2014
38 ACLS-AHP Fellowships Awards 2014-2015
The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to announce 38 fellowship awards to African scholars in the sixth year of the African Humanities Program (AHP), a multi-year initiative of annual, international competitions funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The program is open to humanities scholars in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
2014 African Humanities Program Dissertation Fellows
2014 African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellows
The humanities lay the foundations for understanding and furthering every society’s economic and social development. The AHP is committed to advancing the humanities as a core component of higher education in Africa. To revitalize humanistic study, AHP offers fellowships for the completion of PhD dissertations and postdoctoral projects by early career scholars. Stipends provide a year free from teaching for full-time dissertation writing or postdoctoral research and writing as well as the option of a two-month residency at one of six internationally renowned research centers in Africa.
Applications are evaluated by an international committee of senior scholars from African universities in a rigorous process of peer review.
In addition to fellowships, the AHP organizes two annual Manuscript Development Workshops for AHP Fellows who have completed book manuscripts.
The African Humanities Series, a collaboration between the AHP and University of South Africa Press, publishes selected manuscripts written by AHP Fellows.
Application materials for the 2014-15 competition will be available in early September. See the competition announcement for details. This year’s deadline is November 1, 2014.
African Humanities Program
www.acls.org/programs/ahp/
facebook.com/ACLS.AHP
@acls1919
Eszter Csicsai
Program Coordinator
African Humanities Program
American Council of Learned Societies
633 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10017-6795
Tel.: 212.697.1505 x 135
Fax: 212.949.8058
E-mail: ecsicsai@acls.org
www.acls.org/programs/ahp
https://www.facebook.com/ACLS.AHP
2014
John Templeton Foundation, Autum 2014 Open Submission Call for Proposals
The Autumn open-submission call for proposals for the John Templeton Foundation is open now until October 1, 2014. Visit https://portal.templeton.org/login to apply.
The John Templeton Foundation (JTF) will distribute $155M of funding in 2015 (up from $93M in 2013) for topics that range from quantum physics to the evolution of cultural complexity. A proportion of these funds are dedicated to topics relating to the social scientific study of religion (including non-religion), including sociological, psychological, anthropological, and economic approaches.
JTF gives grants for up to 3 years in duration and for projects ranging in scope from $50,000 to more than $5,000,000. There are no constraints on the nationalities of the principal investigator or project members. The application process begins with an Online Funding Inquiry (essentially a letter of intent); applicants who are successful at this first stage are invited to submit a more detailed full proposal. The process includes peer review and is highly competitive: ~85% of proposals considered in the Human Sciences portfolio are rejected at the first stage and ~50% are rejected at the second stage.
Learn more about JTF’s grantmaking process here: http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/our-grantmaking-process
Learn more about Sir John Templeton’s philanthropic vision here: http://www.templeton.org/sir-john-templeton/philanthropic-vision
—
Nicholas J. S. Gibson, Ph.D.
Program Officer, Human Sciences
John Templeton Foundation
2014
2014
2015 Peter B. Clarke Memorial Prize
2015 Peter B. Clarke Memorial Prize
The BSA Socrel Study Group invites essay submissions on any aspect of contemporary religion addressed from a sociological perspective.
Final Deadline: 31 December, 2014 – completed submission form should be emailed to aratalp@gmail.com
2014
International Conference of the Research Network on Religion, AIDS and Social Transformation in Africa (RASTA), Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, 28-30 May 2015
Research Network on Religion, AIDS and Social Transformation in Africa (RASTA), International Conference: Spirit and Sentiment: Affective Trajectories of Religious Being in Urban Africa, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, 28-30 May 2015
Keynote speakers
* Prof. Dr. Filip de Boeck, University of Leuven
* Prof. Dr. AbdouMaliq Simone, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Call for papers
Experiences and social practices of people living in urban Africa are powerfully shaped by the dynamics of affect and emotion. Moving into and residing in the vital and (economically, ethnically, socially) diverse urban centers of the continent often triggers, and is driven by, states of anxiety, insecurity and fear, as well as feelings of excitement and hope, e.g. for a better life and socio-economic liberation. In addition, urban centers, and the opportunities and risks that living in them implies, provide space for sensations of pleasure, love, care and intimacy, but also experiences of suffering, alienation and emotional drama.
Many of these emotional and affective dynamics are engendered by the particular characteristics that have shaped urban life in and beyond Africa over the last decades; including the presence of violence and crime in urban dwellings; high levels of unemployment, poverty and epidemic illness; the promises, desires and actual pains induced by neoliberal, market-oriented reforms; along with the proliferation of artistic and aesthetic forms in urban centers. They have been exacerbated further in the context of HIV/AIDS and urban violence where cities have become signifiers not only as sites of death and bereavement, as exemplified by Mbembe s notion of necropolitics and de Boeck s writings on the invisible city and young people s social and moral imaginaries in Kinshasa (2004). Cities have also become places of hope and possible future(s) where due to the existing infrastructure and higher degrees of anonymity antiretroviral medication was available first and where people started to refashion their lives and emotional selves around as well as beyond the rigid frameworks of the emerging treatment regimes. Thus, as the case of HIV/AIDS illustrates, moving into and residing in urban settings may imply the reorganization of social relations and individual subjectivities, thereby giving rise to new understandings and practices of citizenship, self and personhood, but also sensations of marginality and exclusion and the anxieties of leading a good life in morally, socially, politically and spiritually corrupt environments.
This conference focuses on the multiple articulations between the wide array of affective and emotional states that living in and beyond urban Africa implies, on the one hand, and religious practices and ideas present in African cities and that may impact on the former, on the other. While a further goal of the conference is to establish a link between these various domains and HIV/AIDS, this is not an obligatory requirement for paper submissions. In a fundamental sense, the emotional and affective dynamics in urban Africa and the social, political and material configurations that sustain (or are sustained by) them are bound up with religion, its politics of collective aspirations and presence in material public space, and its material practices: First, religious ideas and practices offer affective regimes that regulate the hermeneutics of religious selves; second, religion allows people to encode their emotional states in religious and/or spiritual terms that may shape their maps of meaning and guide their movements; third, it supplies affective forms of belonging that are often simultaneously localized and transnational and thus forge new notions of emplacement; fourth, it provides ritual spaces for catharsis, peace and elation hence an outlet for the discord and anxiety of city life but religious groups and rituals may also foster aggression towards those considered outside their moral order; and fifth, religious communities often provide concrete material, emotional and organizational support and care to those in need and danger.
We are particularly interested in contributions from anthropology, sociology, political science, urban studies, history, geography, and religious studies that are based on thorough empirical research and that highlight not only how religious idioms, practices and structures channel and articulate emotional and affective states, but also how they foment emotions and affect in their own way (e.g., in ritual and prayer, religious group formation and mass mobilization, and religious engagements with political and moral issues in contemporary society). We expect presenters to engage with the analytical key concepts of the conference, i.e. the notions of affect, emotion and the urban. In our view, the notion of sentiment is helpful in defining distinctive ways of moral and emotional being in specific communities (Throop 2012) which cultivate ethical lives in times of social transformation and moral breakdown (Zigon 2007) and which can also be inscribed in forms of humanitarian and state governance (Fassin 2011). Also, engaging analytically with urban space may benefit from the notion of scale (Brenner 2001) that addresses the hierarchical arrangements of urban centers in an interconnected world as well as the internal diversity of urban space with its hot spots and dead zones (van Dijk 2011). Furthermore, we consider cities as spaces of intensification (Debord 1977) which are configured around spatial mobilities, risks and opportunities. Papers can address these issues from the perspective of dominant traditions (Christianity, Islam, African Traditional Religion) or actors who engage with their ideas, practices and everyday articulations in the flourishing religious markets and popular sectors of African cities , religious minorities, and other, site-specific scenarios of religious diversity both on the continent and in the African diaspora.
Paper submissions may cover one or several of the following themes:
- African Cities as epistemological laboratories: medicine, faith and enchantment
- Insecurity, health and healing
- Emotionality of religious politics in urban Africa and the mobilization of religious sentiment in urban governance
- The manifestation of religious sentiment in urban art and media (song, graffiti, theatre, TV)
- Emotionality, affect and religious engagements with public space
- Anxieties, hopes and affect in interreligious encounters
Sentiment and the formation of religious personhood in and beyond institutional settings
Intimacy, love and care in religious and family domains
The material as well as immaterial practices of care and support that enable the navigation of the urban in spiritual, emotional and material ways.
Abstracts
*Please submit your abstracts of 250-300 words to*: rasta.berlin.conference2015[at]gmail.com
Deadline
The deadline for applications is September 30, 2014. Participants will be informed about the acceptance or non-acceptance of their papers by mid- to end of October. Accepted speakers will be expected to submit their paper (4-5000 words) by April 20, 2015 for pre-circulation among all conference participants.
Scholarships
Several travel and accommodation fellowships are available for select participants. African scholars will be prioritized in selection, though we also invite others to apply whose participation would be dependent on financial support. Please write a 500 word motivation for funding applications, outlining your reasons for the application, whether you require full or partial funding, and your expected travel costs. Please include also a short CV of no more than 2 pages.
Organizing Team
- Hansjörg Dilger (Frei Universität Berlin, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, hansjoerg.dilger@berlin.de )
- Astrid Bochow (Georg-August University Göttingen, Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology, a.bochow@gmail.com )
- Marian Burchardt (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Göttingen, burchardt@mmg.mpg.de )
- Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon (African Center for Migration and Society, Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa, matthew.wilhelm-solomon@wits.ac.za)
Sponsor
The conference will be co-sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation Program Knowledge for Tomorrow Cooperative Research Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa