In celebration of Mother’s Day, The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) and MAMAPALOOZA are hosting our 3rd annual conference in NYC.

Time: May 20-22, 2010
Place: Nola Studios, New York City
Deadline: January 5, 2010

We welcome submissions from scholars, students, activists, artists, community agencies, service providers, journalists, mothers and others who work or research in this area. Cross-cultural, historical, and comparative work is encouraged. We encourage a variety of types of submissions including academic papers from all disciplines, workshops, creative submissions, performances, storytelling, visual arts, and other alternative formats.

Topics can include (but are not limited to):

Representing the Maternal in Film, Video, Art, Music, and Theater; Theorizing Motherhood and Representation; Race, Representation and Motherhood; Continue reading →

Minerva Journal of Women and War (Web)

The Minerva Journal of Women and War seeks to provide informative and timely reviews of books and films which focus on any aspect of women’s relationships with wars, conflicts and militaries, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In addition to reviews of single items (or reviews of up to three items), longer review articles are also welcome.

Books for Review

• Miranda Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (Routledge, 2009)
• Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)
• Joyce P. Kaufman and Kirsten P. Williams, Women, the State, and War: A Comparative Perspective on Citizenship and Nationalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) Continue reading →

SHESVIE (Société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences de la vie) in partnership with the University of Strasbourg (IRIST/DHVS) (Web)

Zeit: 24.-25.03.2010
Ort: Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Pathological Anatomy
Deadline:20.01.2010

In recent decades, the remarkable expansion of postcolonial studies has triggered new approaches in the field of colonial history. Instigated by Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978), these studies have challenged the idea that knowledge produced in colonial settings did not follow linear diffusion from imperial powers to local systems of norms, beliefs and discourses. Rather, the production of scientific knowledge could be described in terms of accommodation and relational processes transpiring with the circulation of scientific tools, concepts and scientists. Regarding Saïd’s book as a milestone, authors such as Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and David Arnold have contributed to the postcolonial project by respectively developing a colonial theory, balancing colonial biases with subaltern discourses, and relocating the conflictual economy of knowledge production and its circulation.

If the proponents of the postcolonial project have emphasized the role of colonial discourse, historians Continue reading →

Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University: ninth Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop

Time: May 12-14, 2010
Place: Bloomington
Deadline: 08.01.2010

The workshop is part of a series of annual interdisciplinary events that has been running since 2002, with 12-15 scholars presenting and discussing papers on a broad topic in a congenial setting.

Our topic for 2010 is „The Forms of Life“.  We’d like to consider the implications of the 18th-century debate about the nature of life and the turn to vitalist proposals of an animating force, broadening beyond the discourses of physiology and the natural sciences, where many of these ideas originate, to consider their connections elsewhere in the period.  Why does the idea of a life force emerge (or re-emerge) at this moment?  How are living forms distinguished from each other?

What sorts of decisions create the hierarchies of animate forms (and, for instance, what gets called „animal“)?  Which lives matter and which don’t?  How might we reconsider eighteenth-century answers to these questions in light of twenty-first-century rethinking of life and animality?  How is the line drawn distinguishing the living and the non-living, animate being and thing?  Continue reading →

Place: Copenhagen
Time: 16-18 August 2010
Deadline: 01.03.2010

This joint Ph.D. course and conference sets out to investigate the nexus between processes of subjectivation and various forms of colonial and postcolonial governance. Subjectivation refers to processes whereby new moral subjects are coming into being via practices of the self. Within dissimilar colonial and postcolonial projects, however, subjectivation took many different forms, happened on different levels, and can be examined and understood in multiple ways. In colonies and metropoles, for example, states, educational and scientific institutions, missionary societies, philanthropists and many other agents used various educational techniques to mould the bodies and minds of children, men and women so as to fit the roles considered appropriate to their particular gender, race, or class.

Questions of childrearing, childhood, and education in colonies, metropoles, and postcolonial societies figured centrally in these processes of subjectivation. Continue reading →

Organizers: Malgorzata Mazurek (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam) in conjunction with Sandrine Kott (Université de Genève), Paul Betts (University of Sussex), Andreas Eckert (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ZZF)

Time: 2-4 December 2010
Place: Berlin/Potsdam
Deadline: 15.02.2010

Keynote: Frederick Cooper (New York University)

By examining competing traditions and shifting meanings of human rights, this conference seeks a critical understanding of social rights in the making of the contemporary world. It explores historically the ways in which regimes of social rights converged with the concept of human rights as a result of wartime and postwar experiences. At the same time it seeks to understand when, how and why social rights were defined, pursued and applied as a concept on its own terms in diverse political orders and spaces (democracies, dictatorships, empires and nation-states).

The conference aims to explore the multiple uses of the concept of rights in the context of the internationalization of the social, and throughout such key moments of social rights institutionalization as, for example, the ILO Declaration of Philadelphia in 1944 or the adoption of the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966. Continue reading →