As the weather is getting warm and sunny (for some of us at least) and the spring semester is winding down, it definitely feels like summer is on its way. Which is why we’re dedicating this month’s list of events to summer schools, summer programmes, and summer workshops. And there definitely is a lot of fun stuff happening all over the world!
As always, if you want your event to feature in our next events list or if you wish to write a short report, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our events assistant Aude at audef@allegralaboratory.net.
Workshop: Envy and Greed: A Political Economy of Accusation and Critique
4-5 June 2018, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
The organizers are looking for grounded ethnographic work that explores how accusations of envy and greed are deployed in projects of moral policing that are shaped by inter and intra-community power relations. We believe that a deeper understanding of the economic and political realities of those being accused and those doing the accusing allows us to go beyond ethics as merely a cognitive set of rules to instead throw light on everyday hierarchies, inequalities, and differential relations of power. We hope that this workshop can be a step towards an intervention into debates within the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of emotions and affect, bringing together scholars who emphasise not just social actors’ thought-worlds, but also their material conditions and lived realities.
Our focus will be on how moral judgments about emotions are politicized in the course of broader collective struggles. The shift from a focus on emotional states themselves to a focus on accusations and judgements about those emotional states helps forge new connections between a range of vibrant debates within anthropology. We hope to invite contributions that are situated at the intersections between ethics and emotions, but those that simultaneously pay attention to the political and economic factors that shape people’s ethical worldviews, their defences, judgements, accusations and anxieties. Potential topics might include but are not limited to the themes of witchcraft, speculative bubbles, commodity booms and busts, inter-ethnic violence, racism, right-wing populism, moral policing, and modes of ethical self-fashioning. [more]
Deadline for submission of proposals: 27 April 2018
Workshop: (Mis)trust, money and debt in interdisciplinary perspective
15 June 2018, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Trust and faith are basic attributes of modern monetary systems. Trust is also recognized as a public good, the maximization of which yields growth and harmony. But if we know what ‘trust’ is – or ought to be – do we therefore understand its opposite? Is ‘mistrust’ always the inverse of ‘trust’? Does mistrust lead to strictly vicious circles of societal destruction? Similarly, are narratives of bursting bubbles, economic decline and corrosive structural violence the only kinds of stories that can be told when considering money and mistrust? This workshop aims to explore the roles, qualities and affordances of (mis)trust within socioeconomic life, as well as create a space for dialogues across disciplinary boundaries and methodologies. We begin from the general situation of human beings often having to cooperate with untrustworthy others, of mutual obligations and expectations bridging subjectivities shot through with mistrust and perhaps especially so when money and debt is involved. Thus, we welcome contributions that (1) suspend assumptions about the concepts of trust and mistrust, and (2) explore the expression and importance of (mis)trust in diverse political economies and sociocultural settings. [more]
EXTENDED DEADLINE for submission of abstracts: 30 April 2018
Telciu Summer School: Labor dystopias and redundant humans: slaveries, serfdoms, precariousness
11-18 August 2018, Telciu, Romania
The 2018 edition of the Telciu Summer School is dedicated to forms of unfree, precarious, or unremunerated labor across the global capitalist system, the structural changes they have historically undergone, and the continuities that characterize them in the present.
Slavery, serfdom, subsistence work, sharecropping, indentureship, debt peonage and other forms of non-wage labor have usually been considered lower, backward forms of labor, incompatible with the free labor characterizing the capitalist labor market of core areas and meant to eventually disappear. The colonized and peripheral locations in which such labor forms predominated were in turn seen as merely on their way to capitalism, yet never quite there.
The Telciu Summer School is interested instead in highlighting the historical connections between and the continuities among labor regimes usually constructed as polar opposites. [more]
Deadline for application: 1 August 2018
Summer Workshop: Qualitative Research Methods
22 May-21 June 2018, Center for Ethnographic Research, UC Berkeley, California
The Center for Ethnographic Research (CER) Summer Workshop provides mentorship, hands-on research experience, and advanced training in designing and executing a project using qualitative methods for motivated undergraduates and beginning graduate students. The CER Summer Workshop will provide students with six weeks of intensive accelerated methodological training in the design and practice of qualitative methods in weekly seminars taught by advanced graduate students. The topics in the seminars include the following:
- The Logic and Practice of Qualitative Research Design
- Participant Observation
- In-Depth Interviewing
- Qualitative Data Analysis
In addition to these weekly seminars, each participant will meet individually with the instructors and receive feedback on research project development and design.
During the CER workshop, students develop an empirical research project proposal for an honors thesis, masters thesis, advanced methods class, scholarly article, or conference presentation. In this process, students develop hands-on research and logistical experience and receive structure and guidance in the development of an independent and original project. Students will walk away with a refined 6-page research proposal for an honors thesis, masters thesis, graduate school, or fellowship application. They will also gain first-hand experience in qualitative research data collection and analysis methods through a collective research project conducted during the six weeks of the workshop.
In addition to in-person group seminars on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1-4:30, participants are expected to meet weekly with the graduate mentors on their individual projects. Participants should expect to spend about 20 hours per week in seminars, meetings, and completing assignments. [more]
Urban Summer School: Open form
26 August-8 September 2018, Lublin, Warsaw, Szumin, Poland
Completed works by one of the most discussed architectural tandems in post-war Poland, Oskar (1922-2005) and Zofia (1924-2013) Hansen, will become a testing ground for the duration of the Urban Summer School, that is, for two weeks. This international and interdisciplinary project is yet another instalment of the “Visions and Experiences” summer school, initiated by the Centre for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, and devoted to urban issues. We welcome undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and young professionals operating in the field of architecture, urban planning, art and design, as well as representatives of other areas of humanities (history, sociology, fine arts, anthropology, and more). We extend invitation to all those interested in the present functioning, and the future of modernist housing estates. [more]
Deadline for application: 7 May 2018
Summer Institute Programme 2018: The knowledge society and the challenges of doing research in Africa: theoretical perspectives and methodical approaches
23 July-3 August 2018, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
The Ife Institute of Advanced Studies hereby announces its call for applications for its second doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships taking place at one of Africa’s most beautiful and serene university campuses, the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. The goal of the summer residential programme is to facilitate and foster innovative research of young scholars in the academy, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, by exposing them to relevant theoretical and methodical tools in their respective disciplines. The institute’s summer programme will be anchored by an impressive number of senior scholars from Nigeria and abroad engaging a wide range of themes and issues that are designed to deepen the understanding of research and teaching mission in the academy. [more]
Deadline for application: 11 May 2018
Summer Doctoral School 2019: Religion and atheism in pluralist societies
17-19 June 2019, Université de Nantes, France
The Institut du pluralisme religieux et de l’athéisme (IPRA ; www.ipra.eu) is organizing a summer school on religion and atheism in pluralist societies. We seek to bring together doctoral students in different disciplines (history, religious studies, sociology, law, art history, anthropology, etc.). Presentations may be given in English or in French. Participants should be able to understand both languages. We seek in particular to bring together doctoral students from Iran, France, other European countries and the USA. [more]
Deadline for application: 15 September 2018
Featured image by Tommy A (flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
