Rights to Nature

RIGHTS TO NATURE

Conference & Call for Papers

“Rights to Nature: tracing alternative political ecologies to the neoliberal environmental agenda”.

This is a hybrid academic-activist event that aims to encourage a closer collaboration between scholars and activists working on the neoliberalisation of nature. The conference is sponsored by the GEOFORUM journal.

23rd and 24th June 2016

Keynes Hall, King’s College, University of Cambridge, UK

 

We are looking for activists and scholars engaged in environmental movements in Europe. We are interested in a wide variety of topics, including -but not limited- the privatization of natural resources and public assets, land grabbing, the dismantling of traditional forms of using natural resources, the neoliberalisation of nature (including biodiversity conservation), and expropriation of green spaces in both urban and rural areas. Instances of these movements include anti-fracking and anti-mining movements, housing struggles, anti-biodiversity offsetting initiatives, movements against the privatization of public nature assets, including forests and water, and struggles against gentrification, regeneration, urban redevelopment and/or large infrastructure projects with significant environmental impacts.

We would like to invite you to participate in the conference and also if possible to help us reaching people from outside academia that engage in this kind of work. We have some funding available to pay for travel and accommodation. We would be extremely grateful if you could pass them this information and the preliminary program and call for papers, please.

You can find the call for papers here: http://conservationandtransformation.com/2016/01/27/conference-rights-to-nature-tracing-alternative-political-ecologies-to-the-neoliberal-environmental-agenda/ and here (in the Facebook page you can also find the program): https://www.facebook.com/groups/985735908164832/

Deadline for Abstracts: 27^th March 2016

We would also like to let you know that our goal is to enable an in-depth discussion between scholars and activists and, therefore, this would be a rather small event with a limited number of participants.

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/conference-rights-to-nature-tracing-alternative-political-ecologies-to-the-neoliberal-environmental-agenda

Old Nature

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Space, Identities and Memory

SPACE, IDENTITIES AND MEMORY

Birkbeck Institutes of Social Research and the Humanities Graduate Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

Space, Identities and Memory

Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: 11/03/2016.

Contact: bihbisrconference@gmail.com

We invite postgraduate researchers, academics, activists, artists, and practitioners from across disciplines to contribute to the Birkbeck Institutes’ (BIH/BISR) annual two day conference held from the 13th to the 14th  May 2016.

This year’s conference theme seeks to examine the interplay between identity, space and memory, exploring the ways in which identities may be created, formed and informed by spatial and temporal contexts. In particular, we seek to examine to what extent identities are performed in response to political, social and cultural pressures, including historical circumstances leading to the construction of acceptable and unacceptable identities.

The conference aims to capture the complex overlaying of identities in time and space, and the agency of individuals and communities as they address their own complex understandings of the temporality of identity. Conversely, we hope the conference will highlight how space and time are influenced and shaped by everyday life, sociabilities, mobilisations and processes of subjectivation. In particular we are seeking papers that engage with topics such as:

 

• The built environment: how are housing, architecture, urbanity and concepts of public and private space harnessed in the self-fashioning of individual and communal identity?
• Gender, sexuality and race, the politics of becoming and the deterritorialisation of the body;
• ’Home’, domesticity and concepts of solitude and isolation across time and space;
• Spaces of dissent and resistance: how is memory imbricated in public spaces as sites of encounters, direct action and creative practices?
• Displacements and borders: constructing or disassembling boundaries from local to global;
• Explorations in the use of maps, social cartography and critical geography;
• Exclusion and inclusion in institutional spaces: how have institutionalised spaces cemented or challenged contemporary and past perspectives on identity?
• Narrating the past: memorialisation, contestation and re-enactment
• Innovative methods and approaches in the investigation of the intersections between space, identity and memory

 

Our first confirmed keynote speaker is Andy Merrifield. The conference will conclude with a round table bringing together activists, practitioners and academics.

This is an interdisciplinary conference, designed to foster creative thinking and new research agendas. To this end, we encourage papers from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds that explore the interconnections of space, identity and memory.

We are particularly interested in receiving contributions from artists and practitioners in education, the heritage sector or related fields to participate in this interdisciplinary conference.

Proposals

We warmly welcome abstracts for 20-minute panel papers. Abstracts should be between 200-300 words in length. Please include a short biography with your submission.  The deadline for submission of abstracts is the 11/03/2016. Authors will be notified regarding the acceptance of their paper after submissions have been reviewed and no later than 31/03/2016.

Contact Details

Please send enquiries and proposals to Beth Hodgett, Calum Wright, Eva Lauenstein & Moniza Rizzini at:

bihbisrconference@gmail.com

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

 

How I Learnt To Love The Seagulls – A Photography Exhibition by Neil Whitehead

Neil Whitehead

HOW I LEARNT TO LOVE THE SEAGULLS

Photography Exhibition: How I Learnt To Love The Seagulls

By Neil Philip Whitehead

The Window Gallery

Jubilee Library

Brighton

Saturday 9^th January 2016

2.30-4.30pm

 

How I Learnt To Love The Seagulls is a whimsical yet in-depth study of the birds that are hard to avoid seeing. The series combines genres of photography using studio, street, and nature photography and experiments with ways of displaying photography. The work is humorous, emotive, beautiful and even political, and is an untypical look at our most noticeable wildlife.

114 framed C-Prints printed on Matt Fujicolor Professional, 1 Hard Back Silk Lustre Book.

Brighton Jubilee Library.

Window Gallery, inside and out.

There will be snacks, wine, and a nice time on
Saturday 9th 2:30pm til 4:30.

If you can’t make it to that, the exhibition will be on show
4th January 2016 until 10th of January 2016.

10am to 7pm – Monday to Thursday
10am to 5pm – Friday to Sunday.

RSVP to: gulls@neilphilipwhitehead.co.uk

See more @: http://heyevent.uk/event/re6p3rgdhth4ca/photography-exhibition-how-i-learnt-to-love-the-seagulls

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

The Rise and Fall of Cheap Natures

THE RISE AND FALL OF CHEAP NATURES

CALL FOR PAPERS

Paper session: The Rise and Fall of Cheap Natures

For the Annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, 29 March-3 April 2016

Capitalism’s greatest strength – and the source of its most pressing problems today – has been its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. In these sessions, we explore the manifold geographies of environmental change and capital accumulation through state-, imperial-, and capital-centered projects to appropriate natures – including human natures – as cheaply as possible.

These explorations may engage the creation – or destruction – of Cheap Natures across the spectrum of scalar and geographical emphases: regions of the Global South and Global North, from the body to the biosphere. We welcome papers encompassing (but not limited to) historical and contemporary transformations of social reproduction, commodity frontiers, hegemonic projects, scientific regimes, imperial power, and capital accumulation on a world-scale.

We especially welcome proposals that seek to transcend Nature/Society dualisms in the pursuit of new syntheses of “ecological” and “capitalist” crisis.

Deadline 16 November.

Contact: Jay Bolthouse (jebbolt@gmail.com) and Christopher Cox (crc42@uw.edu).

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Biopolitics

Biopolitics

BIOPOLITICS

Call for Papers

Journal Pléyade

ISSN 0718-655x / Online ISSN 0719-3696

Nº 17 January-June, 2016

Special Edition on Biopolitics

Since Foucault’s initial work on “biopolitics”, the relation between life and politics has become of increasing significance in the contemporary debate in philosophy and in the social sciences. As an area of research and as a concept, biopolitics has received diverse and at times opposed applications in the works of Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, Nikolas Rose, among others. This year the journal Pléyade intends to dedicate a dossier on biopolitics with the aim of analyzing both the exploitation and administration of biological life as a form of power, and of proposing alternative conceptions of politics that allow biological life to escape or resist its domination. We are interested in receiving contributions that address both modalities of biopolitics from a variety of disciplinary points of view.

 

This dossier invites authors to make contributions in the different areas on biopolitics and biopower in the contemporary thought. Along these lines, the proposed themes could include:

– Debates in contemporary thought on life and politics

– New perspectives on Michel Foucault and biopolitics

– Italian Theory and biopolitics

– Biopolitics and neoliberalism

– Biopolitics and totalitarianism

– Origines of biopolitics in the history of philosophy

– Affirmative biopolitics

– Biopolitics and new materialism

 

Guest Editor:

Vanessa Lemm, Head of the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New

South Wales UNSW, Australia.

Reception until: December 30, 2015

Languages: English or Spanish

Publication date: June 2016

Send articles to: revistapleyade@caip.cl

Manuscripts will be evaluated by double blind refereeing

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Mediated Cities

The City

MEDIATED CITIES

Mediated Cities Book Series

Open Call for Contributions
Intellect Books will launch its Mediated Cities book series April 01-03, 2016 with three books.

Digital Futures and the City of Today:  New Technologies and Physical Spaces. ISBN: 978-1-78320-560-8
Filming the City: Urban Documents, Design Practices & Social Criticism Through the Lens. ISBN: 978-1-78320-554-7
Imaging the City: Art, Creative Practices and Media Speculations. ISBN: 978-1-78320-557-8

This is a call for chapter contributions for the following book in the series from the perspective of all disciplines that engage with issues of the city, its design, mediation, representation and experience.

Contributions are welcome from urban design, planning, cultural studies, digital art, emerging technologies, social media, film, photography  etc.

The next book in the series will be drawn from the conference: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City.

For details: http://architecturemps.com/bristol-uk/

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: 15th NOVEMBER, 2015

This conference is organised by the journal Architecture_MPS, Intellect Books, the University of the West of England and the Centre for Moving Image Research. The publication series is a joint AMPS / Intellect Books initiative. See: http://architecturemps.com/publications-2/

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Historical Materialism London Conference 2015 – Pre-Registration

I must work harder!

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM LONDON CONFERENCE 2015 – PRE-REGISTRATION

Reminder: Only 4 days left to pre-register for the HM 2015 London Conference*

* NB: remember please that this year’s conference is at the SOAS Russell Square site, not Vernon Square as last year!
The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: States, Strategies, Socialisms

Twelfth Annual Historical Materialism Conference

School of Oriental and African Studies, Central London, 5-8 November 2015
As austerity tightens its grip around the throats of the peoples of Europe, but also rears its ugly head in Brazil and elsewhere, we are forced to recognize that it is not the mere by-product of the ‘economic crisis’ but a political project in its own right, one whose aim is to deepen and consolidate the most uncompromising forms of neoliberal capitalism. It cannot be said that this project has hitherto been met with passivity, even if social movements of resistance have been mostly far from strong enough to halt its advance. Yet something is perhaps beginning to change, namely the emergence of counter-austerity projects that have pitched themselves at a political – even electoral or governmental – level. With all their weaknesses, hesitations and contradictions, the chinks of light in Southern Europe, amongst others, should compel Marxists to pose a whole series of ‘old’ strategic and theoretical problems in new garbs and new configurations, ​but perhaps also to retire some of our dear fetishes and shibboleths, and to experiment with forms and strategies adequate to our present. Among the themes that have returned to the agenda are: the relationship of movements and parties of the radical Left to states and governments; the need for a political response to how class power is enmeshed with forms of domination that have gender, race, imperialism or sexuality as their axes; possible « socialist » futures and the ‘transitional’ mediations implied by them; the guiding dichotomies of left thought: reform and revolution, revolution and revolt, state and movement, parties classes and masses; the link between the limits to capital and the limits of politics.

Over a hundred panels on a wide variety of topics and plenary sessions on: Race, Mobility and the State; Austerity and Socialist Strategy in Southern Europe; Social Reproduction Theory; Marxism and Religion; Workers’ Struggles in South Africa.

Provisional Programme: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual12/ProvProgramme.pdf/view
Conference Poster for download: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual12/conference-poster

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Biotechnology, Biopolitics & Biocapital

BIOTECHNOLOGY, BIOPOLITICS & BIOCAPITAL

Friday October 23, 2015

2.30 – 6.00 pm

216 Asa Briggs Hall

Richmond University

17 Andsell Street, London, W8 5BN

Advances in our ability to make circulate, to intervene and to enhance biological functions have meant that the realm of culture now involves the transformation and commodification of ‘nature’ at its most elemental and molecular levels. This workshop interrogates changing understandings of ‘life’, the human, and the natural in the context of these and related developments in biotechnology, biopolitics and bio-capital.

Benoît Dillet (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies) ‘Automation, Desire and Capital’

Alexander R. Wilson (Aarhus University) ‘Chronopolitics, Biotechnology, and the Post-Human Narrative’

Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway) ‘Gaia, Gender, and the Anthropocene’

Paul Rekret (Richmond) ‘Cogito Ergo Habum’

 

All welcome.

 

Please register at http://www.eventbrite.com/e/biotechnology-biopolitics-biocapital-tickets-18625940690

For enquiries contact Paul Rekret rekretp@richmond.ac.uk

Part of the ‘Living in the Anthropocene: Rethinking the Nature/Culture Divide’ Workshop Series: http://rethinkingtheanthropocene.blogspot.co.uk/

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternative Realities, Landscapes of Dread

Dreamscape

PRETERNATURAL ENVIRONMENTS: DREAMSCAPES, ALTERNATE REALITIES, LANDSCAPES OF DREAD

Call for Papers for a special issue of Preternature (Issue 6.1)

Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2016.

This special issue of Preternature seeks papers that examine elements and/or depictions of the preternatural in all sorts of environments. Scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, the stories we tell about them, and our interactions with them. This volume focuses on preternatural aspects of natural and unnatural environments such as dreamscapes, alternate worlds, and eerie landscapes.

Papers should investigate the connections between preternatural environments and literary, historical, anthropological, and artistic forms of understanding. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Defining the “preternatural environment” / preternatural aspects of an environment.
• Superstition and spaces.
• Demonic domains.
• Artistic representations of preternatural environments across the ages.
• Aspects of the uncanny in various physical settings.
• The pathetic fallacy and narrative theory.
• “Unnatural” landscapes and environments.
• Bridging natural and preternatural spaces.
• Preternatural ecology and ecocriticism.
• Connections between material environments, literary narratives, and the preternatural.
• Eerie landscapes as characters or significant presences in literature, history, and culture.
• How preternatural environments inform human behaviour, or how behaviour informs preternatural environments.

Preternature welcomes a variety of approaches, including narrative theory, ecocriticism, and behavioural studies from any cultural, literary, artistic, or historical tradition and from any time period. We particularly encourage submissions dealing with non-Western contexts.

Contributions should be 8,000 – 12,000 words, including all documentation and critical apparatus.

For more information, see: http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_submis_Preternature.html or submit directly at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/preternature/default.aspx.

Preternature is published twice annually by the Pennsylvania State Press and is available through JSTOR and Project Muse. This periodical is also indexed in the ATLA Religion Database® (ATLA RDB®), http://www.atla.com.

Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural can be viewed at: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/preternature/

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Resilience and the Anthropocene

RESILIENCE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE: THE POLITICAL ECOLOGIES OF COMPLEXITY

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses

Call for Special Issue Abstracts

Deadline: 1 March 2016

The Anthropocene signals a new geological epoch in which humans have become a geophysical force. The possibility that human activity now produces the environments on which it depends destabilizes the image of a stable Earth that has grounded Western philosophy and politics for two millennia. Critical scholars assert that Anthropocene thinking can provoke new understandings of spatiality, temporality, ethics, responsibility and politics. As Simon Dalby (2013) suggests, a new kind of politics becomes possible when we begin to consider that the stakes include (de)forming the world we inhabit. However, Brad Evans and Julian Reid (2014) argue that the Anthropocene just as easily presents a dangerous, vengeful Earth teetering on the brink of systemic collapse – a catastrophic discourse that creates fearful subjects who desire resilience in order to survive a calamitous future. The Anthropocene’s world-deforming vision leads into a reactionary bio-politics of resilience that fashions adaptive neoliberal subjects capable of surviving whatever surprises complexity has in store.

Thus two concepts have been central to the shifting dynamics of power and agency under the political ecology of complexity: the Anthropocene and resilience. And yet, resilience techniques do not produce uniform effects. The deployment of resilience always occurs within particular socio-ecological contexts striated by multiple conflicts and tensions. Resilience intervenes in, and is inflected by, these contextually-specific relations. Ben Anderson’s (2015: 62) call to recognize that ‘‘resilience’ names a fractured, multiple, empirical field rather than a series of generic characteristics’ means that not only will resilience be something different in different times and places, it will also produce uneven and potentially unintended effects as well. Thus, there is no guarantee that resilience interventions will necessarily reinforce neoliberal order; they could just as well catalyze new ways of harnessing complex life’s potentiality. The bio-politics of resilience may attempt to constrain and regulate adaptability, but these constraints are plastic, malleable, and can thus be broken, cast aside or even re-molded into weapons.

This special issue of Resilience: Policies, Practices and Discourses will explore the indeterminate political ecologies opened by the Anthropocene and resilience. It takes seriously the call from Dalby, Evans and Reid, Anderson and others to think through the different ways politics might be thought, practiced, and analyzed through the malleable worlds of the Anthropocene and the complex life of resilience thinking. We invite abstracts from across the disciplines that offer empirically driven, theoretically informed papers that engage with the Anthropocene and resilience to explore the shifting forms of geo-politics and bio-politics that reinforce and challenge neoliberal political ecologies. Abstracts may touch on these themes in any number of fields, including but not limited to climate change adaptation, disaster management and development, international relations, environmental security, or urban development and security.

 

References

Anderson B (2015) What kind of thing is resilience? Politics 35(1): 60-66.

Dalby S (2013) Biopolitics and climate security in the Anthropocene. Geoforum 49: 184-192.

Evans B and Reid J (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press.

 

Submission Instructions

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted to Kevin Grove (Aberystwyth University, kevinjgrove@gmail.com) and David Chandler (University of Westminster, D.Chandler@westminster.ac.uk) by 12 October 2015.

Deadline for invited full submissions will be 1 March 2016.

 

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

 

Esoterism and the Cognitive Science of Religion

ESOTERICISM AND THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

CALL FOR PAPERS

An Aries Special Issue

Together with Markus Altena Davidsen (Leiden University), I am setting up a special issue of Aries on “Esotericism and the Cognitive Science or Religion”. At this stage we are looking for abstracts from people who might be interested in contributing a full research article.

Please find details in the CfP, linked here and pasted below. Feel free to spread the word to anyone who might be interested in this project.

Call for Abstracts, Aries special issue on Esotericism and the Cognitive Science of Religion

(Edited by Egil Asprem and Markus Altena Davidsen)

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) and the academic study of Western esotericism have both made a significant impact on religious studies over the past two decades. The study of esotericism continues to deepen our understanding of the historical complexities of religion in the West, and has identified a number of blind-spots related to heterodox religion, radically experiential practices, and overlaps between “religion”, “magic”, and “science”.

Meanwhile, CSR is rapidly changing the way scholars think about and approach key processes of religious practice, adding important new experimental and analytic tools to the scholar’s toolbox. This special issue of Aries aims to explore the potential of bringing these two fruitful fields together. What happens when we apply CSR approaches to the empirical material studied by esotericism scholars? How can key areas of interest in the study of esotericism, such as the notion of (experiential) gnosis, correspondences, imagination, higher knowledge, rejected knowledge, magical thinking, secrecy, and initiation contribute to the development of new approaches in CSR? How can we think about ritual practices such as theurgy, divination, healing, and ceremonial magic in terms of CSR approaches to ritual? Moreover, how can we use CSR approaches to these issues to integrate the study of esotericism more firmly in the broader comparative study of religion?

We are looking to curate research articles that deal with these and related questions. We take an inclusive view of CSR, and are happy to consider approaches from e.g. personality- and social psychology. We are especially interested in hands-on approaches that demonstrate the use of CSR inspired methodology to esoteric subject matters. We look in particular for articles based on contemporary ethnographies, interview or experimental data, but are also open for articles that bring CSR to bear on historical sources. The important thing is that studies should be able to integrate cognitive and psychological perspectives with existing state-of-the-art scholarship on esotericism.

If you want to take part in this special issue, please send us an abstract of your proposed topic by June 15 2015. Please specify as far as possible the empirical scope of your proposed article, as well as the CSR approaches you plan to work with. Include a short bibliography of the key literature you intend to draw on. On the basis of received abstracts, we will invite authors to submit their completed articles for peer review. The deadline for receiving finished manuscripts will be February 1 2016.

 

Relevant subject matter includes but is not limited to:

• New Age movement
• Ritual magic
• Channeling
• Healing/holistic health
• Correspondence thinking
• Kabbalah / esoteric hermeneutics
• Sex magic
• Spiritualism
• Neoshamanism
• Contemporary paganism
• Astrology
• Alchemy
• Western initiatory societies

 

Relevant CSR approaches include but are not limited to:

• Epidemiological approaches to the spread of esoteric representations
• Cognitive optimality theory (e.g., agency detection, promiscuous teleology, minimal counter-intuitiveness, theological correctness)
• Cognitive ritual theory (e.g., ritual form hypothesis, two modes theory, cognitive resource depletion theory)
• Embodied cognition
• Neurocognitive, experimental, and psychological approaches to experiential practices
• Personality and individual difference correlates for esoteric practitioners (e.g. positive schizotypy, absorption, hypnotizability)
• Conceptual blending theory

 

Please email your proposed abstract to Egil Asprem (easprem@gmail.com) and Markus Altena Davidsen (m.davidsen@hum.leidenuniv.nl). If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

European Labour History Network Conference

Labour History

EUROPEAN LABOUR HISTORY NETWORK CONFERENCE

First ELHN Conference – Turin, 14-16 December 2015

“Factory Level Analysis: A Methodological Exploration”

ELHN website: http://socialhistory.org/en/news/european-labour-history-network

Although among different types of work, industrial work has received the utmost attention by labour historians, studies focusing on a single factory are very few. Factory as a site of both industrial production and social relations of production is often taken as given and treated as the backdrop for the real action. The ELHN Factory History Working Group (FHWG) calls for a reconsideration of this particular workplace as the site of one of the most important relationships in society that between worker and employer with the insights gained from the new social history.

This reconsideration could be carried out on a number of lines some of which are as follows. To begin with, the study of a single factory is based on a complex weave of history, economics, culture, labour, industry, production, and ideology. As such, the history of a single factory lies at the intersection of different disciplines, sub-disciplines and methodological approaches: social history, economic history, business history, urban history, Marxist social theory, sociological inquiry, discourse analysis and micro-level analysis. A complete study of factory history would have to look at a number of social phenomena related to its actual physical existence (such as its relation to urban space, to ecology etc.), as well as its economic, political and social functions. Thus, factory level analysis could put labour history in a dialogue with other historical fields of study resulting in a rich array of details on the experience of industrial work.

The study of the relations in production at the factory level allows the historian to depict the connections between the labour process and the changes in workers’ consciousness and their individual and collective political behaviour could be depicted. Also, factory level analysis makes the divisions within the labour force most visible. Documenting this heterogeneity could also be helpful in understanding different types and levels of militancy, shop loyalty, alienation, and competition among workers. Moreover, a systematic study of factory files could bring the hidden, and isolated instances of resistance to surface. Focusing our attention on the level of factory not only enriches the historical details of that process, it also allows the historian to depict the dense and non-deterministic web of interrelationships at the point of production. Studying a single factory requires that the management is also given special attention. The analysis of the shaping and reshaping of the form and content of the managerial practices in relation to workers’ resistance practices paves the way for a more dynamic depiction of the relations between management ideologies and practices and workers’ reactions to these. Similarly, analysing the changes in the ownership patterns could shed light on their effects on labour relations.

The FHWG invites scholars to explore the methodological possibilities of factory level analysis. Both individual paper proposals and session proposals are welcome.

Please send your proposal (200 words max. for single papers, 8000 words in total max. for sessions) to both coordinators until June 30th 2015.

Görkem Akgöz, Hacettepe University, gorkemakgoz@yahoo.com

Nicola Pizzolato, Middlesex University, N.Pizzolato@mdx.ac.uk

 

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/european-labour-history-conference-factory-history-cfp

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