Call for Papers: COMMUNITIES IN CONTEXT- CONTESTING HISTORIES AND CULTURES

Organizer: Centre for Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana – 500046, India

About the Conference

  • When: 27th – 29th March 2023
  • Free Registration
  • Call for papers

Traditional notions of community, as a collective of people residing in a common geographical area with mutual interests, values, or goals, have always been overwritten by non-territorial affiliations, especially after the proliferation of various modes of communication and easy access to a plenitude of social media platforms and networks. So much that the concept of community itself seems to be at a crossroads, even as it appears as often the only remaining recourse and resource in our crosshairs, even as we are solicited to share to show that we care. Even a cursory glance at titles of research work, submitted as well as ongoing, at least in the Humanities and Social Sciences in India, will reveal that almost everyone is, in one way or another, engaged with community, whether it be aural or written, literate or literary, or gender, caste, tribal, religious, or sexual, whether it be enumerated or ethnic, imagined or immanent. Yet there seems to be a paucity of critical reflection on the category of community itself as it most often appears only as a backdrop of debates and deliberations. Hence, the 2023 Raw.Con proposes to bring together researchers interested and invested in diverse contexts of communities, as well as of community itself in
context, to facilitate alternative historiographies, literatures, accounts of mobility/migration, and so on, by probing practices, methodologies, textualization, politicization and epistemological dissemination about communities in emergent capacities. We plan to foster discussions, not necessarily circumscribed to the Indian subcontinent, so that the comparative framework expands to investigate communities in different and all possible contexts of the world(s).

Abstracts of about 300 words that explore relationships between communities, histories, textualities, cultures, literatures, especially in their contemporaneity, within and beyond the ambit of the following sub-topics, may be sent to rawconuoh@gmail.com latest by 31st January 2023.

Sub-topics:

  • Communities and Archives
  • Redefining the Margin/Marginalization
  • Communities and Memory
  • Communities and the Self
  • Cultural Imaginations of Communities
  • Origin/Persistence of Communities
  • Communities, Languages and Regions
  • LGBTQIA+ Communities
  • Communities and Religion
  • Communities in the Global South
  • Indigenous Communities and Ethnic Identities
  • Communities and Medical Humanities
  • Communities and Myths: Retellings, Adaptations, and Translations
  • Textual Communities, Communities of Readers and Literary Communities
  • Interest-Based, Cyber and Recreational Communities
  • Subaltern and anti-Caste Communities

Raw.Con or Researchers at Work Conference is an annual offline event organized by the students of the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL) at the University of Hyderabad. The conference is open to students who have registered for Ph.D. or aspiring PhD scholars (a limited number of slots are available for BA & MA students), though advance free online registration may be required to help us manage the incidentals. As per practice, some of the eminent scholars will also be invited as resource persons for the conference. If your abstract is accepted after review, you will be required to email the full paper draft by 28th February 2023. Selected paper presenters will be provided bed and board, and often train fare as well, if the budget allows.

Organizing Team:
Neha Girish Kaushik
Lalfakawmi
Nikhileswar Reddy

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