To mark the fifth anniversary of ReOrient, the Centre for Ethnic and Racism Studies, University of Leeds will be holding the first international conference on Critical Muslim Studies. The current proliferation of the ‘critical’ as a prefix in an ever-increasing range of fields and sites addressing and engaging Islam, Muslims and the Islamicate raises the questions: why and why now? A disparity of efforts is discernible among scholars grappling in different fields against the impasses of positivism, presentism and the entrenchment of disciplines in epistemic cages forged as part of Europe’s worldmaking. This conference is organised to bring together research and scholarship that recognises the imperative for epistemic decolonising and decolonisation and recognises that such an imperative can only be realised through collaborative engagements. To this end, this international and interdisciplinary conference aims to also bring into the conversation scholars and researchers who may not necessarily identify themselves as doing Critical Muslim Studies but share some of the same concerns and interests.
The conference will be concerned with the Western paradigm of knowledge production about what are deemed to be non-Western societies, histories and cultures. This Western paradigm which held sway more or less unchallenged for the last 200 years, has in recent decades been subject to multiplying critiques.
ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies was launched five years ago as a platform for conversations that explore and develop these critiques. The ability to name Eurocentrism as an epistemological and methodological problem has long presented a challenge and opportunity to advance approaches that engage in a serious and sustained manner with Orientalism and White Supremacism and its legacies in shaping our understanding of the world beyond the pale of the West.
Critical Muslim Studies has emerged as a project based on the articulation of the Islamicate and what could be broadly described as the decolonial. The key touchstones of this approach, emphasise scholarship that is non-positivist, theoretically informed and conceptually rigorous. It includes being attentive to racial formations and processes of racialisation; engaging with comparative and transnational context and processes on a global scale, and mapping out non-linear histories, discontinuities, and genealogies.
We invite individual and panel proposals from any relevant disciplinary field. Contributions can be historical or contemporary, theoretical or substantive.
CALL FOR PAPERS
White Supremacy And Its Enemies
Anti-Colonial Struggles And Islamicate Mobilisations
Comparative Construction Of Majorities And Minorities
Genealogies Of The Global South
Race And Eurocentrism
Connecting Struggles
Global Regimes Of Securitisation And Insecurity
South-South Solidarities And Insurgencies
Islamophobia in Islamicate Contexts;
Gender Justice And Decolonial Intersectionalities
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Proposals of individual papers or panels should include the title, an abstract of around 300 words, and the name(s) and a short biographical note (of approximately 50 words) about the speaker(s).
All submissions should be sent to:
Sarah McLaughlin | S.McLaughlin1@leeds.ac.uk
Deadline for Submissions: 31st March 2020
Registration Fees: £100 (waged)
Registration Feeds: £50 (unwaged)
