Call for Papers, IRTG Diversity
Ostracized or celebrated, suppressed or embraced, difference is undeniably an object of both intensified and constant scrutiny in the contemporary world. To perceive, name and recognize it are all major issues replete with ambiguities manifested through the numerous social debates about it. Whether perceived as a problem or a solution, the various manners of addressing its manifold processes layer themselves, not without contradiction, in the fine weaving of the social fabric.
Academia is certainly caught within the same phenomenon as the multiplication of concepts called upon to capture such moving targets are the object of constant revision (most of the time, precisely in the name of a mishandled difference). While some are simply shunned and others amended, new concepts appear in order to highlight some of downplayed or devalued facets of the processes of differentiation.
This proposed volume thus envisions a critical incursion in the complex and multidimensional contemporary situation of the apprehension of difference. We will do so by assessing some of the key concepts directly linked to such efforts in order to: highlight current debates, render explicit some of what remains implicit within them and get a better grasp on the aporias and potentialities bared and expressed by the contemporary mobilization of such concepts.
The goal of such an interdisciplinary collection is to focus on both traditional or emergent ways of thinking and conceptualizing difference as they tend to deploy themselves today. We call upon critical and original reflections on the use (and abuses) of some the following concepts: alterity, authenticity, biodiversity, borders, culture, diversity, exoticism, forms of life, gender, heterotopia, hybridity, interculturalism, liminality, majority/minority, multiculturalism, ontologies, orientalism, pluralism, race and racism, religion, species, spirituality, stranger, translation, etc.
Such a variety of concepts will allow us to follow the numerous traces and historicities specific to the complex landscape of the conceptualization of difference. Some of the underlying questions of our inquiry can be formulated in this way: how, why and when is a chosen concept mobilized and debated? What are the conditions of its (re)emergence? What relations to difference tend to deploy themselves through the chosen conceptual mobilization? We invite authors to delve into current interrogations regarding the concepts of difference in order to question, on a more general level, how we think difference today and, what to think of our contemporary compulsion to think difference.
Propositions (400 words maximum) should be addressed, before July 30th 2016, to Phillip Rousseau – postdoctoral researcher IRTG Diversity, Université de Montréal. Authors will be advised if their propositions are selected on the 15th of August 2016. The length of the contributions should be between 6000 and 8000 words and will need to be sent by December the 15th 2016.
Papers in English, French or German will be peer-reviewed and the selected contributions published as part of the ongoing Waxmann (Münster / New York) publishing series entitled Diversity – Diversité – Diversität.