2014
Call for Papers: Religion, Violence, and Peace Conference
The Human Rights and Global Justice Research Group at Wake Forest University
invites paper proposals for a conference on the broad topic of
Religion, Violence, and Peace
9-11 April 2015 – (Winston-Salem, North Carolina).
Deadline proposals: December 15, 2014
Our chief aim is to bring together multi-disciplinary scholars working on the topic of religion, violence, and peacemaking from historical as well as contemporary perspectives. In particular, we are interested in papers that probe the complex patterns of interaction between religious commitments and violence in a variety of cultural and regional contexts, the ways in which violence is sacralized, and the use of religious beliefs and practices to justify, mitigate or redirect violence in less destructive channels.
Through keynote presentations and group discussion after each speaker, this conference will provide opportunities to deepen our understanding of the patterns of religious violence and the nature and scope of our moral responses to them.
Synthesis and dialogue will be facilitated by asking presenters from one day to serve as respondents on the other day and keynote speakers whose research explicitly addresses the intersections between religion and violence. We plan to publish the best papers from the conference.
Among the topics papers might address are the following:
– The roots of different types of violence in their specific contexts
– The use of religious texts as legitimation of violence; competing interpretations of religious texts to incite or to oppose violence.
– Religious violence perpetrated by the State.
– Assessments of religious ethical approaches to war and peacemaking;
– Religious violence as a tool of state domestic and/or foreign policy
– Models of religious responses to violence;
– Religious strategies of conflict resolution and peacemaking initiatives
– Non-Muslim minorities in religiously pluralistic context.
– Gendered strategies to promote or counter violence.
– The role of violence in sustaining cultures of faith, economy, and collective and personal identity
– Political and economic factors that influence certain forms of violence.
– The links between religion, violence and economic conditions.
– The impact of education and the role of children.
– Religious justification of the use of violence to promote religious rights and human rights.
Submission Details:
Please send abstracts of approximately 500 – 800 words to both:
Simeon Ilesanmi (ilesanmi@wfu.edu) and Nelly van Doorn-Harder
(vandoopa@wfu.edu). Deadline: December 15, 2014.
An affiliate of the WFU Humanities Institute, the Human Rights and Global Justice Research Group is an incubator and a hub for faculty research, programs, and events devoted to issues of human rights and global justice.
2014
Beyond Insider Outsider Binaries: Call for Chapters
Beyond Insider Outsider Binaries: New Approaches in the Study of Religion (working title)
Edited by:
George D. Chryssides (Honorary Research Fellow in Contemporary Religion, University of Birmingham, UK)
Stephen E. Gregg (Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Wolverhampton, UK)
It has become clear that binary notions of religious belonging, based upon narrow views of religion as a monolithic category of participation, are no longer tenable within the Study of Religion. Similarly, recent scholarship has emphasised a relational approach to engagement with religious communities and individuals, critiquing previous conceptions of scholastic objectivity and participation. However, much pedagogy and research about religion and religions still uses insider and outsider categories uncritically. As methodology within the study of religion – and particularly the study of everyday religion – has developed in the last decade, a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be an insider or outsider is needed. Indeed, this focus upon the performance of everyday religious lives must lead to a re-evaluation of ‘what religion is’, thus complicating issues of situation and approach to religion and religious communities. In so doing, we complicate the associated relationships religious practitioners and scholars have with these religious individuals and communities. Quite simply, when we re-negotiate ‘what religion is’ and ‘what religious people do’, with the subsequent challenging of sacred/profane dichotomies, we create a landscape where structured and restrictive notions of ‘insideness’ or ‘outsideness’ may no longer apply. If this is indeed the case, we need to re-focus upon performed everyday narratives and malleable, often complicated and contested, religious identities at the overlaps and edges between researchers, individuals and religious hierarchies, communities and worldviews.
Call for Chapters
The editors seek high quality original scholarship from a variety of international and multi-thematic and multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of religion in contemporary contexts. Chapters may be related to a particular religious community or tradition, or may focus upon a particular issue or methodological approach. Chapters should be 8,000-10,000 words in length. Examples of particular issues relevant to insider/outsider debate may include, but are not limited to:
- Teaching and researching religion ‘after the world religions paradigm’
- Sociological approaches to membership of religious communities
- Ethnographic issues for researchers in relation to religious communities
- Particular issues in researching controversial or problematic host communities
- Contested religious identities within and between religious movements
- Complicated processes of joining or leaving religious communities – converts, seekers, leavers and apostates.
- Theoretical and methodological approaches within the Study of Religion
- Public discourse on religious belonging and identity
Deadline
Potential contributors should email GDChryssides@religion21.com or s.gregg@wlv.ac.uk with a title, 250 word abstract, and 250 word personal profile, including institution affiliation and research profile, before 1st November 2014. It is anticipated that final chapter submissions will be required by 1st September 2015.
2014
IAHR e-Bulletin Supplement, September 2014
IAHR e-Bulletin Supplement, September 2014
Contents
- Introductory Summary (2-4)
- IAHR XXI World Congress Erfurt 2015: the deadline for panel proposals has been extended to 15 December 2014
- Retain or Changethe Name of the IAHR? (7-8)
- ‘A Rationale for a Change of Name for the International Association for the History of Religions’ (9-13)
- Minutes of the IAHR International Committee Meeting, Liverpool, UK, 2013 (14-39)
- IAHR Business Meetings Erfurt 2015: First Call (40-41)
- IAHR Honorary Life Membership: Call for Suggestions (42)
- Invitation for Letters of Interest for Hosting the IAHR XXII World Congress 2020 (43)
- Appendix to the 2013 International Committee Meeting Minutes (44-45)
Travel Grants
Those in need of a travel grant for attending the 21st IAHR World Congress at Erfurt, 23-28 August 2015, should carefully read the Travel Grant Guidelines before applying for financial assistance. Application for Travel Grants is possible until December 15, 2014. You will be informed about the status of your application before March 1, 2015.
2014
2014
Journal of Contemporary Religion – Special Issue on Religious Cultures and Gender Cultures
Journal of Contemporary Religion – Special Issue on Religious Cultures and Gender Cultures
Call for Papers
What is different about gender across religious cultures?
Instructions to authors and deadlines
Please submit an outline abstract of about 500 words (plus bibliographical references; in .doc and .pdf format) by 15 October 2014 to both heidemarie.winkel and elisabeth.arweck, outlining the following:
• Title of proposed paper
• Contributing author/s and contact details
• Significance and importance of the research question
• Key concepts, research framework, aim and methodology
If provisionally accepted, full papers are to be submitted by April 2015 for review in line with JCRguidelines. Submission of an abstract does not guarantee publication. Submitted papers will go through the journal’s usual peer-review process. Authors will not receive any payment upon publication.
