With the Fall semester drawing to a close and the end-of-year holidays fast approaching, what better time for one last list of events! 2017 will undoubtedly be filled with wonderful and exciting events! Get ready to travel the world, from Canada and the United States to Poland, Romania, and Thailand. In terms of themes, you will find a bit of something to please the interests of everyone: movement and mobility, women’s rights and violence, democracy, art. There’s even an opportunity to learn weaving techniques alongside experts!
If you want your event to feature in our next event list or if you feel like writing a short report, do not hesitate to get in touch with Andrea at andreak@allegralaboratory.net or Aude at audef@allegralaboratory.net
Conference/InterCongress: Mo(u)vement CASCA/IUAES2017
2-7 May 2017, Ottawa, Canada
Movement – as diverse knowledges, practices and problematizations – has once again become a focal point of public discussion and scholarly intervention. As such, ‘ancient’ ontologies that focused more on movement than on stasis and of which sight has been lost through the colonial encounter, are now reappearing as particularly meaningful, and transformative of the discipline. A longstanding concern of anthropologists, movement has most prominently been discussed through the rubric of mobility, and its attendant terminologies of flows and scapes, flexibilities and foreclosures, disjunctures and “frictions.” The notion of movement resonates in studies of political, ecological, religious and economic life as well as of kinship, gender and embodiment. In so doing it highlights the promiscuous nature of the analytical space opened by the processes of life forms, things and ideas enmeshing through relationships in space and time. [more]
Deadline for submissions of abstracts: 19 December 2016
International interdisciplinary conference: Women’s rights and violence in the contemporary world
30-31 March 2017, University of Gdańsk, Poland
Women’s rights were never respected in the past. And they are not respected today, even though it seems that many things have been changed and that we are now much more aware of the gender inequalities than our parents were. In our crazy world increasingly accepting all kinds of extremism and fundamentalism, there is less and less place for an open and honest discussion about women’s needs and expectations. During our interdisciplinary conference we would like to look at various manifestations of violence and women’s rights violation in the contemporary world, and also at the possible ways of counteracting such phenomena. We will describe them in political, social, psychological, cultural and many other terms. We also want to devote considerable attention to how the situation of women’s rights is represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts. [more]
Deadline for submission of proposals: 5 February 2017
International interdisciplinary conference: Democracy in development: comparative perspectives on the governance of the public good
26-28 May 2017, University of Bucharest, Romania
The general theme of the 4th International Interdisciplinary Conference of Political Research – SCOPE: Science of Politics, i.e. DEMOCRACY IN DEVELOPMENT: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE GOVERNANCE OF THE PUBLIC GOOD, incorporates two distinct but complementary interpretations of democracy/democratization, public good, and of the relation between them.
The first one focuses on changes in the ways we define, conceptualize, and understand democracy, not only as researchers, but also as citizens.
The second interpretation focuses on the rise and falls of democracy both at supra-national and sub-national levels, transcending the traditional national sphere of politics and policy-making. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 February 2017
Summer Workshop: Weaving Knowledge
6-23 July 2017, Ban Rai Jai Sook (Jai-Sook Studio), Chiang Mai, Thailand
This two week workshop aims to engage both the theory and practice of craft knowledge by teaching participants the Lanna techniques of weaving alongside expert weavers, at the same time engaging with the scholarly challenge of making embodied craft knowledge explicit. As the students are trained in crafts by practitioners in a weaving workshop near Chiang Mai, they will discuss concepts such as tacit expertise and technological literacy, pedagogy in sensory and material knowledge, innovation and sustainability in traditional technological cultures, with the practitioners, as well as invited scholars and activists in history, anthropology, and sociology from around the world. Set in the rural environment around Chiang Mai, this workshop will bring together three conveners: one historian of science and technology, one weaving/craft expert, and one scholar of development practice in craft, to guide the group of doctoral candidates in reflexive practice – both of weaving and writing. [more]
Deadline for applications: 1 December 2016
Graduate symposium: Art in public life and the life of public art
1 April 2017, Yale University, Connecticut, USA
While the concept of “public art” in the American context is often associated with twentieth-century modernism and monumentality, this symposium invites scholars to consider an expanded definition of the term. For instance, how and when does art become public? And how might its meaning shift as its public changes?
At Yale, recent events have illustrated art’s potential capacity to actively shape collective priorities. In 2016, the University convened the Committee on Art in Public Spaces in order to survey artworks on campus and articulate policies to guide future commissions and acquisitions. Furthermore, this past summer, in the aftermath of the University’s decision not to rename Calhoun College, a Yale employee broke a stained glass window depicting enslaved African Americans picking cotton—an act of iconoclasm that exemplified the emotional, social, and political potency of art in the public sphere. The debates that have followed upon these events highlight the key role art can play in discussions of shared space, institutional memory, and inclusivity.
With these recent controversies and conversations in mind, we invite proposals that examine the public, communal, and collective in the art of the Americas. In hopes of broadening the discourse on public art, we invite a wide range of submissions from graduate students working on the visual and material culture of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean across all time periods and media. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 January 2017
Featured image by Cedar Beauregard (flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
