CALL for journal articles: “Building an Open Qualitative Science”

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CALL FOR ARTICLES

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

ISSUE ON: Building an Open Qualitative Science

The qualitative research tradition appears to be on an upward trajectory. In the last five years alone, qualitative scholars have generated a raft of influential findings within such core social science areas as poverty and material deprivation, residential segregation, policing and the criminal justice system, health disparities, immigration and ethnicity, housing and eviction, public surveillance, populism and the radical right, and science and genetics. This influential line of recent qualitative scholarship is joined by an equally influential stream of “fast science” qualitative journalism appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all manner of other media outlets. The country depends heavily on these two streams of qualitative work to build a richer basic science, to develop policy, and to understand ongoing crises and new developments in real time.

Although no one could dispute the profound impact of these scholarly and journalistic streams of qualitative work, the growing success of the form has also made it a target of criticism, much of it raising concerns about replicability, transparency, and representativeness. In some cases, this “open science” criticism comes in an overtly hostile form, a type of criticism that’s focused on discrediting the tradition in its entirety or, alternatively, advocating on behalf of particular variants of it.

The American Voices Project (AVP), the country’s first platform for conducting qualitative interviews with a nationally representative sample, was also spawned by this growing commitment to open science but instead proceeds by developing a new qualitative form that’s intended to stand side-by-side with the already immensely successful existing variants. The AVP’s simple objective is to begin the task of building a new qualitative research form that rests on representative samples, open data, and secondary analysis and that’s intended to supplement—rather than replace—existing qualitative forms.

The purpose of this call for articles is to roll out this AVP-based qualitative analysis by opening up the AVP dataset to qualified scholars and analysts. We welcome research on the many topics—including health, poverty, politics, protest, employment, coping, and anomie—that the AVP interviews can assist in understanding. Although most issues of RSF are topically focused, this issue will be topically broad and is instead unified by a commitment to exploring the hopefully broad payoff to this new form of qualitative data collection. The balance of this call discusses the design of the AVP, the topics covered in the interview schedule, and the types of research questions that it opens up and that are supported by this call.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

Submission instructions and timeline

To secure the interview and survey protocols and a sample interview, please submit the nondisclosure agreement here. After doing so, prospective contributors can apply by submitting a CV, an abstract of their study (up to two pages in length, single spaced), and supporting tables, figures, pictures, references, or other relevant material (up to two additional pages). These should be submitted by no later than 5 pm EST on January 5, 2022 to https://rsf.fluxx.io. (NOTE: If you wish to submit a proposal and do not yet have an account with RSF, it can take up to 48 hours to get credentials. So please start your application at least two days before the deadline.)

All submissions must be original work that has not been previously published either in part or in full. Only abstracts submitted to https://rsf.fluxx.io will be considered. Each paper will receive a $1,000 honorarium when the issue is published. All questions regarding this issue should be directed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org, and not to the email addresses of the editors of the issue.

A conference will take place at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City on December 9, 2022. The selected contributors will gather for a one-day workshop to present draft papers (due a month prior to the conference on 11/11/22) and receive feedback from the other contributors and editors. Travel costs, food, and lodging for one author per paper will be covered by the foundation. Papers will be circulated before the conference. After the conference, the authors will submit their revised drafts by 2/22/2023. The papers will then be sent out to three additional scholars for formal peer review. Having received feedback from reviewers, the editors, and RSF, authors will revise their papers by 8/17/2023. The full and final issue will be published in spring 2024. Papers will be published open access on the RSF website as well as in several digital repositories, including JSTOR and UPCC/Muse.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

CFP for Journal Special Issue on Religion and Bioethics

Dr Tyler Tate from Oregon Health and Science University, United States, and Dr. Hossein Godazgar from University of Warwick are editing the Research Topic of ‘Religion and Bioethics: A Sociological Perspective’ for the journal Frontiers in Sociology.  The call for papers and details are available here:  https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/25414/religion-and-bioethics-a-sociological-perspective

I would be grateful if you could also circulate this to researchers and/or practitioners who might be interested in the sociological study of the intersectionality between religion and bioethics.

Submission deadlines are 31 January 2022 (for Abstracts) and 04 July 2022 (for full manuscripts). Please note that we will pursue a thorough scientific peer-review process. We look forward to receiving your abstracts and full manuscripts.

About this Research Topic

Both ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ were central themes in sociology as practised by its pioneers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. However, their central position as major fields of social scientific enquiry and attention has been lost over time. This Research Topic is an attempt to recover these traditional, long-forgotten, but vital, parts of sociology. In doing so, it focuses on the conceptual interrelationship between the meanings of ‘religion’ and ‘bioethics’ at the ‘first-order’, everyday ‘lay’ or ‘folk’ level in various social contexts across the world from countries of the ‘global north’ to those of the ‘global south’ and from so-called ‘Abrahamic religions’, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to ‘non-Abrahamic religions’, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Sikhism and the so-called ‘indigenous religions’ of animism, naturalism and totemism.

This Research Topic presupposes that the meanings of both ‘religion’, as highlighted by Beckford (2003), and ‘bioethics’, as emphasised by Nietzsche (1990) and Charles Taylor (1985) in relation to the definition of ‘morality’, are by no means unitary, universal, fixed and homogenous. Their definitions change across various social contexts in time and space. As Steven Lukes (2010), referring to Hacking (1999), stresses in relation to ‘morality’, contingency, nominalism and externalism are essential components of both ‘religion’ and ‘bioethics’. Therefore, it would be fascinating to explore and understand how and to what extent the understandings of ‘religion’ (and its cognate terms, including ‘non-religion’) and ‘bioethics’ (in relation to themes such as cloning, abortion, organ transplantation and blood transfusion, sexual health and orientation, the value of life, death, killing and letting die) intersect each other in various social contexts.

Waikato Islamic Studies Review – Call for Papers

Waikato Islamic Studies Review – Call for Papers  : http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/UWISG/review.shtml

On behalf of the University of Waikato Islamic Studies Group, I warmly invite submissions of papers which examine Islam in the widest sense to the Waikato Islamic Studies Review for publication consideration.

Articles can be as short as 2000 words and up to a maximum of 5000. For full details regarding paper guidelines and submissions and the Waikato Islamic Studies Review please see:http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/UWISG/review.shtml

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me asap if you think that you might like your work considered; the next edition is due for publication in September or November 2021. 

Kind regards,

Abdullah Drury
Editor: Waikato Islamic Studies Review
Email: abdullah@xtra.co.nz

CFP: “Religion and Public Health Threats in the 21st Century”

CALL FOR PAPERS

Religions Special Issue: “Religion and Public Health Threats in the 21st Century”

The focus of this issue is on the role of religion in addressing public health threats plaguing societies in the 21st century. Past books or edited volumes provide overviews of religion as a social determinant of public health; scientific evidence of the religion–health link; spirituality’s role in medicine; and religion connections with specific health areas (e.g., mental health, adolescent health). This volume will emphasize religion connections to key public health challenges in the last two decades, including but not limited to the current COVID-19 crisis. NOTE: Invited papers will be published free of charge. Read more here

Magdalena Szaflarski, Ph.D. | Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Sociology
UAB | The University of Alabama at Birmingham
szaflam@uab.edu

Call for Papers: “The Family in Chinese Christianity”

“Generational Legacies:
The Family in Chinese Christianity”

Special Issue of Review of Religion and Chinese Society

Though the vast majority of Christians in China today are converts, or first-generation Christians, a significant and influential number of Chinese Christians trace their faith back to earlier generations. Some Chinese families count a Christian heritage six, seven, or even more generations back. In the contemporary Western tradition, Christianity is often framed as an individualized religion—conversion is an individual’s choice and having a “personal relationship” with God is emphasized. However, outside of the West where Christianity has experienced rapid growth, particularly in collectivist cultures, such a framing may not fit. In China, the family, rather than the individual, has traditionally been the most basic unit. The family is integral to the understanding of Chinese religious life, but this has not been a major focus of much of the research on Chinese Christianity, particularly Protestantism. By focusing on the importance of the family in Chinese Christianity, we see that this religion is not simply a Western implant, but truly a Chinese religion.
This special issue of Review of Religion and Chinese Society will publish select articles that provide fresh perspectives on how understandings of the family may shed new insights onto Chinese Christianity. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Commemoration of family history by Chinese Christian families
  • How Chinese Christianity is linked to kinship or lineage networks
  • Religious influence of (great) grandparents on young generations
  • “Sinification” of Chinese Christian families
  • Intergenerational challenges for Chinese Christian families
  • Multi-religious or mixed religious Chinese families
  • How Chinese Christian families perform life course rituals
  • How Chinese Christian families express their religious identity

Important Dates:

  • Complete drafts: March 20, 2021. Drafts should be 5,000-8,000 words (including bibliography and notes). Please refer to the RRCS Instructions for Authors for paper formatting details. Also, please include abstract (100-200 words) and a brief CV. Submit these materials and any questions to Chris White: chrismwhite@purdue.edu.
  • Decisions will be made by April 1. Those selected will be invited to participate in a workshop that will take place on April 26, 2021, 9:00-11:30 am EST. The goal of this workshop is for all contributors to offer constructive suggestions on the papers and better allow the articles to dialogue with each other. (Attendance at the workshop is not mandatory for consideration.)
  • Final draft: May 31, 2021. After final submission, all papers will go through the normal, rigorous blind peer-review process with the journal. The tentative plan is that the special issue will be published in late 2021 as issue 8.2 of Review of Religion and Chinese Society.

Annual Review: “Chinese Religions Going Global”

Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion
Volume 11:
Chinese Religions Going Global

Edited by Nanlai Cao, Giuseppe Giordan, & Fenggang Yang

Cover Chinese Religions Going GlobalAs China is being increasingly integrated into the global economy, more and more Chinese people live transnational lives and practice religion globally. So far scholarship of the relationship between religion and globalization in the Chinese religious field has primarily been set in the historical context of the encounter between Western Christian missionaries and local Chinese agents, and little is known about a global Chinese religious field that is in the making. The Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 11: Chinese Religions Going Global seeks to challenge the dichotomous ordering of the western global and the Chinese local, and to add a new perspective for understanding religious modernity globally. Contributors from four continents who represent a range of specialisms apply social scientific methods in order to systematically research the globalization of Chinese religions.

The latest issue of Review of Religion and Chinese Society is available online

Review of Religion and Chinese Society
Volume 7, Issue 2

The latest issue of Review of Religion and Chinese Society has been published and is now available online. Edited by Anna Sun, Volume 7 Issue 2 is a special issue entitled “Confucianism and Daoism: From Max Weber to the Present” which gathers scholars of Confucianism and Daoism to have a open conversation. The articles included in RRCS 7.2 are listed below.

Editorial
Confucianism and Daoism: From Max Weber to the Present
Anna Sun
Articles
“The Last Confucian” in the Rice Paddy of Java: Toward Constructing an Anthropology of Confucianism
Yong Chen
From Female Daoist Rationality to Kundao Practice: Daoism beyond Weber’s Understanding
Robin R. Wang
From Alchemy to Science: Daoist Healthcare in Contemporary China
Jonathan Pettit
Religion and the Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia
Kenneth Dean
Thinking with Weber’s Religion of China in the Twenty-First Century
Anna Sun
Book Reviews
The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China, written by Carsten T. Vala
Marie-Eve Reny
China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church, written by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
Alexander Chow
Buddhism after Mao: Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions, edited by Ji Zhe, Gareth Fisher, and André Laliberté
Tzu-Lung Chiu
Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans, written by Russel M. Jeung, Seanan S. Fong, and Helen Jin Kim
Steven Hu

Call for Papers Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne/Academic Journal of Sociology

Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne/Academic Journal of Sociology
According to the legend, in May1973 David Bowie was travelling through Poland back from a tourist journey from Moscow. At the Warszawa Gdańska station the train had a very long technical stop. It was used by the British artist to walk into the city and by chance buy a vinyl with the songs performed by the folklore band “Śląsk” at a local music store. We can find echoes of this accidental meeting today on his album “LOW” in the song “Warszawa”. We would like to follow this path and that is why we decided to focus on the topic of the influence of Polish culture on the broadly understood world culture and technology.

You are welcome to contribute to the newest issue of the ‘Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne / Academic Journal of Sociology’. The topic of the issues will be one hundred and fifty years of the influence of Polish culture on world science, literature, music and technology.

You are expected to focus on the topics in sociology, cultural studies, musicology, literary studies, and history. They will touch upon the strong Polish accent of the global reception of its cultural systems, which would be treated on two different levels:

  1. As the influence of the Polish culture in the form of famous names of Polish artists;
  2. And as the reception and presence of elements of the Polish culture in the works of foreign artists, scientists and other creative personalities.

The texts that touch upon the following issues, are especially welcome:

  • – the influence of Polish scientists on the world science, among them Aleksander Czekanowski, Stefan Banach (we would happily accept articles also about the works of Florian Znaniecki or Ludwig Gumplowicz);
  • – the influence of Polish male and female writers and poets on world literature (W. Gombrowicz, R. Gary, W. Szymborska), referring to the last name of the famous poet, a Noble Prize winner, we would be happy to accept, among others, articles about the work of the other Polish Nobel Prize winners);
  • – the influence of the Polish composers, musicians as well as painters and directors that remained outside Poland (Mieczysław Weinberg, Zbigniew Preisner, Roman Polański, Zdzisław Beksiński);
  • – the reception of Polish science in tje global technology (e.g. the discoveries of the ancestor of the “Silicon valley” Jan Czochralski or K-202 by Jacek Karpiński)
  • – the reception of Polish culture in music, science, literature, photography, cinematography etc.

Deadline for the abstract/outline submission:
31 December 2020 to email: m.choczynski@uksw.edu.pl

Deadline for the paper submission:
31 January 2021 to email: m.choczynski@uksw.edu.pl

The text should be no more than 24,000 characters (with footnotes and a list of cited works) and must be adapted to the standards of citation / footnotes that is found on the journal website(Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne/Academic Journal of Sociology).

Please attach to your paper your short academic profile (up to 500 characters), affiliation, a list of works cited in the paper and a summary in Polish and English with keywords.

Leading Editors: Tomasz Michał Korczyński, Marcin Choczyński

Call for Papers: Special Journal Issue: “Religion and Public Health Threats in the 21st Century”

Special Issue on Religion and Public Health in the journal Religions is seeking papers. The call for papers can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/Religion_Century. Submission deadline for completed papers is June 1, 2021, but we encourage early submissions. Religions is an open access journal, but a 50% discount on publication fee (final cost approx. 500CHF) will be offered to selected good quality papers. If you don’t have funding support and have concerns about the fees, please state so in your cover letter. In addition to the Special Issue online, accepted papers (if 10 or more) will be published in printed book format. Please direct any inquiries to Magdalena Szaflarski, PhD, Guest Editor, at szaflam@uab.edu.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on “Religious Communities in Exile and Diaspora”

The open access journal Religions is preparing a special issue on “Religious Communities in Exile and Diaspora”.  Dr. Ellen Posman (Baldwin Wallace University) is Guest Editor.

Religions is an international, open-access scholarly journal. It is indexed in A&HCI (Web of Science), ATLA Religion Database and in SCOPUS,  which gave it a Citescore of 0.50 and listed it among the top 9% of the 462 religious studies journals SCOPUS surveyed in 2018.

Papers may be submitted from now until 28 February 2021, as papers will be published on an ongoing basis. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

If you would like to contribute, please email Dr. Posman by 12/31/2020 with a title and
abstract (email: eposman@bw.edu, subject: Religions abstract).