Collaborative Research Centre 948: Heroes—Heroizations—Heroisms / Sonderforschungsbereich 948: Helden—Heroisierungen—Heroismen; Michael Butter (Tübingen), Nicole Falkenhayner, Wolfgang Hochbruck, Barbara Korte (Freiburg) and Simon Wendt (Frankfurt)

Ort: Freiburg
Datum: 28.-30.09.2017
Bewerbungsschluss: 31.12.2016

In an age of globalization and transnationalism, heroes transcend their cultural spheres of origin and are re-rooted, adapted and translated in new local contexts across the world. The organizers understand (male and female) heroes as a phenomenon of exceptionality that has a positive significance in relation to the values, ideals and norms of the communities in which these figures are admired, followed, functionalized but also debated.

In this process of “glocalization,” popular culture, with its world-wide markets and media, is a driving force. Such different media as films, comics, graphic novels, computer games, or internet blogs construct and disseminate narratives about heroes and heroisms across the globe and are consumed in the Global North as well as the Global South. At the same time, there are centres of dissemination – including Hollywood, Bollywood, or Hongkong – that continue to dominate processes of production and dissemination of hero narratives. Read more and source … (Web)

Contributions to this themed issue may address, among others, the following questions:

• What existing digital technologies of non-violence are used or could be used by girls and young women (both online and offine)? In what ways do they (or might they) function for girls and young women in relation to emergency communication, local storytelling, education, or addressing contexts and circumstances that put girls at risk?
• What historical technologies might be re-examined as girl-centered technologies of non-violence?
• What types of software and support infrastructures exist to facilitate girls’ and young women’s development of technologies of non-violence (for example, the plug-and-play MIT App Inventor)? What roles do NGOs, universities, and crowdsourcing hold in the development and support of these softwares, and other forms of technologies of non-violence? Read more … (PDF).

RU-LAV Lavoro e lavoratori rurali (gruppo di lavoro SISLav), Andrea Caracausi (Univ. di Padova), Pietro Causarano (Univ. di Firenze), Michele Colucci (ISSM – CNR)

Time: September 2017
Venue: Milano, Italy
Proposals by 30 September 2016

The introduction of the pluriactivity concept marked an important turning point in rural studies. As a wider outlook of research on the countryside led the agricultural world to be more open, the care in the ways of integrating and structuring the different activities allowed to get a new point of view on the ways of socially organizing farming world and its material and symbolical spaces. Furthermore, the subject of pluriactivity has undoubtedly the merit of being in the crossroads of the most recent tracks related to renewal of rural history: it played indeed a central role in the enhanced prestige of the marginal farmers, who are no longer a powerless victims pushed in the background of the market, but actors able to disrupt the traditional picture of the still countryside, both from the geographical and the socioeconomic point of view (Bevilacqua 1990; Béaur 2015).

Especially during the 1980s, Italian and French researchers focused their attention on this phenomenon, both as a tool for investigating the most recent changes and as the subject of long-lasting analyses (ARF 1984; Garrier, Hubscher 1988; Annali 1989; De Benedictis 1990; Fanfani 1990; Sabbatucci Severini 1990; INEA 1992). In France, home of marginal farming par excellance, pluriactivity does not seem to … read more and source (Web).