2014
2014 Consultation of African and African Diasporan Women in Religion and Theology
CALL FOR PAPERS
2014 Consultation of African and African Diasporan Women in Religion and Theology
Theme: Texts of Terror, Texts of Empowerment: Reimagining Sacred Canon
in Africana Womanhood
The Consultation of African and African Diasporan Women in Religion and Theology invites proposals for paper presentations at the 2014 meeting. Proposals engaging any religious tradition and on any of the wide variety of topics related to the consultation’s theme – Texts of Terror, Texts of Empowerment: Reimagining Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood – are welcome. ALL proposals should clearly and specifically (1) integrate discussion of sacred texts (in oral, written, or embodied forms) and (2) consider the relationship of sacred texts to any forms of violence against continental and diasporan African women and girls. Proposals may not exceed one single-spaced page and should include the proposer’s name and email address, a title, the proposer’s institutional affiliation, and a clear indication of how the proposed presentation considers violence, African-descended women, and sacred texts. Send proposals to ghanaconference2014@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is March 1, 2014.
The second Consultation of African and African Diasporan Women in Religion and Theology will take place July 6-14, 2014, in Legon, Ghana. The 2014 meeting extends work of the 2012 conference by continuing the focus on overcoming violence against continental and diasporan African women and girls and seeking to build relationships of continental and diasporan African women in religion and theology. Roots of these meetings began during the 1970s and 1980s when Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Brigilia Bam, Musimbi Kanyoro, Katie Geneva Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant and others first encountered each other as the earliest continental and diasporan African women’s voices at transnational Christian denominational and interdenominational meetings.
2014
Happy New Year from AASR President Elias Bongmba
Dear Colleagues,
Happy new year to you.
I write to thank you for your service AASR in 2013 and give you some updates. Because of the nature of the updates, I have taken the liberty to copy colleagues who are not members of the executive or country or regional representatives but involved with the conference planning.
We look forward to 2014 with excitement as we will all gather in Cape Town July31-August3 for the 6th AASR conference. The Co-Chairs, Abdulkader Tayob and Madipoane Masenya are doing an excellent job and I am very pleased to be working with both of them on a daily basis.
As we celebrate the new year permit me by way of summary to pass on information to you on different things that relate to AASR and the conference.
First, I encourage you to renew your membership and also encourage all members in your country and region to renew their membership for 2014. We plan to update our membership rolls by listing those who are current on their membership dues.
Second, if you plan to arrive in Cape Town early, and choose to stay with friends, relatives, or at another hotel, please consider booking the conference hotels for the duration of the conference. This is important for us to keep the special rates that have been arranged for us.
Third, the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) who are co-sponsoring the conference with us will post an announcement on their website that Professor Bron Taylor is the keynote speaker at the conference. We will give the same information to Melissa to post a on our website. We will also pass on to Melissa information about two plenary speakers when we receive biographical information from them.
Fourth, we hope that a senior member of the South African Government will address the conference. We have made initial contacts and will follow up with out invitation after elections are held in the Spring of 2014 in South Africa.
Finally, I had a conversation with Afe and Damaris about progress on the publication of selected papers from the Kenyan Conference, and I am glad to report that Afe is working on it and when all papers are in and decisions have been made, he and the editorial team will submit a book proposal to an editor for consideration. I must apologize to all of you and to Afe that I did not pass on this information earlier. Afe reminded me in a recent correspondence that he gave me that information in Liverpool.
Thank you again for your hard work on behalf of ASSR.
Sincerely,
Elias K. Bongmba
President of ASSR
2013
Research Methods for the Study of Religion
The role of empirical research in the study of religion has become increasingly important in recent years. In the discipline of Religious Studies, more postgraduate students are undertaking field-work based projects, and in other social science disciplines there has been a renewed interest in religion as an area of study. There have been relatively few resources available however to support methodological training in this specific field.
This project, funded by an AHRC Collaborative Research Training award, has been designed to address this gap. With support from the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme, this website was designed by the project co-ordinator, Professor Gordon Lynch, to provide an easily accessible resource to support individual researchers as well as courses in research methods in the study of religion. Training materials and position papers on the site were initially trialled for use through an intensive residential workshop held for PhD students from across the UK and Europe run in Oxford in September 2010. The discussion papers and exercises on the site are intended as introductory resources to give readers an overview of key issues and approaches.
Postgraduate users of the site, particularly at doctoral level, are encouraged to follow up with further reading using additional resources and links suggested for each topic. We hope to be able to add further relevant resources to the site over time, and welcome any feedback or suggestions for development of the site’s content.
http://www.kent.ac.uk/religionmethods/about-the-project.html
2013
Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions (ISASR): Third annual ISASR conference, in collaboration with Queen’s University, Belfast, Fri-Sat 23rd-24th May 2014
Conference theme: ‘Religion and Remembering’: Cross-Disciplinary Conference
Memory studies has become one of the most popular research areas in the humanities and social sciences producing a vast number of studies examining how nations, communities and cultures remember, re-construct or indeed forget the past. The theme of the conference encourages paper proposals across disciplines, being open to topics including (but not restricted to) remembering in the form of rituals, public commemorations, anniversaries, festivals, bodily practices, physical objects and places or in the form of orality, literacy, narratives and language.
Please send a 150-200 word abstract for papers to Dr Jennifer Butler (j.butler@ucc.ie) by the closing date of Friday 7th March 2014. Notification of abstract acceptance will be given by Friday 28th March, 2014.
Further information on the ISASR Conference 2014 will be posted in due course at: http://isasr.wordpress.com/events/isasr-2014-conference/
2013
IAHR e-Bulletin Supplement November 2013
To the officers and members of the IAHR member societies and affiliates:
Please send the members this link
http://www.iahr.dk/bulletins/2013/november/index.html
and kindly urge them to open it and spend some time browsing the latest issue of the IAHR e-Bulletin Supplement.
Please do not hesitate to write in case you have any questions regarding the IAHR.
Sincerely
Tim Jensen
IAHR General Secretary
