| Call for Papers: In the Presence of Faith |
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| Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:55 |
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An interdisciplinary symposium on Southern African studies of religion, 25-26 February 2010, Johannesburg CHANGE OF DATE
The symposium will take place at the University of Johannesburg. Introduction: The University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Culture and Languages in Africa (CCLA), and the University of the Witwatersrand’s Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) will be hosting a symposium in Johannesburg in October 2009. It aims to stimulate social science and humanities research into religion in Southern Africa. This symposium responds to contemporary social, political and academic trends that are reshaping forms of religion and the ways in which they are studied in Southern Africa. The past two decades have seen revisions of public and political religion, for example, a growth in Pentecostal Christianity and the politicization of the umma. New versions of faith, piety, religious identity and practice, have emerged both locally and in the global context. The South African academic study of religion has also undergone significant shifts. One of these is the emergence of the category of faith. Secularism as a thesis and a political ideology has been questioned in light of these developments, and this has opened new interdisciplinary spaces that are increasingly able to take religion and its effects seriously. The forms of religion in the contemporary world call for new kinds of empirical attention, theorising and a greater degree of interdisciplinarity. To date, there has been remarkably little interaction between anthropologists, philosophers, political scientists, historians, sociologists, and those in religious studies, cultural studies, law and literature departments about religion and its contemporary forms and consequences. Call for Papers We therefore call for papers on the following themes:
The CCLA and WISER have invited position papers on each theme. In addition, we are calling for papers on any of these themes to be presented at the symposium. Some of the papers will be selected for a special edition of Journal for the Study of Religion in 2010. Abstracts should be no longer than one page, and must be submitted to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by the 15th of November 2009. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be notified by the 30th of November. There is no conference fee. Applications for financial assistance will be considered. For further information, please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers.
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