FRCPS NEWSLETTER 01/2015

CONTENT

...CALL FOR PAPERS

...EVENT AND WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENTS

...CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Please note:

The following items are excerpts taken from the full announcements. For more detailed information, please follow the links below (which will redirect you to the original announcements).

The FRCPS, or its staff, takes no responsibility for content on other websites.

If you would like to suggest an event of CfP to be included in the FRCPS newsletter, please send your suggestion to frcps.mail@googlemail.com.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Gender and the Colonial

SOAS Centre for Gender Studies, London, UK, 13-14 May 2015

In a period where gender is increasingly deployed via international and national policy initiatives, the Centre invites scholarship that analyses the role of gender (performance, embodiment, histories, constructions, deviations) in the persistence and legacies of colonial tropes, as well as papers that complicate expected understandings and meanings of gender through the study of the colonial and vice versa. The Centre welcomes papers from across disciplinary spaces, as well as the intersection of disciplinary approaches. Papers that analyse colonial histories and continuities are invited, as are those which use the tools of either postcolonialism and/or gender and/or queer theory to re-evaluate the ways in which these continuities contribute to the closure of debates on colonial politics, narratives and understandings.

Papers are sought which challenge and disrupt the re-enacting and telling of colonial power relations through the deployment of gender tools and activism. The Centre also welcomes papers that directly address methodological questions regarding temporal and geographical assumptions, that explore histories and representations of women’s and/or queer activism, that address legal regimes and legacies in colonial spaces and/or contemporary spaces of resistance, as well as interrogations of the legacy of colonialism in the stories told and re-told in the histories of colonial powers.

Abstracts or Panel Proposals are due by 31 January 2015.

Liveable Lives

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, University of Exeter, UK, 2-4 September 2015

This session at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference will explore what makes lives liveable in the broadest sense. Whilst livability/liveability has been discussed in philosophy and particularly the work of Judith Butler, it has yet to be fully engaged with in geographies. Addressing this concept may help to further our understandings of, and engagements with, social justice, social exclusions/inclusions and equalities.

Papers may wish to consider Butler’s conception of liveability in terms of how we normatively construct the idea of who is a human and who is not; what lives are rendered liveable or unliveable; or what lives are rendered intelligible or unintelligible. Critiquing how normative liveabilities and intelligibilities are created could therefore be one point of departure for papers in this session.

Abstracts are due by 6 February 2015.

Subverting the State: The Postcolonial Predicament

Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent, UK, 22 May 2015

Presenting a daunting challenge to postcolonial studies, the rapid growth of neoliberalism, globalization and neo-nationalism requires renewed attention to the role of the nation-state and, more importantly, forces that seek to subvert the nation-state. In light of these challenges and framing subversion within a postcolonial context, this symposium invites scholars to ‘think outside the state’ from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. It seeks to discuss and develop productive ways of engaging with the opportunities and limits of theories of subversion that encompass and extend across postcolonial discourses.

We invite papers from scholars working in the disciplines of history, literature, political science, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, religious studies and other related areas. Proposals reflecting an interdisciplinary approach are particularly welcome.

Abstracts are due by 15 February 2015.

Postcolonial Studies Association Convention: Diasporas

University of Leicester, UK, 7-9 September 2015

Diaspora has been one of the key concepts of postcolonial studies within this context of individual and collective journeys. Within contemporary analysis, diasporas have tended to be explored in terms of ethnicity, race, nationality, and even religion. However, diaspora has sometimes been accused of perpetuating histories of colonial inequality by failing to differentiate between precarious migration motivated by exploitation and the more economically privileged transnational movements of the global bourgeoisie. The study of human movement during colonial and postcolonial times has taken a number of shapes across the humanities and social sciences through the study of diaspora, migration, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalisation.

Abstracts or Panel Proposals are due by 28 February 2015.

AfroEurope@ns V: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe

University of Münster, Germany, 16-19 September 2015

African European Studies explore social spaces and cultural practices that are characterised by a series of contemporary and historical overlaps between Africa and Europe. This fifth bi-annual conference aims to provide perspectives on specific strands of this diverse and vibrant field, including both established and emerging research areas of a trans- and multidisciplinary nature.

Recognising that African European Studies cannot be confined to textual representations, we encourage submissions on a wide range of topics from several disciplinary backgrounds. In addition to academics, artists, and activists, we welcome authors, social workers, journalists, and anyone else with a specific interest in the field.

Abstracts or Panel Proposals are due by 1 March 2015.

Tracing the Path of Tolerance. History and Critique of a Political Concept from the Early Modern Period to the Contemporary Debate

Associazione Alumni della Scuola Galileiana, University of Padua and the Galileian School of Higher Education, Padua, Italy, 26-27 May 2015

During the history of political thought the concept of tolerance represented not merely an abstract idea, but rather a concrete political public space that rendered possible the recognition of those civil and political rights which contributed to the development of democratic societies. The concept has undergone radical changes during the centuries: from constituting a claim in favour of religious freedom within reformed communities in early modern Europe, to a representation of an institutional principle deemed to regulate social life. A concept largely accepted but, at the same time, often criticised being considered a surreptitious instrument of hegemonic political power.

This conference aims at highlighting the different meanings the concept acquired in different contexts and different times. In particular, the analysis of the concept will be conducted from an interdisciplinary perspective which will merge philosophy, history of political and legal thought, history of literature and political science, by tracing the history of this idea and practice from the early modern period up to the modern debate, focusing on questions such as pluralism and multiculturalism.

Abstracts are due by 1 March 2015.

EVENT AND WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENTS

Difference that makes no Difference: The Non-Performativity of Intersectionality and Diversity

FRCPS in cooperation with the Women’s Network, Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders,” Goethe University Frankfurt and Hessische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Goethe University Frankfurt, 5 February 2015

Despite the hype of intersectionality and diversity, they remain predominantly symbolic commitments in academic discourses and institutional practices. The rhetoric of diversity is employed to deflect charges of racism and hetero/sexism, even as there is systematic resistance against the institutionalization of diversity. Despite commitments to “do diversity” and to be diverse, discourses and institutions sustain the status quo through Eurocentric and Androcentric academic curricula and discriminatory hiring practices.

The aim of this workshop is to explore the ideological function of diversity and intersectionality as legitimizing performance indicators in academic discourses and institutions.

Participation is free of charge. Please register for the workshop at: frcps.mail [at] googlemail.com

Greynog Ideas Lab IV

Gregynog Hall, Newtown, Powys, Mid Wales UK, 13-18 July 2015

Set up in 2012, the Gregynog Ideas Lab is a unique opportunity for graduate students and academics working in international politics from a range of critical, postcolonial, feminist, post-structural and psychoanalytic traditions to re-examine their own work and meet new people in an open space for thinking and generating new ideas. It offers guest professor seminars, round table discussions, methodology workshops and one-to-one tutorials with the guest professors.

Provisionally, our guest professors for 2015 are: Jenny Edkins (Aberystwyth), Himadeep Muppidi (Vassar), Sam Okoth Opondo (Vassar), Michael Shapiro (Hawaii), Erzsebet Strausz (Warwick), Annick T. R. Wibben (San Francisco), Rob Walker (Victoria), Marysia Zalewski (Aberdeen) and Andreja Zevnik (Manchester).

There is a reduced rate for bookings received before 30 January.

Colonialism, Orientalism and the Jews: The Role of Gender and Postcolonial Studies Approaches

Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, 24-26 June 2015

The workshop will explore the possibility of applying perspectives developed in the context of Gender and Postcolonial Studies to Jewish Cultural Studies and Studies in Antisemitism with a special emphasis on the orientalization of Jews and Jewish self-orientalization.

In this workshop we wish to offer the framework for a discussion of ways in which these recently developed theoretical and methodological approaches, primarily in Postcolonial Studies and in its historically entangled relation to the Study of Antisemitism, may be made productive for an investigation of “Colonialism, Orientalism and the Jews.” Special attention will be given to the ways in which Jewish self-orientalization challenges suggestions by Said and others that orientalism is nothing more than a patronizing attitude and a “strange, secret sharer” of Western antisemitism.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Steven Aschheim, Ivan Kalmar, Derek Penslar

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Call for Book Chapters: Ecofeminist Intersections

Editor: D. A. Vakoch (California Institute of Integral Studies)

This new book project explores the manifold ways that ecofeminism has been used across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including but not limited to such fields as history, philosophy, religious studies, women’s studies, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, geography, and political science.

We invite proposals for chapters that explicitly address the intersections between ecofeminism and other approaches or perspectives (for example, posthumanism, postcolonial studies, or queer studies). We especially encourage authors to highlight the unique contributions that ecofeminism, in combination with other approaches, brings to their primary discipline.

Abstracts are due 1 March 1 2015.

Special Issue of ‘Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society’: Gender, Sexuality & Decolonization

Guest Editor: Karyn Recollet (University of Toronto)

This issue invites us to consider both the centrality of gender and sexual violence to colonization, but also, relatedly, the centrality of gender and sexual justice to decolonization. Too often these issues have been seen as peripheral to the larger struggles against colonialism, too often cis-heteropatriarchal normativity has been justified in the name of decolonization.

To us, it seems impossible to discuss Indigenous sovereignty without a discussion of body sovereignty. It seems impossible to discuss environmental justice without connecting the violence against the earth to the violences against our bodies, particularly the bodies of women, Two Spirit, queer, transgender and others who fall beyond and in resistance to the male cis-heteropatriarchal norms of colonial society. Not only do these bodies bear the brunt of colonial violence, they also embody, create and sustain the theories, movements, and creative actions that resist it. We are interested in papers that connect theoretical discussions with active decolonization work by engaging the intersections of theory and practice.

Abstracts are due by 16 March 2015.

Special issue of Surveillance & Society: Race, Ethnicity and Surveillance

Editors: Simone Browne (University of Texas at Austin), Ronak K. Kapadia (University of Illinois at Chicago) Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University)

Since its emergence, surveillance studies has been concerned with how and why populations are tracked, profiled, policed and governed at borders, in cities, at airports, in public and private spaces, in databases, through biometrics, CCTV, identification documents, social media and other technologies. Also explored are the many ways that those who are subject to surveillance adopt, endorse, invite, subvert, resist, innovate, limit, comply with and monitor that very surveillance. As an interdisciplinary field of study the questions that shape surveillance studies center on the management of everyday and exceptional life – personal data, privacy, security, and terrorism, for example. While “race” and “ethnicity” are terms often found in indexes of many of the recent edited collections and special journal issues dedicated to the study of surveillance, limited attention is paid to race and ethnicity as key sites through which surveillance is enacted.

This special issue is guided by the following question: How can centering race and/or ethnicity as categories of analysis help social theorists, artists, scholars and researchers to understand surveillance? We seek papers that explore the relationship between surveillance and configurations of race and ethnicity. We encourage contributions that theorize race and ethnicity as operating in an interlocking manner with gender, sexuality, dis/ability, class, religion, location and other categories of identity. Papers that critically and creatively interrogate oppression, inequalities, power and resistance would be especially welcome..

Submissions are due by 1 May 2015.