Korea in the Context of US-China Competition: Negotiating the Growing Tensions between Economics and Geopolitics

The Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex together with the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna is inviting scholars whose research focuses on the intersections of contemporary geopolitics and economic statecraft on the Korean peninsula in the context of growing tensions in the region to submit a proposal for an upcoming international workshop. Senior and early career scholars as well as doctoral candidates are encouraged to apply.
The workshop is scheduled to take place at the University of Sussex, UK, on the 6th November 2024.

• Proposal submission deadline (maximum 300-word abstract): 28th February 2024.
• Acceptance notice: 6th March 2024.
• International Workshop at the University of Sussex: 6th November 2024.
• Submit papers to k.gray@sussex.ac.uk

Two nights accommodation will be provided along with up to GBP 120 for participants within the UK and GBP £330 (inclusive of transfers) for participants from outside of the UK.
Online participation in the workshop will also be accommodated.
The goal is that the papers presented at the conference will be included in a special issue/edited volume.

Aims of the Workshop
This proposed workshop seeks to provide an interdisciplinary in-depth examination of the emergent tensions between the two Korea’s security and economic imperatives arising from the deepening competition between the US and China. On the one hand, this involves examining the various forms of economic statecraft that the Korean states are deploying to deal with the challenges posed by the rise of the so-called “new Cold War.”

Kevin Gray (University of Sussex)
Antonio Fiori (University of Bologna)

Workshop Youth in Chinese History: Education and Representations of Young People in Chinese Sources between Tradition and Modernity

In China, childhood and education have historically been intertwined with ritual practices and social relations, with their ultimate scope being the construction of an ideal society and the formation of a virtuous elite. While canonical texts and conduct books have constantly played a crucial role in shaping children’s original character, the development of educational theories and practices throughout Chinese history has also been deeply influenced by endogenous and exogenous doctrines such as Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity and Western thought. This workshop proposes to generate discussions around the evolution of educational practices and representations of children across the centuries and literary genres, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. It seeks to highlight the diachronic correlation between family units and broader society, and how the moral and intellectual cultivation of children aimed at creating pillars upon which the ideal of stability rested.

Workshop fields of interest
The workshop welcomes contributions from all periods of Chinese history. A list of papers’ potential topics includes, but is not limited, to the following:
• Theories and practices of Confucian (and Neo-Confucian) education
• Theories and practices of Daoist education
• Theories and practices of Buddhist education
• Introduction/re-elaboration of the Western thought in the Chinese pedagogical debate
• Texts for the moral/intellectual development of children (translations, prescribed texts, magazines, etc.)
• Young Women’s education

Timeline and instructions
All interested candidates are requested to send a title and a 250 characters abstract via this Google Form. Please submit your individual paper abstract at the latest 5 May 2023. Acceptance notice will be given at the latest 31 May.

Funding
This workshop is sponsored by the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants. Successful applicants will receive upon request a £ 300 flat-rate reimbursement for travel expenses. Accommodation will be provided to all participants (further details to be provided at a later stage).

A selection of participants’ contributions will result in an edited volume in English language.

Changing dynamics of gender, family, and relationships in South Korea (1st Aug 2023 virtual writing workshop for graduate/early-career researchers)

We warmly invite graduate and early-career scholars from around the world who are qualitatively researching gender, family, and relationships in South Korea to a one-day virtual workshop on 1st August 2023. The goal of the workshop is to provide an opportunity for participants to share their research-in-progress and to give and receive constructive feedback on each others’ works (circulated in advance) as well as to network with like-minded people in similar stages of their academic career working on closely related topics.

While we are open to applications working on any topic relating to gender, family, and relationships in South Korea informed by a feminist perspective and using qualitative data and methodologies, we particularly welcome those focusing on the following areas/themes:
-Marriage, childbearing, and parenting
-Children’s perspectives and experiences
-Romance, friendship, and intimate relationships
-Alternative arrangements of care beyond the nuclear family and heterosexuality

Please send in your abstract of up to 500 words, including a preliminary title, topic, research question, methodology and the main argument by 15th March 2023. Participants whose abstracts are selected will need to send their writing by 14th July 2023 for circulation. You will have the opportunity to submit your work either as an extended abstract (around 3000 words including a motivation of the study, description of the analytic approach, and preliminary results) or a full paper (up to 9000 words including abstract, references, tables, footnotes, etc.), depending on the current stage of your research.

At the workshop, participants will give a 5-10 minute recap of their work. As our workshop aims to provide a friendly and constructive environment in which to develop ideas and work, all participants are expected to read and provide constructive and thoughtful feedback on the submission of a few other participants. Participants are also welcome to give comments on the other works based on presentations.

Key deadlines and details
Deadline for abstracts: 15th March 2023 Wednesday
Deadline for full papers / extended abstracts: 14th July 2023 Friday
Workshop date: 1st August 2023 Tuesday (time TBC)
Registration link: https://forms.gle/1V8JkqqTQDj4SaQEA

Cholera in the Indian Ocean World since the Nineteenth Century Workshop

Cholera—first described in the Ganges delta in 1817—spread globally in seven pandemics during the past two centuries. Most recently, some 30 countries worldwide reported cholera outbreaks in 2022, and a Lancet report from October 2022 revealed an alarming shortage of cholera vaccines that resulted in a shift from a two to a less lasting one-dose vaccination strategy. In fact, the 7th pandemic of cholera—which first was identified in the medical station of El Tor among pilgrims returning from Mecca in the early 20th century—is ongoing. A discussion of the scarcity in vaccines, however, was largely limited to relevant health channels, and only some outbreak hotspots (such as Haiti in 2010) made it into the international media and gained scholarly attention beyond the medical and aid fields.

Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Left untreated, it might kill a person within hours. Despite the availability of a prophylactic Oral Cholera Vaccine (OCV) since 1985, cholera still is a life-threatening disease for the disadvantaged and the poor, rarely noticed in affluent parts of the world. The main factors that are congenial to the spread of cholera still include stressed water supplies, unsanitary housing, and the effects of environmental disasters. These include, in particular, earthquakes, weather extremes, and certain hydrological events that are increasingly associated with climate change, such as floods. Other potentially causal factors are related to armed conflict, underreporting of data on national and local levels, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and insufficiently resourced national health systems.

We take this alarming situation as an occasion to discuss the V. cholerae El Tor strain in both its historical dimensions and as a pressing public health issue along two main methodological pathways. Firstly, by tracing the historical events of cholera in the littorals and interconnected hinterlands of the Indian Ocean, known as the Indian Ocean World (IOW). The factors conducive to the spread of V. cholera mentioned above resulted in recent outbreaks and predispose countries of the IOW to future outbreaks. We, therefore, aim, secondly, to bring new insight from the archives on IOW’s cholera history in a fruitful dialogue with the lived experiences of current outbreaks in this region, including but not limited to the civil war-induced cholera in Yemen and localized outbreaks in Kenya.

Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences: Addressing Multiple Marginalities in South and Southeast Asia

A Symposium organized by The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and The Regional Center for Social Science  and Sustainable Development (RCSD)

As part of a new transnational Project supporting under-resourced scholars of Asia, this three-day symposium will bring together early-career scholars, students, artists and public intellectuals to reflect critically on issues of social, cultural, economic and political marginalization.

With generous support from Sweden, the symposium on Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences: Addressing Multiple Marginalities builds on a prior series of skill-building workshops organized by the Project’s implementing partners located in Cambodia, India, Pakistan and Thailand. This event will highlight current research and local perspectives from communities in South and Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on strengthening emerging scholars’ analytic and interpretive competencies. The symposium will focus especially on conflict and post-conflict areas, where marginalization has entailed multiple intersecting forms of exclusion, inequity and vulnerability.

Organized around a series of roundtable discussions, research presentations and workshops, the symposium will showcase new scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences on a wide array of topics and questions that both emerge from and affect the region. Issues addressed will include, but not be limited to, gender and transgender inequalities; local strategies to mitigate environmental risk; forced-displacement and scholars-at-risk; natural resource conservation and human rights; digital humanities and activism; and non-traditional security issues.

A priority for the symposium is to reframe academic debate in a manner that centres perspectives from the margins and enables participation from under-resourced scholars and institutions in South and Southeast Asia. The emerging scholars selected by the Project’s regional partners will be the driving force in these conversations—furthering their research and analytical skills, sharing local knowledge and strategies for coping with censorship and authoritarianism, exploring possibilities for partnership, and expanding their professional networks across borders and between the margins.

God and Vaiṣṇavism: An Online Workshop, 23-26 May 2022, 3pm CEST

GOD AND VAIṢṆAVISM
An Online Workshop
23-26 May 2022, 3.00-5.30pm CEST
www.logicandreligion.com/vaishnava-concept-of-god

The purpose of the online workshop God and Vaiṣṇavism is to locate the Vaiṣṇava concept of God within a global philosophical framework. Each speaker in the workshop will explore a concept of God in one of the main Vaiṣṇava traditions or texts. The main question to be addressed is: What is the Vaiṣṇava concept of God? Or more specifically: What attributes does God possess according to particular textual sources and traditions in Vaiṣṇavism? There will also be more general talks on philosophy and the concept of God.

The workshop will be held on Zoom. There will be no fee for participation. Registration however will be required.

The workshop is part of “A Philosophical Approach to the Vaiṣṇava Concept of God,” a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation through the Global Philosophy of Religion Project, hosted by the University of Birmingham. The workshop is supported by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and the Institute for Vaishnava Studies.

List of Talks:
• Varieties of Theism, Benedikt Göcke (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany)
• Thinking about God, Graham Oppy (Monash University, Australia)
• Philosophical Issues with the Concept of God, Rebecca Chan (San José State University, USA)
• The Concept of God in the Bhavagad Gītā: A Panentheistic Account, Ricardo Silvestre (Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil) and Alan Herbert (Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, UK)
• Form and Beauty: God in the Bhagavata Purāṇa, Edwin Francis Bryant (Rutgers University, USA)
• Reflections on Pāñcarātra Conceptions of Deity, Gavin Flood (University of Oxford, UK)
• Expounding God’s Singularity in the Mahābhārata Epic, Angelika Malinar (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
• The Āḻvār concept of God: A Look at Toṇṭaraṭippoṭi Āḻvār’s and Maturakavi Āḻvār’s Objects of Worship, Suganya Anandakichenin (University of Hamburg, Germany)
• The Concept of God in Madhva’s Tatva-vada, Shrinivasa Varakhedi (Central Sanskrit University, India) and Srinivasa Kumar Acharya (Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India)
• Non-theism and Theism in the Nimbārka Sampradāya, Vijay Ramnarace (Georgetown University, USA)
• God in Puṣṭimārga, Frederick M. Smith (University of Iowa, USA)
• A Polyvalent Concept of God in the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava Tradition, Ala