[Oberlist] HU* CfP: Framing struggles: Critical Approaches to Anthropology and Sociology, Budapest, 13-14.6.2008

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---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [balkans] CfP: Framing struggles:  Critical Approaches to
Anthropology and Sociology, Budapest, 13-14.6.2008
From:    "dora vetta" <vettadora la yahoo.com>
Date:    Tue, December 18, 2007 12:29
To:      balkans la yahoogroups.com
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Framing Struggles: Critical Approaches to Anthropology and Sociology
Postgraduate Conference

Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Central European University
Budapest, Hungary
13-14 June 2008

Until recently, most social research has focused on political and economic
struggles to the detriment of understanding cultural struggles. But an
undue focus on culture tends to ignore the contested nature of economic
and political interactions that provide the structural underpinnings to
cultural form and content. Anthropology can contribute equally to
understanding frames of struggles, and framing the relevant problematic
that needs to be exposed to public scrutiny, while sociology is able to
situate and analyse these struggles in a broader perspective through its
focus on macro-micro interactions.

The main purpose of this trans-disciplinary conference is   to investigate
how cultural, political, and economic struggles are framed, both by actors
and scholars. By framing struggles we mean the ways in which participants
themselves construe and delimit the meanings of their actions in an era of
accelerating global changes, as well as the manner in which scholars and
researchers select their own frames of reference to make sense of these
social upheavals. Regarding social phenomena in an integrated and
multifaceted persepective, the conference will reflect on and mediate
between broad, distant, and sometimes seemingly incompatible research
fields and approaches e.g., religious studies, studies of popular culture,
as well as social movement studies and the scholarship on migration and
informal economy.

Concentrating on a variety of issues concerning struggles, we seek to
encourage critical ethnographic/sociological research enriched by
theoretical grounding. The conference will tackle the issue of framing
struggles from four main perspectives in the following panels (also see
the more detailed descriptions further down):

Panel I: Borders, Economy, Conflict

Panel II: Approaching Religious Modernities: Constructions, Contestations,
Mobilizations

Panel III: Performing and Representing Culture, Ethnicity and Gender

Panel IV: Activism in (Post-)Socialist Contexts

The conference will take place 13-14 June 2008, at the Central European
University in Budapest, Hungary. Each applicant should submit an abstract
(max. 250 words) and introduction of their academic affiliation/research
topic/general research interests (max. 100 words). The deadline for
submissions of the abstracts is the 1 February 2008. Please send to:
framing.struggles la gmail.com. (contact person Mariya Ivancheva)

As each panel will have a discussant -  an invited scholars from the
relevant field, the approved - candidates will have to submit a
full-length paper by the 01 st of May 2008. This is a strict deadline.
Conference papers will be made available to all participants in advance.

The organizers will be able to provide partial reimbursement of travel
expenses and accommodation at a hostel in central Budapest to a number of
panel participants. A possibility exists that some participants be hosted
by students from the department – please indicate if you are interested in
such option.

Participants are also requested to state whether they would need a visa
for Hungary so that organizers can assist in the visa process.

Description of Panels
Panel I: Borders, Economy, Conflict

This panel seeks to scrutinize from a critical and trans-disciplinary
perspective the features of borders: physical and symbolic, fixed and
transgressed. How they separate different categories of actors, while
framing and enforcing their social roles and identities. However economic,
political, and cultural borders need not necessarily imply "bounded-ness".
What we aim to do is to pinpoint the fluidity, volatility, and mutability
of the concept of 'borders'. Furthermore, we seek to discuss how different
sorts of conflict reinforce, but also displace borders in various everyday
contexts and the manner in which the micro-macro actors involved negtate
and define them through their practices, interactions, and collisions.

The panel invites papers and visual materials that actively engage with
issues of borders, border-crossing economies, and conflict. Contributions
should include, but are not necessarily restricted to questions such as:

 * Border sovereignty: empire(s) and nation-state(s)
 * Border trouble: conflict and trade
 * Micro actors vs. macro actors: border economies in a regional and
global context
 * Trafficking in humans, arms, and drugs
 * Transnational (under)classes, informal economies, and host states
 * International refugees and no-man's land(s)
 * Economy without borders: transnational corporations, international
organizations, and global capital

Panel II: Approaching Religious Modernities: Constructions, Contestations,
Mobilizations

The persistence of religion within processes of social change all around
the globe has called into question the secularization paradigm. Social
scientists have been forced to reassess the theoretical and methodological
categories for understanding the shifting location of religion in various
societies and to be more open to the notion of multiple religious
modernities. We are thus in a fruitful reflexive moment which could open
new perspectives on religious phenomena entangled in social processes.
Our panel revolves around a number of issues which are still waiting for
adequate theoretical and methodological approaches:

 * The shifting location of religion within the public sphere in various
social contexts
 * Constructing and contesting boundaries between the 'religious' and the
'secular'
 * Agents active in the processes of construction/contestation (state,
church, civil or religious associations, academia, new religious
movements etc.)
 * The framing of contemporary religious mobilization, both within world
religions (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism etc.) and indigenous religions
 * The emergence of new religious movements (e.g., global religions such
as Pentecostalism)
 * The impact of these movements on nation-states and traditional
(historical) religions
 * Socio-cultural and political strategies employed by religious actors in
new contexts dominated by global media technologies and global horizons
of consumption

Panel III: Performing and Representing Culture, Ethnicity and Gender

Performance has become a catch-all term to refer to the practices of
agents as opposed to a prior focus on structure. In the new era of all
kinds of promotion initiatives on behalf of agency, the belief that agents
can resist or contest forces of domination has become widely celebrated.
But this capacity can be called into question and is itself problematic.
Indeed, such performances cannot be properly understood without taking
into consideration their often mediated or represented character.
Therefore, it is worth looking at the interplay between performances and
representation, especially when these performances become embedded in
global networks of production and circulation.

The main themes of this panel would include the following issues:

 * Markets and media as a facilitators of cultural exchanges
 * Struggles over cultural recognition through the staging of performances
(arts, sports, tourist practices, etc.)
 * Performing gender/race/ethnicity
 * The transformation of performances through processes of interaction and
mediation
 * Political institutions and the representation of cultural practices
 * Ethnographic writing as representation and the framing paradigm: the
responsibility of ethnographers

Panel IV: Activism in (Post-)Socialist Contexts

In societies where leftist themes of class, economic redistribution, and
social justice have formed or still form the regime's dominant discourse,
social movements trying to make demands related to such themes face
complex problems, for example of avoiding cooptation or negative
associations. This phenomenon can be seen in artern social democracies,
but it is equally present under social democratic regimes in the global
south that have taken a "Third Way". And these complexities are all the
more present among activist groups in societies with a history of
repressive "really exiting" socialism, such as in Eastern Europe.
Our panel calls for papers that explore the complexity of political
contention in such historically determined political contexts. These could
address topics such as:

   * Framing struggles of oppositional groups under repressive socialist
regimes
   * Activists strategies in a context dominated by social-democratic
rhetoric
   * (Dis)Continuities in performances and narratives of present and past
dissent
   * Strategies for alignment with trans-national activist campaigns
   * Relevance of class-based claim making: past and presence
   * Framing of collective and individual memory in processes of political
transition
   * Left- or right-wing protest: (un)civil society in post-socialist
contexts

-- 
Framing Struggles
Graduate Conference, 13-14.06.2008
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Central European University, Nador utca 9
Budapest H-1051, Hungary
framing.struggles la gmail.com

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