The Spain-North Africa Project and the Mediterranean Seminar University of California Multi-Campus Research Project are pleased to announce a two-day, two-part event, to take place in May, 2014, at Loyola Marymount University-Los Angeles. This forum will provide opportunities for intellectual exchange among scholars of the Mediterranean who work in a variety of disciplines and time periods.
Friday, May 2, 2014: The Spain-North Africa Project (SNAP), with the generous support of a Loyola Marymount University Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts Conference Grant, will present a one-day conference, Power Relations and Religious Communities in the Western Mediterranean.
Saturday, May 3, 2014: The UC Mediterranean Studies MRP Spring Workshop, “Mediterranean Connectivities,” which will feature three pre-circulated papers, and a featured scholar (TBA).
CFP: Power Relations and Religious Communities in the Western Mediterranean (Friday, May 2, 2014)
The Spain-North Africa Project invites proposals for presentations at the organization’s second conference, Power Relations and Religious Communities in the Western Mediterranean. This event approaches the topic of religious pluralism by examining the intersection of power dynamics and confessional identity. Papers will investigate how such dynamics shaped relations among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa from the medieval period to the modern day.
Power among members of the Abrahamic faiths could be manifest in a variety of ways and on numerous registers. It could be instant, quotidian, and systemic; it could be ephemeral or institutionalized. Power differentials between religious communities and their strictures defined an individual’s possibilities as a person. These included aspects as elemental as who one could marry, how one inherited, what legal recourse one had access to, and what kind of violence one could be subjected to. Power created relations and also disturbed and undermined them. Power could attempt to enforce, but it also provoked reactions in the form of negotiation, resistance, and refusal. Power therefore looks different from different perspectives, and it is critical that we study it embodied in individual human beings as well as collectives. The role of power, then, is nuanced beyond the binaries of master and subject, believer and infidel; it surprises in how it affects the nature of relations within and across religious, ethnic, and political communities. Ultimately, our goal is to understand how power dynamics shaped, formed, and structured relations and identities in a process more complex than the cooperative versus conflictive, or tolerant versus intolerant – models so dominant in recent scholarship.
The SNAP conference will include a variety of formats for the presentation of work. A traditional Panel will provide the opportunity to present polished papers. A Workshop will enable presenters to pre-circulate papers and receive constructive feedback at the forum. Finally, the conference will include an innovative “Artifacts” session in which presenters each pre-circulate a single artifact – perhaps one that presents a puzzle – that will encourage discussion, exploration, and engagement. Examples of artifacts include a short portion of a text, musical piece, or film clip; or an image of art, architecture, or object. Presenters will open by presenting the artifacts and the audience will weigh in with questions and proposed “readings”/interpretations of the artifacts. All papers and artifacts must be tied to the theme of the conference. Through this variety of sessions, we encourage the dynamic exchange and exploration of ideas in ways that bring together scholars from the various disciplines, geographies, and time periods in which SNAP’s members work.
Please email proposals to Andrew Devereux (awdevereux@gmail.com /andrew.devereux@lmu.edu) no later than December 15, 2013. Proposals should be no more than 300 words and they should identify (in order of priority) one or more types of session in which you would like to present.
The SNAP Executive Board is exploring the possibility of a third SNAP publication coming out of this event.
CFP: Mediterranean Connectivities (Saturday, May 3, 2014)
A Call for Presenters for the Spring 2014 Workshop of the Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP will be sent out on 16 December, 2013. The theme of the workshop will be “Mediterranean Connectivities” We will welcome proposals for presentations on works-in-progress in any relevant discipline which examine historical dynamics is any subregion of the Mediterranean. We are especially interested in papers on the Eastern or Central Mediterranean, and papers which focus on regional and intra-regional connectivity. Graduate students may submit proposals on any topic relating to the Mediterranean.
Further information at mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org, but please stand by for the detailed Call for Presenters.