Kategorie: Call for Papers

International Conference, June 1-3, 2017, Department of North American Literary and Cultural Studies of Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Indigenous Popular Culture is arguably one of the most vibrant and fastest-growing fields of contemporary cultural production not only in the United States and Canada, but across the globe. Indigenous artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs of all walks of life proliferate increasingly on contemporary popular cultural landscape in all its various incarnations, from popular fiction to animation to the fashion world. While doing so, diverse Indigenous practitioners of the popular throughout the world not only intervene powerfully into the landscape of popular culture and representation—a cultural field which is notorious for its various appropriations and misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples—but also draw attention to the pressing social issues which Indigenous communities of today are faced with. Thus, Indigenous popular culture is not only a field of a dynamic creative expression, but often also in one way or another stands in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous activist groups and causes working towards the goal of decolonization and resurgence.

This conference is dedicated to a multifaceted, multifocal, and interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary Indigenous popular culture in all its various facets and geographical locations. The organizers thus welcome papers from all disciplinary perspectives engaging with any aspect of Indigenous popular culture. Suggested thematic fields include, but are not limited to:

• Indigenous Popular Culture and its role in the project of decolonization
• Indigenous Feminism and Popular Culture
• Comparative approaches to Indigenous Popular Culture
• Indigenous geek cultures
• Indigenous fandoms
• Indigenous Popular Culture and Social Media
• Indigenous film, TV, and animation
• The role of marketing, publishing institutions, and distribution channels
• Indigenous genre narratives of all kinds
• Indigenous popular video and music cultures
• Indigenous fashion

Invited Speakers:
Sonny Assu, visual artist
Taiaiake Alfred, University of Victoria
Sarah Henzi, SFU and Université de Montréal

Registration Fee: 30 €

Abstracts of ca. 250-300 words and a short biography should be submitted to amerikanistik[at]mx.uni-saarland.de by March 15, 2017. Please include subject line “Indigenous Popular Culture Conference Proposal.”

Contact:
Svetlana Seibel, M.A.
Universität des Saarlandes
North American Literatures and Cultures
Campus C5 3, Zimmer 116
66123 Saarbrücken
Mail.

Conference, 18 – 20 May 2017, Institute of Canadian and Aboriginal Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON/Canada

The 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, coming as it does in the aftermath of the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is an ideal moment to re-examine the stories told of Canada’s past. Restorying Canada will inspire bold challenges to historiographic conventions of how we remember, invite critique as well as celebration, and explore multiple media and genres for evoking and interrogating the past, privileging artistic creativity along with academic rigour.

Religion has played a crucial, if understudied role in Canadian history: serving as the engine of residential schools, forming the still-extant „two solitudes,“ inspiring collective visions of state responsibility for health care, and shaping a multicultural identity. In keeping with the urgency of the TRC’s „Calls for Action,“ the conference will also highlight contemporary explorations of the troubled relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, including the legacies of religious, cultural, and linguistic imposition and resistance. Restorying Canada asks a few fundamental questions: How does our understanding of our past impact our present? What aspects of our nation’s history have gone un-told, been forgotten, or been systematically repressed? How have the complex interrelationships among Canada’s religious communities changed? Perhaps more troublingly, how have they remained the same?

Conference keynote speakers include novelist Margaret Atwood, Poet Laureate of Canada George Elliott Clarke, and filmmaker Zarqa Nawaz. Each speaker’s ground-breaking work in their diverse fields of endeavor has encouraged creative and critical re-imagination of Canada’s collective past and its ambiguous legacy; they have participated in „restorying“ Canada.

The organizers invite proposals for individual papers and full panels from scholars, graduate students, artists, writers, filmmakers, educators, journalists, public policy professionals, community activists and others. The Conference will bring together people from multiple fields of expertise who are working on projects broadly related to the theme of religion and public memory in Canada that consider the multiple nations that brought this country into being. The organizers welcome proposals in areas such as the study of religion, history, anthropology, Indigenous studies, law, museum studies, political theory, literature, art, media studies, environmental studies, and archaeology. Since Restorying Canada is considered to include diverse modes of storytelling, the organizers encourage proposals for both traditional and innovative forms of presentation.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Creative and ritual practices of memorialization, reconciliation, and storytelling
• Indigenous/settler relations, 1600 to the present
• Religion as inspiration for utopian and dystopian visions
• Museums, collectors, and material culture as agents of religion and public memory
• “Secularism,” “multiculturalism” and “religion” as contested categories
• Environmental, geographic, and ecological aspects of religious engagement
• Religion, immigration, and the “values” of Canadians
• Acculturation, appropriation, and the politics of “majority” and “minority” religions
• Religion and changing economic practices/ideals

Deadline for submissions: 3 March 2017

For more information and to submit a proposal, please go to their website.

Organizing team:
Emma Anderson, University of Ottawa;
Hillary Kaell, Concordia University;
Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto

Contact Email.

42nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association (SSHA), November 2 – 5, 2017, Montreal, Quebec/Canada

The Race/Ethnicity network of the Social Science History Association welcomes submissions to this year’s conference theme „Changing Social Connections in Time and Space.“ Papers and panels on topics that address the conference theme are welcome, including:

• „Scholars Ignored:“ Patterns of Exclusion in Academia
• Social Movements and Politics
• History and Memories of Rights Battles
• Pedagogy, preservation/continuity of struggle
• Defining an Intersectional Politics
• Sexuality, Solidarities, and Networks of Activism
• Race and Politics: Panels addressing the contemporary political situation
• The Far Right Movements
• The Far Right and Racialization
• Reisstance to Far Right Movements
• White Nationalism, the construction of Whiteness
• Refugees
• Racialization
• Criminalization as Racialization
• Spatialization of Racialization (e.g. ghettos and internment camps)
• Intersections of Race and Religion
• First Nations: Histories, Activism

The deadline for sumbission of abstracts is March 3, 2017, and the submission portal is now open at this web address. Please not: All SSHA requires to submit at this point is an abstract. You can find more information at the SSHA’s website.

Graduate student papers are especially welcome and funding is available to assist with conference travel. The new application process for funding can be found here. If you would be interested in putting together an entire session, please let the organizers know and they would be happy to provide you with the details as to how to do this.

Contact info:
Joseph O. Jewell
Liz Onasch
Marisela Martinez-Cola

Student-Focused Conference, March 18, 2017, Centre for Indigenous Research, Culture, Landuage and Education (CIRCLE), Carleton University (Algonquin Territory), Orrawa, ON/Canada

Carleton University’s Centre for Indigenous Research, Culture, Language and Education (CIRCLE) and the Indigenous and Canadian Studies Graduate Community (ICGC) is pleased to announce its fourth annual student research conference that will take place on March 18, 2017 at Carleton University.

The theme of this year’s event is Reckoning with Canada at 150: Critical Perspectives and Indigenous Sovereignties with a special keynote address by Nēhiyaw writer and community organizer Erica Violet Lee. This will be a forum for both Indigenous and non- Indigenous researchers, students, activists and artists to come together to share their work. In light of Canada’s 150th anniversary, we are looking to centre insights that critically engage with Indigenous experiences and realities. We encourage participation by artists, activists, organizers, community members and all experts (academic and non-academic).

The proposed sub-themes are:

• Our Responsibilities to Our Mother: Land Defence and Water Protection – Reconciliation; for Whom?
• Decolonizing Settler Logic and Imagining the Next 150 years on Turtle Island
• Queering, Unsettling and (de)Gendering the 150th
• Self-Care, Refusal and Healing in the Academy
• Sacred Spaces and Spirituality as Places of Learning and Refuge
• Decolonial Practices and Positionalities
• Immersive Approaches to Indigenous Language Teaching
• Digital Disruption and Decolonial Technology

Participation can be in the form of a paper presentation, a presentation of work-in-progress, workshops, paper panels, roundtable discussions, artistic performances (music, storytelling, etc) and more. Presentations by individuals will be limited to 20 minutes with an additional 10 minutes for discussion. Workshops, roundtables and panels will be limited to 90-120 minutes, based on number of participants.

Individual proposals should be 250 words in length and clearly outline the topic of your research, and the nature and format of your anticipated involvement. Performances and workshop proposals should indicate the nature of the expressive art or workshop. Panel and roundtable proposals should be 400 words in length and include an overall description, a title, individual paper titles, and the contributions of individual participants.

The deadline for submissions is February 3rd, 2017. Submit your proposals via email and clearly identify your name, academic or community affiliation, and proposal title in the body of the email. Any questions can also be sent to this address. Applicants will be contacted by February 15th to confirm participation. Further information about the conference will be posted on the CIRCLE website.