Author Archives: Hannah

Call for Papers: Religion and the Social Order

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Call For Book Proposals
Religion and the Social Order
A Book Series from Brill Academic Publishers and the Association for the Sociology of Religion

We are now seeking book proposals for Religion And The Social Order book series. The series was initiated by the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), which is an international scholarly association that seeks to advance theory and research in the sociology of religion. The aim of Religion and the Social Order (RESO) is to publish edited volumes or single topic monographs that center around a particular set of current interests within the sociology of religion. It specifically aims to advance theory and research within this field of study. The series seeks to publish at least one volume per year. Under the auspices of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, RESO has been published by Brill since 2004 and under the General Editorship of Inger Furseth since 2016.  Please view the full Call For Proposals and find out more about the Manuscript Proposal Guidelines.

General Editor:
Inger Furseth, University of Oslo, Norway

Editorial Committee:
Lori Beaman, University of Ottawa, Canada
Michele Dillon, University of New Hampshire, USA
David Herbert, Kingston University London, UK
Juan Marco Vaggione, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
Rhys Williams, Loyola University, Chicago, USA
Melissa M. Wilcox, University of California at Riverside, USA

Visit the Series on the Brill Website

Call for Papers: The Centre for Education for Racial Equality

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Third Call for Papers ‘Activism and antiracism in education: telling our stories’

Biennial Conference, 14-16 June 2017

Moray House School of Education, Edinburgh

Keynote speakers:

Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University, Racism in a Post-Racial America

Professor Gloria Wekker, University of Utrecht, White Innocence in the Dutch Academy

Professor Robert Phillipson, University of Copenhagen, Global English, an imperialist project?

Professor Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Anti-Linguicist and Pro-Linguistic-Human.Rights Education – what, why and how?

Conference themes:

(1) Reclaiming teacher activism/political literacy

It is hard for teachers to be part of a system that recreates the inequalities of society and, at the same time, to try and change that system. One indication of the challenge is the recognition by advocates of a social justice approach to teacher education that being “critical” is not enough and that teachers have a responsibility to act as agents of social change. For this to become reality, teachers need to be able to consider how change can come about in their context, what obstacles need to be overcome and how specific issues of discrimination relate to wider influences in society. This strand welcomes proposals from teachers and teacher educators who have stories to tell of anti-racist activism. We hope to draw lessons about how a political understanding of society helps teacher activists to be agents of change.

(2) The power of intergenerational activism and solidarity

Racism and discrimination shape the experiences of different generational groups in specific ways. Inequalities develop in complex ways across the lifecourse, and while generational interests sometimes appear in tension, global events have shown that there is a need for intergenerational solidarity and activism in order to address persisting inequalities of race and other categories. Intergenerational relationships are a key site of both reproducing and challenging race and other inequalities, whether in professional relationships – e.g. working with children and young people – or in personal relationships within families and communities.

This stream welcomes contributions that explore the experiences of racism and other forms of discrimination of different generational groups, give voice to generational groups that are silenced, and link these to intergenerational activism and social change.

(3) Countering monolingual hegemony in education

Globalisation and migratory forces have resulted in ever increasing linguistic diversity in contemporary educational contexts. Yet dominant language policies frequently ignore the realities of multilingual classrooms and conceptualise/position speakers of indigenous, heritage and regional languages as a problem rather than as a resource. This stream welcomes papers examining ways in which educators and community activists disrupt prevailing monolingual ideologies by creating spaces where learning takes place in two or more languages both inside and outside of schools, colleges, universities, and community and adult education. It also encourages contributions concerning ways in which children and young people take a critical stance towards the role of languages in any educational context and actively participate in translanguaging/ multilingual practices for educational purposes.

(4) Decolonising the curriculum

The masters’ tools will never dismantle the master’s house – Audre Lorde Countering dominant hegemony and narratives require different strategies. Inserting new inputs into the curriculum (tinkering) can leave existing curriculum largely unchanged. Decolonisation is about dismantling, requiring critical reflective thinking and a robust understanding of how European and Western knowledge, language and power structures have shaped curriculum. Decolonising the curriculum also calls for a re-theorising of the history, contributions and experiences of black, minority and indigenous peoples, thereby desanitising what is remembered. This strand welcomes papers by educators (school, college and university, community and adult education) who have looked at reframing curriculum and problemmatised the nature of knowledge.

Abstracts:

Abstracts for papers relating to one or more of these themes are welcomed. Abstracts of 250-300 words should be submitted to ceresconference2017@ed.ac.uk by Friday 28th April 2017. Abstracts will be peer reviewed by the CERES co-director team, and applicants will be notified of abstract acceptance by Friday 12th May 2017.

For further information please contact: The Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland, The University of Edinburgh, Moray House School of Education Room B.04 Old Moray House Holyrood Road Edinburgh, UK. EH8 8AQ. Tel: +44(0)131 651 6371; Email: ceresconference2017@ed.ac.uk

Book Announcement: Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Series

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New Book in the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Series

Michael Wilkinson and Peter Althouse, eds. 2017. Pentecostals and the Body. Leiden, Brill.

The intersection of religion, ritual, emotion, globalization, migration, sexuality, gender, race, and class, is especially insightful for researching Pentecostal notions of the body. Pentecostalism is well known for overt bodily expressions that includes kinesthetic worship with emotive music and sustained acts of prayer. Among Pentecostals there is considerable debate about bodies, the role of the Holy Spirit, possession of evil spirits, deliverance, exorcism, revival, and healing of bodies and emotions. Pentecostalism is identified as a religion on the move and so bodies are transformed in the context of globalization. Pentecostalism is also associated with notions of sexuality, gender, race and class where bodies are often liberated and limited. This volume evaluates these themes associated with contemporary research on the body.

Funding: Preparation of a doctoral dissertation project

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The a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, the interdisciplinary graduate school of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne, offers 8 “Predoc” scholarships for the preparation of a doctoral dissertation project, each of EUR 950 monthly and for a time period of six months starting October 1st, 2017
The purpose of the Predoc scholarships is to enable candidates to begin working towards a doctorate at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne immediately after obtaining their qualifying degree. The scholarship holders are supported for one semester during which they are able to develop a doctoral project with a specific focus on interdisciplinary aspects.
The application deadline is May 19, 2017. For more information about the scholarships and the application process please visit artes.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/?L=1.

Call for Papers: Approaching Ethnoheterogenesis Membership, Ethnicity, and Social Change in Contemporary Societies

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Organization                                   
Prof. Dr. Mathias Bös, PD Dr. Nina Clara Tiesler, Deborah Sielert
                                                              
Institute of Sociology, Leibniz University of Hannover
                                                               
(Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie – Sektion Migration und ethnische Minderheiten)
                                                              
Venue: Hannover Leibnizhaus
Date: Thursday and Friday December 14th & 15th, 2017                                                    
The study of societal change and ethnic relations has been a core pursuit in Sociology, both in the past and in the present, especially – though not exclusively – in historical contexts marked by heightened migration. This conference aims to refine the theoretical understanding of social and cultural processes regarding the formation of ethnicities and ethnic diversity (Yancey et al 1976, Bös 2010).
The specific contribution of this conference goes to the research context of migrants and migrant descendants; wherein conceptual debates on self-perceptions, modes of belonging, group formation, and collective subjectivities continue to be at the core of theoretical considerations (Cohen 1974, Glazer and Moynihan 1975, Banton 2008). Importantly, the conference also goes beyond this context: studying the genesis and continuously shifting social forms of ethnicities is heuristically important in that it can help us clarify processes of socio-, cultural-, and political change in society at large (Bell 1975, Bös 2011, Banton 2011).
Researching the emergence of ethnicities has a long tradition in diverse social sciences and in the humanities. The term ethnogenesis originally described constitutive processes of ethnic groups, their possible fissions, de-ethnization, expansion, or new formations over time and space (Singer 1962, Voss 2008). From the mid-1970s onward, in American Sociology, ethnogenesis was also used to grasp societal assimilation, integration, and change caused by ethnic diversification (Greeley 1974), as such describing socio-cultural change among both minority and majority groupings and in society at large.
However, it appears that current analytical concepts and frameworks to describe the genesis of ethnicities and societal change through ethnic diversification are too limited to grasp these complex and multi-dimensional formative processes (Barth 1969, Fardon 1987, Thompson 2011, Bös 2015). These concepts (e.g., assimilation, identity, integration, diversity, inclusion, multi-ethnic societies, etc.) often represent normative self-descriptions by civil society rather than analytical categories of heuristic value. Therefore, we propose the concept of Ethnoheterogenesis (EHG) as a starting point to discuss multidimensional models of specific forms of societization (Vergesellschaftung), which involve ethnic framing and affiliations of individuals, groupings, and macro groups (Tiesler 2015). Rather than reducing such formative processes to linear models, new concepts such a Ethnoheterogenesis explicitly address the dialectic of homogenization and heterogenization in the genesis of ethnicities, as well as the normality of de-ethnization and multiple options regarding ethnic affiliation (Waters 1990).
The aim of the conference is to further develop EHG or other new alternatives as analytical categories for processes of socio-cultural change in complex settings of transnationally constituted societies that can be coined ethnoheterogeneous (Claussen 2013). We invite international scholars for a critical discussion in favor of further theorizing. Conceptual papers and empirical studies referring to the following themes are welcome:
  1. What changes in ethnic framing, ethnic affiliation, and multiplicity of memberships/belongings can be observed in current times of heightened mobility and how can they be analyzed?
–  What can be said about ethnicity as a resource for individualization, collectivization, and community building or potential counterhegemonic cultures?
–  What forms of “past presencing” can be reconstructed in the processes of ethno(hetero)genesis?
–  What does the analysis of the genesis and changes of ethnic framing and multiplicity of memberships add to the broader field of sociology (i.e., Sociology of Migration, Global Sociology, and Sociology of the Nation State)?
  1. How are the processes of (de-)ethnization interwoven with social inequality (economic, legal, political, etc.)?
– What role do institutions such as the family, neighborhoods, work, or communities play in this context?
– How should we think about the genesis of ethnicities in intersection with and relation to different categories of social inequality, and most importantly race, gender, class, and/or generation?
  1. How does ethnicity function as an element in the structuring of (world) society?
– What can be said about the (changing) role of the nation in the emergence of ethnicities and membership roles?
– What is the role of spatial configuration, such as transnationalism, in the genesis of ethnicities?
– What insights can be gained from related fields such as diaspora or transnational studies?
 
Keynote Speakers:      
·        Nadje Al-Ali, Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS
·        Thomas D. Hall, Prof. Emeritus, Department of History, DePauw University
 
We are looking forward to proposals for lectures and/or workshops. The abstracts (one page long) should include the question, empirical/theoretical background, hypothesis, and brief personal details.
Please send your proposals or abstracts to: n.tiesler@ish.uni-hannover.de
ABSTRACTS DUE: June 15, 2017

Publication Announcement: Approaching Religion Vol. 7/1 (April, 2017)

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Approaching Religion Vol. 7/1 (April, 2017)

Theme: Interreligious dialogue in Asia
Guest Editor: Professor Lionel Obadia

Available at: www.abo.fi/approachingreligion

AR is an open access journal published by the Donner Institute. Its
purpose is to publish current research on religion and culture and to
offer a platform for scholarly co-operation and debate within these
fields. The articles have been selected on the basis of peer-review.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,

Approaching Religion
Vol 7, No 1 (2017)

Table of Contents

Editorial

Religious diversity (1)
Lionel Obadia & Ruth Illman

Review article

Comparing ‘religious diversities’. Looking Eastward: (Asia) beyond the
West (2-9)
Lionel Obadia

Articles

Diversity and elite religiosity in modern China. A model (10-20)
Vincent Goossaert

Religious diversity and patrimonialization. A case study of the Nianli
Festival in Leizhou Peninsula, China (21-31)
Shanshan Zheng

Traditional and modern crossing process exchange in a Buddhist-Muslim
society. Case studied: Zangskar valley in the great Indian Himalayas (32-45)
Salomé Deboos

Becoming Christians. Prayers and subject formation in an urban church in
China (46-54)
Jianbo Huang & Mengyin Hu

Approaching Religion

http://www.abo.fi/approachingreligion

—
Dr Ruth Illman
Föreståndare, Donnerska institutet
Docent i religionsvetenskap, Åbo Akademi
http://www.abo.fi/forskning/ruth

Dr Ruth Illman
Director, the Donner Institute
Docent of Comparative Religion, Åbo Akademi University
http://www.abo.fi/donnerinstitute

Call For Papers: Annual Review of The Sociology of Religion

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Volume 10: Interreligious Dialogue: From Religion to Geopolitics, Forthcoming 2019

Edited by:
Giuseppe Giordan (University of Padua, Italy) and
Andrew P. Lynch (University of Sydney, Australia)

The topic of interreligious dialogue is of critical importance at a time of increasing geopolitical tension.  The urgency for developing better analytical tools for understanding interreligious dialogue is underscored by widespread concerns about religion and violence, and the security culture that this has given rise to in a number of nation states.  Furthermore, globalization, technological developments, mass migration, and recent political upheavals and the narratives of exclusion that have been associated with them, highlights the need for greater levels of communication between religious groups.  This volume seeks to investigate interreligious dialogue as a necessary component of global affairs in post-secular times, and in multi-faith societies facing increasing levels of cultural pluralism.

To explore these issues we propose to include articles on the following themes, from the perspective of a range of different religions:

1. Changing viewpoints and theories in the study of interreligious dialogue
2. Interreligious dialogue and politics in the context of globalization
3. Interreligious dialogue and debates about secularism and post-secularism
4. Interreligious dialogue in the context of social diversity,
cultural pluralism, and multi-faith societies
5. Interreligious dialogue and emerging information technologies
6. Interreligious dialogue in an age of terrorism
7. Interreligious dialogue and migration

Please send all proposals (300 words) to andrew.lynch@sydney.edu.au

Deadlines:
Submission of proposals: July 30, 2017
Notification of acceptance: September 30, 2017
Completed manuscripts (7,000 words): June 30, 2018

Call For Papers: (Re)Creating A Global Literary Canon

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International conference: (Re)Creating A Global Literary Canon
Organised by Peggy Levitt and Wiebke Sievers. 
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Gisele Sapiro
14-15 December 2017, University of Vienna
Call For Papers – Deadline April 15th
The world is in the throes of a terrible refugee crisis. According to the UNHCR (2016), in 2015 there were more than 65 million refugees and internally displaced people around the globe. That is approximately one in every 113 people. And forced migration is not the only type of movement on the rise. The 2015 World Migration Report stated that in addition to the 232 million international migrants, there are an estimated 740 million internal migrants worldwide (IOM 2015). That means that nearly one billion people (or roughly one out of every seven people in the world today) move internally or internationally, by force or by choice. More and more, they move between countries in the global south rather than from south to north. They move in a world of economic crisis, neoliberal restructuring, precarious jobs, major cutbacks in social welfare, and heightened nationalism and xenophobia.
Many of these migrants stay active in their homelands at the same time that they become part of the place where they settle. They continue to vote, invest in businesses, and participate in civic associations in their countries of origin and buy homes, open stores, and join community groups in the places where they settle. These dynamics challenge long-standing assumptions about how people live and work and about how social institutions function; how and where individuals raise children and care for the elderly; how class, race, and gender are constituted; how livelihoods are earned, the multiple communities with which people identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled. But while more and more people live transnational lives, they are still served by social welfare institutions that are stubbornly national. The social contract between state and citizen is national while many people’s lives are not. What’s more, most educational and cultural institutions still speak of national history, literature, and art without locating those firmly and clearly within the global context within which they are produced and given meaning.
Students, researchers, and policy makers must respond accordingly by better understanding the relationship between migrating people and migrating culture. Literature is particularly important for such an endeavor because people construct their lives in narratives and because reading about the experiences of others can inspire empathy. However, because of power inequalities within the global literary field, where Western authors still predominate, the literary narratives currently reaching most readers do not capture the new complexity of the world. English is the new lingua franca (Crystal 2003). In addition, the large majority of literary translations worldwide are translations of English works, followed by works in French, German and Russian (Heilbron 1999, Sapiro 2010). Few books written in non-western languages have ever been awarded the Nobel Prize. In fact, since 1901-2016, 28 Nobel Laureates wrote in English, 14 in French, 13 in German, and 11 in Spanish compared to 2 in Chinese, 1 in Bengali, and 1 in Arabic. It is not that Arabic, Chinese, and Bengali speaking novelists are less talented than their English and French speaking contemporaries. It is that the economics and politics of the global publishing industry have been stacked against them since the 19th century. During this period, English and French literature conquered the world and created unequal structures that were “at once slow to take shape and slow to fade away” (Casanova 2004: 83, citing Fernand Braudel).
Literary studies have been focusing on analyzing these developments from two perspectives: On the one hand, scholars are mapping the globalization of the literary field by studying the evolution and travel of literary forms (Moretti 2005, Moretti 2006), the hierarchical structures in the global literary field (Casanova 2004), and how literary works change when they travel (Damrosch 2003). On the other hand, they have been analyzing how a global imaginary becomes visible in English literature written worldwide (Damrosch 2014) and in multi-sited and multilingual literary texts written by migrants in the Western world compiled to challenge national and cultural boundaries (Sturm-Trigonakis 2013).
Less attention has been paid to the structures that facilitate or prevent the opening of national and global literary fields to literatures written in non-Western languages and to literary understandings of nations and identities that better reflect people’s mobile lives (for rare exceptions see Sapiro 2010, Sievers and Vlasta 2017). We argue that increasing the visibility of these works in national literary canons and the global literary field requires changing how individuals as well as communities construct their existence in narratives. We must understand not only if and where new authors working in a wider variety of linguistic traditions are able to gain attention but how the emergence of literary diasporas changes the boundaries of literary production and consumption. Where are different understandings of nations and identities produced that better reflect people’s mobile lives? Which agents, publishing houses, book fairs, festivals and prizes facilitate their public visibility? What is the role of cultural, educational, and political institutions in shaping and responding to these articulations? What kinds of new canons and new organizational strategies do they give rise to? How can we better prepare the next generation of scholars and policymakers to work within this changing organizational and ideological context?
Our conference seeks to explore how and under what conditions canons are successfully challenged and/or how cultural production is being sanctified in different ways. What is it that enables an author from the cultural periphery to ascend from national to regional or global fame? What new forms of codification are emerging? Our approach is consciously interdisciplinary. We seek to involve writers and institutional actors in the global literary field in a conversation with people who study them. We want to bring comparative and world literature scholars in dialogue with sociologists and anthropologists. The conference will also organize some public events including public lectures and readings by some of our participants.
We envision the main topics for our conference to be:
  •    The State of the Field: What is the intellectual thinking behind new anthologies of world literature being produced inside and outside the West (i.e. China and Japan)?
  • Agents and Publishing in the global north and south: Who are the gatekeepers? What do they look for? How can independent publishers remain viable in the current economic climate? What role do international organizations like foundations and UNESCO play? How does this vary across languages?
  • Book Fairs and Literary Festivals in the global north and global south: Who comes to these events? How are they supported? What is their role in creating reading publics?
  • Prizes, scholarships and other support structures: How do these work? Who are the judges? What are they looking for?
  • Authors and Critics: How to overcome national and global literary hierarchies?
  • Studying the production and consumption of literature: What do these programs look like in the global north and south? Are they doing anything differently than they did before? What explains how anthologies are constructed? How do we think about these issues when literacy itself is dramatically changing (i.e. reading on-line, texts that include visual culture, graphic novels, etc.)?
  •    Comparative perspectives: How does the globalization of the literary world speak to/drive forward/thwart the globalization of music and art? How do these processes vary by region?
We invite paper proposals that deal with the above or other topics related to our general framework. Proposals should be sent to Wiebke Sievers (wiebke.sievers@oeaw.ac.at) by 15 April 2017. The proposals should include the name and affiliation of the author and a short biography as well as the title and abstract of the proposed paper. The abstract should be no longer than 450 words and should explain the topic, the main conclusions (or the state of the work in progress) and the theoretical and methodological approach of the proposed paper.
Proposers will be informed of whether their paper has been accepted by 1 June 2017. Draft papers are due by 15 November 2017. There may be some funding to offset travels costs but it will be quite limited.
The conference language is English.
We particularly encourage scholars from beyond Western academia to apply.
We aim to publish the results of the conference in an interdisciplinary scholarly publication.
References:
Casanova, P., 2004. The World Republic of Letters, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Crystal, D., 2003. English as a Global Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Damrosch, D., 2003. What is World Literature?, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press.
Damrosch, D., 2014. The Politics of Global English. Journal of English Language and Literature, 60, 193-209.
Heilbron, J., 1999. Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory, 2, 429-444.
IOM, 2015. World Migration Report, Geneva, IOM.
Moretti, F., 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London, New York, Verso.
Moretti, F. (ed.) 2006. The Novel: History, geography and culture, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Sapiro, G., 2010. Globalization and cultural diversity in the book market: The case of literary translations in the US and in France. Poetics, 38, 419-439.
Sievers, W. & Vlasta, S. (eds.) 2017. Emergence and recognition of immigrant and ethnic minority writers since 1945: thirteen national contexts in Europe and beyond, Leiden, Brill/ Rodopi.
Sturm-Trigonakis, E., 2013. Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur, West Lafayette, Purdue University Press.
UNHCR, 2016. Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015, Geneva, UNHCR.