies, and social imaginaries emerge from faith-inspired social justice work. We will analyze how those who give in the name of faith carve out spaces and resources for themselves and precarious others in ways that forge connections between the material and affective; the personal and political; and the intimate and global. We are interested in faith-driven giving practices that are structured by religious institutions or faith traditions, as well as those shaped within secular contexts and agencies. We welcome papers from scholars working  on a wide range of topics across the globe. 

4-6 November 2020, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Submissions for panels should be submitted via e-mail to ERC2020@uu.nl by 15 May 2020.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically, using the on-line
submission system<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeR3DQF2QUikj6LYJo21FFw6tZBDvjyVKZ84KO9q7pFy_yPFQ/viewform> by 15 June
2020.

Convenor: Sandra Ponzanesi

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Paul Gilroy (University College London)

Engin Isin (Queen Mary, University of London)

Nicholas de Genova(University of Houston)

Larissa Hjorth(RMIT University, Melbourne)

Saskia Witteborn (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being
in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of
diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways
that are different from the ways enabled by the communication
technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the
question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps
are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social
worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.

This international conference focuses on the connection between the
media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points.
Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and
personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the
local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of
migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also
subjects individual as well as groups to increased datafied migration
management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as
forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.

This conference pays particular attention to the everyday use of digital
media for the support of transnational lives, emotional bonds and
cosmopolitan affiliations, focusing also on the the role digital media
play in shaping local/urban and national diasporic formations. This is
because it becomes increasingly important to give everyday digital media
usage a central role in investigations of transnational belonging,
digital intimacy, diasporic community (re)production, migrant subject
formation, long-distance political participation, urban social
integration and local/national self-organization.

Therefore we need to examine individual and collective user practices
within the wider historical and cultural contexts of media studies,
cultural studies and postcolonial cultural studies scholarship, attuned
to issues of politics and power, identity, geographies and the everyday.
This also creates new challenges for cross-disciplinary dialogues that
require an integration of ethnography with digital methods and critical
data studiesin order to look at the formation of identity and
experience, representation, community building, and creating spaces of
belongingness.

Contributions are welcome from any field of study that engages with
questions about how technology and social media usages mediate
contemporary migration experiences, not only within media and
communication studies, or digital and internet studies but also in
neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, postcolonial studies,
gender studies, race studies, psychology, law, visual studies, conflict
studies, criminology, sociology, critical theory, political theory and
international relations.

Contributions that explore non-media-centric entry points by focusing on
users’ digital practices and foregrounding ethnographic exploration as a
uniting framework are especially welcome.

The conference is part of the ERC project CONNECTINGEUROPE, /Digital
Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging/:
http://connectingeuropeproject.eu/

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

   * Affective digital practices and the politics of emotion
   * Digital diaspora
   * Cosmopolitanism
   * Cities and urban belonging
   * Translocality and translationalism
   * Co-presence and togetherness
   * Cultural capital
   * Migrant visualization
   * Appification of migration
   * Platformization of migrant lives
   * Gender and critical race studies
   * The migration industry of connectivity
   * Digital ethnography
   * Transnational authoritarianism
   * Networked conflicts
   * Datafication and surveillance

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Submissions for panels should be submitted via e-mail to ERC2020@uu.nl
<mailto:ERC2020@uu.nl> by 15 May 2020.

   * Submission for panels should include a chairperson, a rationale for
     the panel (250 words), and the names of three speakersincluding
     their abstract (250 words) and biographical note (150 words).

Abstracts should be submitted electronically, using the on-line
submission system<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeR3DQF2QUikj6LYJo21FFw6tZBDvjyVKZ84KO9q7pFy_yPFQ/viewform>*by 15**June
2020.

   * Submissions for papers should include an abstract (max 300words) and
     short biographical note (150 words) about the author including
     her/his current position and interest in the field of digital media
     and migration.

Fore more infomation click
http://connectingeuropeproject.eu/home/conference/

For further question please mail: ERC2020@uu.nl 

In support of the UCU strike we are extending the deadlines for the UK and US IR conferences to March 31.

This conference takes place against the backdrop of increased political authoritarianism and a noticeable rise in racial and religious intolerance across the world. Yet we increasingly find ‘race’ being dismissed or diminished as a category of oppression within wider social problems, dynamics, and understandings such as class, and at the expense of understanding the lives, cultures, and histories of people of color (Bhambra, Fields & Fields, Gilroy, Hill Collins, and Heng.) To understand how assertions of identity function at the same time as racism, nationalism, and exclusion we need to view these developments as intertwined with religion and in the development of definitions of religion and religiosity (Nye, Weisenfeld, and Moultrie.) The burning of the Amazon, attempts to lay pipelines in North Dakota, or conduct scientific experiments on indigenous sacred lands and responses to other acts of neo-colonialism might be productively analyzed in terms of race, religion, and implicit religion.

Respectability politics has a significant role in the interaction between race and religion and so must be brought into analysis with those categories (Pitcan.) For centuries people of colour, Jews, Muslims, Indigenous peoples, and Black Atlantic Religions have been denied the status of respectability whilst simultaneously having to continue to conform to white, Christian norms in attempts to attain that status (Long, Rafiq, and Eddo-Lodge.) How can we acknowledge these problematic lenses but also move beyond them? Can we productively talk about how race functions (or has functioned) in societies in terms of commitment, integrating foci, and intensive concerns with extensive effects, the three axioms of Implicit Religion?

Implicit Religion was founded in the UK and as such is shaped by the social history of it, which includes colonising lands and peoples, the slave trade, selling arms and having a punitive relationship with immigration. As such then it is important that we consider how race and racism has influenced, shaped, and interacted with Implicit Religion. It is also important that we ask ourselves what role the axioms of Implicit Religion can play in future analyses with race and representation, be that in academia or public life.

Presenters are invited to submit abstracts for consideration on the theme of “Implicit Religion, Race, and Representation”. These might include, but are not limited to:

• Presence, absence, and resistance in representations of race
• New social movements, resistance, and counter movements (civil rights, indigenous rights, anti-apartheid movements, Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name etc.)
• Womanist analysis, thinking, being, and doing
• Agency and social otherness
• Embodying and embracing difference
• Technologies (visual, material, and sound) and racial categories in culture
  memory and the formation of identity
• Racialisation of religion and religious racism
• Methodologies for decolonising teaching and curricula in the study of religion
• Political and religious authoritarianism: past, present, and future

Proposal Submissions

We invite submissions for proposals for either a paper or a scratch session on these themes, elaborated below (CFP-UK-A4), for #IR43, May 15-17th, at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK, by 31 March, 2020.

The submission form is now available. You will be asked to indicate if you are submitting a paper or scratch session, and to provide an abstract (with references to secondary literature and sources) and other information as specified below, and what we need to know in order to accommodate your participation if your proposal is accepted.

Please note while you can edit your entries before you select the submit button, the form does not allow the submission to be saved and edited later. We suggest looking at the form for context and then composing the abstract and the notes regarding accommodating your participation in a word processing document and then cutting and pasting these elements of the proposal into the form.

PAPERS

Please select the option “Paper” on the form. Those
submitting papers are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 400 words.

SCRATCH SESSIONS

There will be a dedicated panel for undergraduates, MA and early stage PhD students to present at – called a scratch session. These will be shorter papers and rather than the usual practise of asking questions of the presenters, the audience will make suggestions for further reading, pathways for improvement, scholars to explore etc. If you wish to apply for the scratch session, please select that option on the submission form and submit a 250 – 300 word abstract. 

Keynote

The 2020 Edward Bailey Lecture, “Designing for Humans, Designing Research on Human Subjects: Race, Representations, and Rights” will be delivered by Dr Ipsita Chatterjea, Executive Director of the Study of Religion as an Analytical Discipline Workshop.

Please note we are a small organisation and as such are not in a position to provide bursaries, travel grants or funds for visa applications. We can provide you with an official letter of invite and a subsequent letter of participation if your university or funding body requires it or if it is necessary for travel or visa requirements.

References

• Baker, Kelly J. Gospel According to the Klan, The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2011
• Bhambra, Gurminder. Decolonising the University, London: Pluto Press, 2015.
• Eddo-Lodge Reni. Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
• Fields, Karen E., Barbara Jean Fields. Racecraft : The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London ; New York :Verso, 2012.
• Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• ⏤  The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 2007.
• Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990
• Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999.
• Moultrie, Monique N. Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women’s Sexuality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017
• Nye, Malory. Multiculturalism and Minority Religions in Britain. Routledge Curzon, 2001.
• Pitcan Mikaela, Alice E Marwick, and danah boyd. 2018. “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class and the Digital World.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 23 p 163 – 179
• Rafiq Raifa. “Not Just A Black Muslim Woman.” in It’s Not About The Burqa, edited by Mariam Khan, London: Picador, 2019.
• Weisenfeld, Judith, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, New York City: NYU Press, 2016.