Tag: Literature

CFP The Problem of Social Justice: Global Perspectives and Personal Narratives

“Publication

Call for submissions to Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies for a special issue on The Problem of Social Justice: Global Perspectives and Personal Narratives. Deadline: 15 March 2025.

This special issue of LLIDS seeks to initiate a global dialogue on Social Justice (SJ). While considerations of economy undergird SJ theory, its discourse reaches beyond economics to address inequalities of access, privilege, and rights. As an academic discipline, SJ theory embraces a range of critical theories and methods: colonialist criticism, critical race theory, gender criticism, and queer theory among other methods fall under its purview. For SJ theory offers to critique the institutions—social, political, economic—that sustain inequalities of access, privilege, opportunity, and rights generally. As a social praxis, SJ theory aims to deinstitutionalize systematic inequality by means of progressive public policy. Indeed, treating equal access and opportunity as matters of social “justice” necessarily entails law and policy. SJ theory seeks to protect and expand rights of individuals and communities. In concert with posthumanism and ecocriticism, SJ theory extends this same protection to the planet and to our many “companion species” whose survival is threatened by climate change and environmental degradation.

Such is the starting point for a special issue on Social Justice, which invites submissions that reflect on, analyze, expand on, and complicate SJ theory and its implications. As an international interdisciplinary journal, LLIDS seeks to involve authors and audiences globally in exploring this timely issue. A series of questions and propositions follow apropos to this topic.

  • How does SJ theory understand itself as an ideology or ideological behavior?
  • How is SJ theory taught? What is its curriculum? What are its paths of resistance?
  • In the classroom, in scholarship, and in public/political discourse, what does SJ theory enable or make visible? What does it leave unseen or unspoken? What are its “blind spots”?
  • How can SJ theory address the political-economic crisis of the 1% against the 99%?
  • Can Social Justice have the same meaning and application/implication for all communities, charting both the Global North and the Global South?
  • As per the U.N. declaration, Social Justice seeks a “fair and compassionate distribution” of wealth. This remains a noble aim and aspiration. And given the deep entrenchment of global capitalism, is it viable?
  • How can SJ advocates claim to speak “on behalf” of a community unless/until its members have spoken and been heard? Is advocacy earned through listening? (Is SJ theory a mode of “listening rhetoric”? Can/should it become one?)
  • What can SJ advocates learn from the social methods of Engaged Theory, Grounded Theory, and the Bourdieusian Theory of Practice?

CFP Information identities

CALL FOR PAPERS
SIGCIS Workshop 2012
Information Identities: Historical Perspectives on Technological and Social Change
Sunday October 7, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark

DEADLINE for submissions: 15 June 2012

The Society for the History of Technology’s Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS) welcomes submissions for a one-day scholarly workshop to be held on Sunday, October 7, 2012 in Copenhagen, Denmark.  As in previous years, SIGCIS’s annual workshop will be held at the end of the SHOT annual meeting on the day that SHOT has reserved for SIG events.

SIGCIS invites proposals that examine the relationships between computer and information technologies and changes to individual and/or group identities, such as those shared by a nation, company personnel, or members of a virtual community. Such papers might consider:
* Specific ‘information identities,’ a term that we invite scholars to interpret broadly and creatively than has been articulated in the recent or distant past
* Relationships between information technologies and political change
* The rhetoric and discourses of globalization that have been linked to information and computer technologies
* National identity and its relation to information technology
* National and transnational strategies for joining or creating an information society, a network society, an information economy, or related concepts
* Transnational and international organizations, such as IFIP, UNESCO, the European Union, or standard-setting committees.
* Ways in which particular information technologies acquired new meanings and fulfilled new roles through interaction with local practices and identities
* The emergence of new kinds of community and identity around information technologies.

SIGCIS encourages submissions along these and similar lines of inquiry, but it also maintains a proud tradition of welcoming all types of contributions related to the history of computing and information, whether or not there is an explicit connection with the annual theme.  Our membership is international and interdisciplinary, and our members examine the history of information technologies and their place within society.

Proposals for entire sessions and individual presenters are both welcome. We hope to run special sessions featuring dissertations in progress and other works in progress. The workshop is a great opportunity to get helpful feedback on your projects in a relaxed and supportive environment. All proposals will be subject to a peer review process based on abstracts.

All submissions should be made online via the SIGCIS website.  Limited travel assistance for graduate students and other scholars without institutional support is available.  Questions about the 2012 SIGCIS workshop should be addressed to Andrew Russell (College of Arts & Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology), who is serving as chair of the workshop program committee. Email arussell@stevens.edu.

Literature Seminar

“The “Our Shared Europe” literature seminar is the British Council’s first event specifically aimed at exploring Muslim European interaction through contemporary literature, as part of the wider project of the same name. Adopting the well-established concept and format of the “Walberberg Seminar on Contemporary Literature from the UK”, colleagues from the British Council Berlin office have organised this exciting three-days seminar entitled “Faultlines, Fictions and Futures”. Chaired by writer Ahdaf Soueif and gathering writers Inaam Kachachi, Jamal Mahjoub and Robin Yassin-Kassab, the seminar will explore the writers’ work, their people, their times and their hometowns, and give the opportunity to a wide range of participants coming from the UK, Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovenia, Portugal, Turkey, France, Greece and Belgium, to interact and share ideas.”

For details and interviews with these authors, held Nov 12-14, 2010 in Berlin, see the original blog.