Yes, the summer has finally arrived: time to plan for the upcoming academic year! As has become our monthly tradition, Andrea at Allegra has compiled for you a list of exciting events. You’ll find art projects with a political flair, interdisciplinary conferences on topics as varied as religion, urban governance, food, popular culture, ethics, gender… and much more! Have a look, pick your event, and share with us the interesting stuff you’ve come across by writing to andreak@allegralaboratory.net!
SPECIAL EVENT: Beyond Borders (Art Project)
June to September 2015, Flanders, Belgium (and beyond)
The fifth edition of Beaufort entitled ‘Beyond Borders’ continues to build upon the tradition of art in the public space from the previous editions, but also makes a firm choice for change and innovation. The Province of West Flanders is the initiating party, and along with the Department of Culture has invited the ten coastal municipalities to support this innovative artistic concept and to help accomplish it.
Beyond Borders opts for a complete project along the coast, whereby a solo exhibition by the A Dog Republic collective led by 91-year-old architect, urbanist, and designer Yona Friedman is combined with a group exhibition at three locations in the province: the Zwin Nature centre along the East coast, Raversyde in the centre and visitor centre De Nachtegaal with the surrounding Oosthoek dunes along the west coast. The solo exhibition constitutes the artistic link between these three locations, in order to complete the continuity of Beyond Borders in content and presentation. [more]
Ways of Knowing: 4th Annual Graduate Conference on Religion
22 – 24 October 2015, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, USA
The Science, Religion, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School announces the fourth annual graduate student conference in the study of religion. Inaugurated in 2012, this multi-day event is made up of dozens of thematic panels that cross religious traditions, academic disciplines, and intellectual and theological commitments. In addition, the conference features special panels on professionalization, addressing both academic and non-academic careers, and a keynote address. The conference aims at promoting lively interdisciplinary discussion of prevailing assumptions (both within and outside the academy) about the differentiation, organization, authorization, and reproduction of various modes of knowing and “doing” Religion.
Deadline for submission of proposals (individual papers and panels): 17 July 2015
Conference: “Urban Governance And Its Discontents” City Debates
18 – 19 February 2016, University of Oxford, UK
The conference will place scholars at the cutting edge of global urban research face-to-face with established and innovative practitioners – architects, activists, policy makers, and artists. Through a series of rigorous yet accessible public dialogues, they will grapple with the intellectual and material implications of their interventions and theories on contemporary cities. Each debate will be preceded by a small panel of academics and practitioners presenting papers that speak to the same key issues as the respective debates and which will lay the groundwork for the following discussion.
Themes of the panels:
Panel 1 – Making the city: spontaneous vs planned? Challenges of the 21st century
Panel 2 – Governing the city: where do infrastructure, democracy, and social justice meet?
Panel 3 – Mobilizing the city: amidst global urban protest, the ‘right to the city’ is the right to what?
Panel 4 – Representing the City: Can art project, refigure, and challenge urban futures? [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 July 2015
Conference of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA): Insatiable Appetite: Food as a Cultural Signifier
12 – 14 May 2016, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Referring to Early Modern European banquet culture, Mikhail Bakhtin described the act of eating as an “interaction with the world.” In a different sense, this interpretation of food and eating is of particular salience in present times. As the world’s population increases disproportionately to the natural resources on the globe, exacerbated by patterns of consumption in affluent countries, media and scholars alike have discovered food and foodways as topics of crucial importance. Like no other item of daily life, food intimately connects the world’s population to the process of globalization – a process that, as shown by the very same example, was by no means a recent development. Particularly Europe and the Mediterranean have been connected by alimentary exchange since antiquity. Yet while food serves to build bridges, it is also a potent marker of social, religious, gendered, political, and ethnic differences. This conference aims at exploring the cultural as well as scientific ramifications of food and foodways in Europe and the Mediterranean in a longue durée and interdisciplinary perspective. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 July 2015
Conference: Popular Culture & World Politics 8
20 – 21 November 2015, University of Westminster, London, UK
PCWP8 is coming to London, home of Paddington Bear (and the Queen). PCWP8 continues to reimagine and foreground questions of both popular culture in world politics and the world politics of popular culture. Bringing scholars from a variety of academic disciplines into an interdisciplinary space, previous PCWP conferences have encouraged critical, creative and collaborative engagement with a broad range of topics.
PCWP8 seeks to interrogate the cultural, ethical and political significance of worlding in contemporary global politics. The conveners encourage papers and panels that imagine the possibilities of engaging the Other in discourses of kindness, compassion and social justice. Whilst PCWP8 appeals to scholars working in the fields of cultural studies, international relations and gender studies, the organisers seek contributions from any and all disciplines (and especially beyond academia). [more]
Deadline for submission of panel and paper proposals: 31 July 2015
Conference: Media, Gender & Religion
7 – 10 January 2016, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
This conference seeks to bring current research in religion and media studies into conversation with current scholarship on gender and sexuality in order to explore a rich and understudied range of issues relating to the intersection of religion, media and gender studies, broadly considered. During the past three decades, the fields of feminist and gender studies, queer theory, ethnic studies and sexuality studies have generated a tremendous amount of critical, historical and theoretical analysis of the categories of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality,’ broadening our understanding of these categories well beyond binary models. Scholars working in these areas have explored the myriad ways that cultural, religious, historical, political, legal, psychological, linguistic, and literary contexts shape gender and sexual expressions, identities, norms, and practices. This conference will provide opportunities for careful and focused discussion of these and many more related issues. Papers and panels may address, but should not be limited to, questions such as:
- Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of media, gender, religion and culture: gender as a category of analysis, feminist theory, queer theory, intersectionality, LGBTQIA analyses, postcolonial feminist perspectives, etc.
- Comparative analyses of religion, gender and sexuality in the media
- Historical approaches to media, gender, and religion
- Global and transnational discourses of religion, gender, and media
- Gender, secularism, and media
- Discourses of sexuality, power, gender and desire
- Religion, gender violence, and media
- [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 August 2015
The 2016 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference: Beyond Nostalgia: Ethics, Politics, and the Critique of Modernity
15 – 16 January 2016, New York, USA
The unique character of the modern world has made thinking through the relation of the ethical to the political extremely pressing and yet deeply problematic. Since the 19th century, critics of modernity have pointed to various forms of skepticism, alienation, indeterminacy, and abstraction that contribute to a sense of ethical crisis. They point to a sense of uprootedness from the stability and meaning-conferring powers of cultures, traditions, and communities. It may be said without exaggeration that this sense of ethical crisis has global theoretical and practical significance. Various forms of alienation—economic, spiritual, political—have arguably led to extremist versions of the critique of modernity. One everywhere sees the effects of this alienation in the actions of those who take ethical life to have been severed from political life, from the brutal and atavistic program of “global jihad,” to the troubling rise of various forms of crypto-fascism in Europe. At the theoretical level, political reality has come to be seen as divorced from ethical life. The political world is seen as either a kind of contingent result of competing interests or a coercive set of structures that impinge on rather than help actualize human freedom. Postmodern critiques of liberalism and secularism tend to be characterized by a nostalgic yearning for a lost sense of ethical and political unity. It remains to be seen whether these latter theoretical projects can persuasively specify the relation of the ethical to the political, or whether they will succumb to merely atavistic gestures towards a restoration of a lost world of cultural cohesion …
The 2016 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference invites multidisciplinary, topical, and theoretical discussions:
- Multicultural mosaics, civilizational clashes, and cosmopolitan ideals
- Ethics and executive action: Human rights vs. the demands of the security state (e.g., drone warfare)
- Ethics, race, and racism (e.g., the ethics and racial politics of policing; #blacklivesmatter)
- Ethics and politics of global jihad
- The possibility of virtue ethics in political modernity
- [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 August 2015
