[Discussion] CFP: Columbia Religion Graduate Student Conference

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

From:   Jodi Eichler <jre38@columbia.edu>

The Religion Graduate Students' Association of Columbia University

is now accepting papers for inclusion in their

Second Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference:
'Re-Stating Religion: A Conference Reconsidering the Rules'
Thursday-Friday, March 30-31, 2006
Columbia University, New York


Featured Speakers:

Talal Asad, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
author of Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity (2004)

Saba Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
author of Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005)

Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
author of Technologies of Islamic Piety: Cassette Sermons and the Ethics of
Listening (1999), and Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His
Interlocutors (2005)


Description:

This conference is designed to investigate the use of particular narratives
increasingly deployed across historical and geographical contexts to describe
religio-political situations, such as 'secularization,' 'tolerance,' and
'fundamentalism.' Also under consideration are the ways these tropes are
utilized to discuss particular specific national or international practices and
shape discussions of free exercise, democracy, and human rights.

Proposals will be accepted for consideration under (but not limited to) the
following panels:

-Genealogies of Fundamentalism (exploring how the notion of "fundamentalism" has
been constructed and utilized in various contexts)

-Genealogies of Secularism (a similar project and related theme investigating
how this notion has developed as a prescriptive or prohibited political
position)

-Religion and Government/Governance (questioning the ways particular practices
are described as 'religious' and officially or implicitly prescribed or
prohibited)

-'Tolerating' Difference (examining the history and efficacy of tolerance as a
model for negotiating conflicts)

-Religions of Human Rights (looking into the possible connections between
developing discourses of human rights and indices of religious ethics)

-Original Accounts (discussing narratives of origins various political parties
or constituencies hold to as foundational, and their associated prescriptions
for religious-governmental relations)


Proposals will also be considered for full panels dealing with related themes.

Please direct all submissions to Rosemary Hicks rrh2103@columbia.edu

DEADLINE: 15 November, 2005

Jodi Eichler
<jre38@columbia.edu>