[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: The 10th Annual International Conference on Conceptual History (Istanbul, August 30-September 2, 2007)

[Onur Inal]

Conference Announcement

Transnational Concepts, Transfers and the Challenge of the Peripheries

The 10th Annual International Conference on Conceptual History
Istanbul, Turkey, August 30-September 2, 2007

Istanbul Technical University and the History of Political and Social
Concepts Group (HPSCG) warmly welcome you to the 10th Annual
International Conference on Conceptual History. Since 1998 the HPSCG has
been involved in organising annual conferences on conceptual history. In
later years, the focus has been on the theoretical, methodological and
empirical questions dealing with transfers, translations and
re-interpretations of concepts in various parts of the world. This
year's conference will continue on this path. Processes of political and
social transformation have always been a core interest of conceptual
history, particularly those processes variably called modernization,
westernization or civilization related to the establishment of social
and political modernity. Conceptual historians have studied the key
concepts that contributed to bring about social and political modernity.

At the 10th conference we intend to examine and question the master
narratives and the Western modernization canon that resulted from these
processes. The creation of a canon of ideas, values and concepts
included a division between centre and periphery. Centres became defined
by possessing what was to be seen as the uniform way to modernity.
Peripheries were seen as late-comers and receivers.

Master narratives and their conceptual frameworks were transferred from
parts of Europe to other parts of Europe and to other regions in the
world. They provided tools for local processes of transformations. The
master narratives had an in-build demand for imitation and copying. But
what actually happened in various places were translations,
elaborations, adaptations and mergers into other cultural frameworks.
Although transfers often took place under conditions of power and
asymmetry, `peripheries' were never passive receivers. At the conference
we will focus on the canonical and transnational key concepts that
played a crucial role in the processes of democratization,
nationalization, temporalization and secularization contributing to the
establishment of social and political modernity