InterPhil: CFP: Semiotics to the challenge of intercultural communication in the age of globalization
__ Call for Papers Theme: Semiotics to the challenge of intercultural communication in the age of globalization Type: 10th International Symposium on Semiotics and Literary Text Institution: Faculty of Letters and Languages, Mohamed Khider Biskra University Location: Biskra (Algeria) Date: 23.–25.11.2020 Deadline: 20.3.2020 __ Thinking of the other culture from one's own culture remains one of the oldest approaches adopted by the humanities and social sciences, which have fought for objectivity that ensures a certain clairvoyance of self and others, but which remains, in the eyes of the most rigorous, a pure subjective vision. In the same vein, and to escape this subjectivity, semiotics is a discipline that is based on the guiding assumption that there is a beyond culture that would play the role of mediator between disparate cultures. In other words, a common, or universal, level that would allow the exchange and integration of the diversity of their worldviews (Ludovic Chatenet). However, this ambition is increasingly being discussed by a globalization that challenges a compartmentalized vision of intercultural communication based on a rigid notion of borders where the other merges with the foreigner, and where travel is identified with exoticism. In fact, and beyond the universalist utopia implicit in the notion of globalization, the globalized involvement of the economy in culture itself leads to the destruction of the very idea of intercultural communication, which is no longer limited to a simple exchange of messages but above all to a mutation from the symbolic meaning to a product meaning. Indeed, economic globalization continues to affect the symbolic nature of culture to make it into goods produced in order to be consumed by an individual overwhelmed by an instant global circulation of messages, images, speech and practices; (mass tourism, advertising, fashion, relaxation, Zen...) (Gilles Lipovetsky). This has led to a clash between an objective power which, with reference to the globalization of the market, and the growth of transnational corporations, advocates the diffusion of standardized mass cultural goods, and a subjective, cultural resistance which, in order to defend itself, calls on notions of national, religious or ethnic identity (Alain Touraine). It is when this identity distress develops in a context devoid of common sense that intercultural communication is interrupted and gives way to a destructive war in which both sides, paradoxically and ironically, resort to culture in all its significant complexity. In fact, as interpreted by some "peripheral" cultures as a threat to their cultural integrity, they constantly claim their right to be different in order to ensure a presence under the roof of globalization. Unfortunately, this cry of alarm, pushed to its climax, tends to renounce exchanges and contacts, judged from the outset as destructive, hence the phenomenon of identity withdrawal which finds its expression in religious, political and ideological fundamentalisms... Admittedly, the many technological advances in the virtual domain facilitate the path towards a world without borders, where intercultural communication is supposed to result in the emergence of a networked world, but this revolution in space-time has unfortunately led to a destabilization of cultures, seen by Serge Latouche as an aggression that pushes these same cultures to barricade themselves behind everything that can ensure their identity survival. This deculturation has reinforced the emergence of identity borders, which will become increasingly violent. Therefore, a semiotic reading of the notion of intercultural communication in the age of the abolition of borders is required because of the complexity of intercultural phenomena generated by globalization which, because of its universalist hegemony, tends to reduce space-time to zero, to the point where the border between "far" and "near", "familiar" and "foreign", "here" and "elsewhere", The "exotic" and "indigenous" interfere and hybridize, by testing the theoretical model proposed by the socio-semiotics, which tried to cover all the diversity of possible modes of relationship between one self and another (Eric Landowski), in a world where cultural isolation is no longer an option, and where globalization has imposed a generalization of interactions; which is part of a Ricoeurian philosophy where "The Other is the shortest path between oneself and oneself" (Paul Ricoeur). In this respect, however, semiotics can be very useful not only in deconstructing the meaning of an identity surrounded by a globalization that sees only a product to be commercialized, but also in rebuilding the crumpled sense of conflict generated by a new Westernization of the world orchestrated by a West that believes it has a duty to save the world; which the West
InterPhil: CFP: Political Demonologies
__ Call for Papers Theme: Political Demonologies Subtitle: Race, Gender, and Coloniality in a Postsecular Age Type: International and Interdisciplinary Conference Institution: University College Dublin Location: Dublin (Ireland) Date: 15.–16.5.2020 Deadline: 1.3.2020 __ The last decade has seen growing public awareness of right-wing populism and authoritarianism across Europe and the Americas, from Orbán’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia to Trump’s America and Bolsonaro’s Brazil. These nationalist resurgences are not isolated, but often draw on networks and ideas that are distinctly transnational, whether that be the “Eurasianism” of Aleksandr Dugin, or the critical role of conservative charismatic and evangelical Christians in the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro. Such movements rely upon what have been called “political demonologies” — frameworks of demonization and dehumanization that police borders around “self” and “other,” conjuring folk devils that embody anxieties of societal change and galvanizing adaptive regimes of exclusion that are more or less secularized in places and fully theological and non-secular in others. Religious dimensions of these frameworks are often underexamined despite reactionary discourses often articulating themselves in religious terms or claiming religious justifications, perhaps clearest in invocations of a “Judeo-Christian” civilization besieged from without by an Islamic Other and undermined from within by the presence and accommodation of gender and sexual variance and religious and ethnic difference. Rather than signalling something new, however, the exclusionary systems brought to bear in these invocations depend upon pre-existing systems of epistemic and material violence: colonialism and neocolonialism, slavery and its afterlives, and the structures of racial-sexual ordering these inscribed and maintain, as well as a theopolitical substrate that has long worked to stratify humanity within economies of salvation and damnation, being and non-being. This conference aims to critically examine how constructions of religion, race, coloniality, gender, secularity, and sexuality operate within the discursive and affective frameworks of contemporary systems of exclusion and erasure. Surges in reactionary violence and the expansion of state regimes of surveillance and security demonstrate that the political demonologies circulating today are not only comorbid but rely on deep-rooted systems and structures, including the global circulations of racial capitalism and the matrix of coloniality. These structures, their genealogies and legacies, are ones that have come under critical and creative engagement in critical theory and cultural studies, notably in the areas of queer dissidence, afro-pessimism, and decolonial critique. However, many critical insights from these fields have not yet been brought into sustained conversation with scholarship in sociology, religious studies, or politics and international relations. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary body of scholars, the conference will bring these fields into fruitful and timely conversation. In doing so, it will not only chart current reactionary politics but critically excavate the structures they draw upon, exacerbate, and rearticulate — antiblackness, misogyny, queer- and transphobia, settler colonialism, and global coloniality — and how these distinct systems of marginalization are mobilized in ways that both reinforce and deconstruct one another. Please submit a paper title, abstract of 250–300 words, a short biography, and contact details to jonathon.odonn...@ucd.ie and catherine.ca...@ucd.ie. We also welcome applications for full panels of 3-4 papers. Please put the phrase ‘Political Demonologies Abstract’ in the subject header. The deadline for paper and panel proposals is March 1, 2020. We will make decisions on paper and panel submissions on a rolling basis to help facilitate participant’s planning for conference attendance. Possible topics of discussion include, but are not limited to: - The racialization of religious identities. - The theological genealogy of contemporary secularised patterns of prejudice. - Intersections of vectors of prejudice (for example, queer- and transphobia, antiblackness, anti-indigeneity, antisemitism, Islamophobia). - The global material and ideological cross-pollination of reactionary groups. - Christianity's relationship to "the West" and its ties to secularised discourses of othering. - Christian demonology (past and present) and its relation to projects of epistemic and material violence. - Sovereignty and unsovereignty. - The conscription of non-European subjects into the project of European modernity. - The intersections of queer- and transphobia with surveillance and security regimes. - The enduring impact of colonialism on categories of
