In focus

• Call for papers|Geography
  Migration intermediaries
  01/09/2022

  Political and media rhetoric in Europe or North America reduces the category of migration intermediaries to that of “smugglers or traffickers, described as greedy and unscrupulous”. This vague and reductive figure helps to legitimize repressive and humanitarian policies towards migrants, who then mobilize different resources, networks and strategies in order to move around, often taking ever greater risks. To be satisfied with this reading, which makes the migration issue a crisis to be solved, inevitably obscures the diversity of actors involved in “migratory globalization”. The complexity of their role, interests and actions is evaded, even though it cuts across many institutions, including the States themselves. Indeed, the latter contribute, through the policies they deploy and the treaties they sign, sometimes to the detriment of international law, for purposes of control and repression, but also for the management and supervision of the workforce, to the emergence of a myriad of actors who are indispensable to both movement and settlement.

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• Call for papers|Asia
  Lives of the Dead in Asia
  15/07/2022

  The dead inhabit the world in their own particular ways. In Asia, where life presupposes that physical substance, spirits and the flow of vital energy are united and held together, the moment of death is one of disjunction, even of dispersion. Faced with this phenomenon, numerous techniques as well as objects of various kinds allow the living to cultivate a relationship with the dead. Both anthropologists and historians have described and emphasised how vividly the dead are present among the living. This topic has seen new developments since the beginning of the century. Faced with the profusion of objects and techniques that allow the dead to evolve in the world of the living, this issue of “Lives of the Dead in Asia” intends to reflect on the ways the different vehicles of existence of the dead are produced and used.

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• Call for papers|Epistemology and methodology
  The web: source and archive
  31/08/2022

  This international conference proposes to question the place of sources from the web in the scientific field and to situate web archiving practices in plural scientific approaches and questions. The project “Réseau de partenaires pour l'analyse et l'exploration de données numériques” (ResPaDon) brings libraries and research teams together to think, experiment and share practices related to web archives. The main goal is to bring the producers and the users of the web archive collection closer together, with the help and the mediation of academic libraries. In this perspective, the international symposium wishes to develop exchanges of knowledge between STI professionals and scientific teams by engaging the international academic community to participate in its work.

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• Call for papers|Ethnology, anthropology
  Forces and Order. Police, security and surveillance in North Africa
  01/09/2022

  The police forces of the Arab regimes have been the mainstay of the dictatorships in place before and after the 2011 uprisings.The main functions of the latter were and still are to break down democratic opposition. They hold a very specific place in the region’s collective imagination. This imaginary is affected by the power of State repression, which tends to overshadow the plurality of law enforcement mechanisms. As a result, security has mainly been apprehended from the angle of political repression and from outside the security institution, by focusing on the repression’s clientele groups rather than its actors, that is the police. This special issue aims to highlight sociological, anthropological and historical analyses of the various security systems: from the police institution to the more opaque surveillance mechanisms fostered by various institutionalised security professions (informers, militias, neighbourhood agents, etc.).

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• Call for papers|Geography
  Japan and its doubles. Study and representation of Japan’s territory and spatial planning through art and literature
  31/07/2022

  This special issue of Ebisu. Études japonaises focuses on the hypothetical heuristic value and the equally hypothetical performative role that artistic and literary representations, and even myths, play in the making of Japanese territory and the evolution of the reasoning and principles of their planning. Conversely, this issue also seeks to measure and analyse the impact of the dynamics of spatial planning on Japanese artistic and literary production, and even on possible inflections of the great myths that structure them.

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• Call for papers|Political studies
  What Latin America says to Europe: circulations, imaginaries, viewpoints (and fantasies)
  15/07/2022

  We often tend to think of Latin America as a periphery of the global space. The very idea of globalization is frequently equated with that of cultural “Americanization”. Understood as a “United States of America-nization”, it is generally considered only as a circulation of ideas, models, knowledge, techniques or cultural objects from the North or the West to the South. However, working on Latin America frequently leads us to encounter traces of it or to identify its influence in Europe. Politics, culture or knowledge: the objective of this conference is to study some of the diverse forms of Latin American presence in Europe and/or in the European gaze. The works discussed here will take these circulations as an object, analyzing their processes, forms and impact. But they can also take a more reflexive form, by questioning the status of European-based researchers interested in Latin America.

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• Call for papers|Urban studies
  Caring for Urban Nature
  26/09/2022

  This issue of the journal Espaces et Sociétés is focued on the contributions of city-dwellers to the care of greenery in the city, with particular emphasis on two key perspectives. In the first, we look solely at practices that emerge in the public space, whether spontaneous and developed outside organised structures, or encouraged by institutional entities established by the public authorities. In the second perspective, the aim is to look critically at the urban nature activities undertaken by individuals, i.e. outside the collective practices traditionally pursued in shared gardens or big urban projects by public authorities, cooperatives or civil society organisations. International comparisons or case studies from outside France are welcome.

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• Call for papers|Thought
  Man, space and development in Sub-Saharan Africa
  10/08/2022

  Tout au long de sa carrière d’enseignant-chercheur, le professeur Kengne Fodouop, s’est investi sur la question des rapports entre l’homme, l’espace et le développement, à l’échelle de l’Afrique subsaharienne. L’utilisation que l’homme y fait de l’espace dans l’optique d’améliorer ses conditions de vie ou d’assouvir sa volonté de puissance, ainsi que les impacts négatifs qui en résultent, ont été au cœur de ses préoccupations de recherche et ont inspiré ses multiples publications scientifiques. À tout bien considérer, les travaux de recherche à l’actif de cette figure emblématique de la science géographique africaine, se rapportent à quatre champs thématiques majeurs : s’accommoder de la ville, les réalités des campagnes, les dynamiques entrepreneuriales et l’équation géopolitique en Afrique subsaharienne. Les mélanges à lui dédiés se proposent de mener les réflexions scientifiques y afférentes.

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• Call for papers|Epistemology and methodology
  Fashion(s)
  16/05/2022

  The journal Perspective : actualité en histoire de l'art will explore, in its 2022 – 2 issue, the history and historiography of Fashion(s). Two complementary definitions of fashion emerge and these underlie the two approaches that this issue of Perspective seeks to develop: the first aims to determine formal changes in dress and variations in the laws of appearances, while the second conceives of a single, cyclical renewal of taste that inspires customs and thus goes far beyond items of clothing and their accessories.

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• Call for papers|Africa
  Sources. Materials and fieldwork in African Studies
  31/12/2022

  Sources grew out of the observation that academic journals tend to encourage theoretical and epistemological advances at the expense of the field materials under analysis. This journal’s mission is twofold: first, to resituate at the core of the articles the materials upon which researchers produce their reflections, while providing direct access to these materials; and second, to present analyses focusing on the contexts surrounding the production of these materials and their uses. This return to sources deriving from field work takes place in conjunction with topical thematics in African and Africana studies in the social sciences and humanities and promotes interdisciplinary dialogue. Sources is thus adopting a particularly unusual mission, one not currently existing in the academic field on Africa: to make available texts, images, sounds, interviews, field notes, and documents in the broadest sense, which become data that form the basis for researchers’ theoretical developments, and which thus constitute field research archives.

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• Call for papers|Representation
  The Roving Comic Book: Exchanges, Transfers, Circulation
  15/05/2022

  After their emergence in the nineteenth century, comic books quickly became an important vehicle for transnational exchanges. This issue of Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture proposes a multi-disciplinary study of the cross-cultural transfer and circulation of comics. The notion of “transfer” is understood here in a broad sense, as a process in which objects, ideas and practices are transferred across two or several cultures.

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• Conference, symposium|History
  Telling and exhibiting minorities in France and North America
  21/04/2022

  Nous proposons, dans ce colloque, de nous pencher sur les relations entre les minorités et les musées et sites patrimoniaux en Amérique du Nord et en France, en abandonnant le point de vue majoritaire, qui se décline en termes de domination et d’assignation, pour renverser le regard. En nous situant du point de vue de l’expérience minoritaire, nous pourrons envisager la minorité dans sa capacité à agir. Dans la relation des minorités aux musées, il est possible de distinguer deux mouvements qui, bien qu’autonomes, interagissent. Le premier, sans doute le plus documenté, par lequel les musées ont essayé de « décoloniser » les récits sur l’expérience minoritaire. Le second par lequel les groupes minorisés ont promu l’émergence de contre-récits indépendants, sous des formes diverses, leurs actions précédant souvent la réévaluation critique des politiques muséales.

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• Call for papers|Modern
  Inclusive Public Participation
  30/04/2022

  Museums have been pushing the limits of interactivity for several years. They draw their publics toward modalities of participation that grow ever richer, diversifying their intervention spaces, within or outside the walls, in person or virtually. This call for contributions falls within recent international debates over the current issues of participation and inclusion endorsed by ICOM. This special edition of Museologies thus seeks to unite the contributions, taking into account theoretical stances and innovative practices involved in updating and expanding this line of research.

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• Call for papers|History
  Architectural Design Competitions in Europe from the 15th to 21st centuries –an Overview
  30/04/2022

  While not entirely ignored, the question of architectural design competitions seems to have been largely underestimated by contemporary historiography, although these competitions have marked the history of western architecture since, basically, the famous competition of 1418 in view of the construction of the cupola of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence – this is only to mention the modern era.

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• Conference, symposium|Sociology
  Rethinking Institutions and Deinstitutionalisation from a Disability Perspective
  07/07/2022

  On July 7 and 8, 2022, the Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles  will host the ALTER 2022 Conference, on the theme of “Rethinking the Institution and Deinstitutionalisation from the Perspective of Disability”. This conference aims to unfold the notion of institution under all its aspects and in various contexts, from the perspective of different fields and from occasionally distinct positions depending on the country or the disability considered. It also aims to examine the history, the stakes, and the experiences of the various forms of deinstitutionalisation, to trace the possible contours of an inclusive society respectful of the choices of people with disabilities.

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• Call for papers|Sociology
  “Reinvent yourself!”
  29/05/2022

  In the covid-19 pandemic, many transformations affected various societal areas. Becoming a “total social fact” (Marcel Mauss), the virus acted as a revealer of society’s (dys)functioning. The arts and culture were often in the forefront of the pandemic and of its disruptions. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, artists and cultural actors were then urged to “reinvent” themselves. State authorities, the media, and the public pushed them for “new ways” of doing, consuming, evaluating, or managing culture and the arts. What different claims for “reinvention” are addressed to the worlds of arts and culture, and how do they react to these demands? This two-day international conference aims to better understand the capacity and will of alignment or resistance to the various demands for transformation that the worlds of art and culture face from time to time.

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• Call for papers|History
  Dark Heritage, Somber Legacy
  02/05/2022

  Online journal Criminocorpus is issuing a call for papers for a special issue entitled Dark Heritage, Somber Legacy. Memories and Studies of the Justice System (Sombre patrimoine, patrimoine sombre. Mémoires et histoires de justice). The objective is to spark an international collective exploration, embracing all time periods, of the concept of “judicial heritage”, how it hinges on memory issues and where it fits in the writing and transmission of the history of the justice system.

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• Call for papers|History
  Class, Race and Place in the US South
  31/05/2022

  Recent events in the United States remind us to what extent the South is both a place of distinctive identities and a space sharing a common heritage. According to the political scientist Michael Goldfield, “The South is a distinctive, atypical part of the United States; it is also, however, America writ large”" (Goldfield, 2020). These specificities are inscribed in social, cultural, political and, according to the author, above all economic structures, in a configuration that makes any definition of the “South” problematic. For this conference, we propose three different angles of approach: the interaction between race, class and capital; the spatial dimension of these interactions; the causes for and the perpetuation of racism in the United States.

   

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• Call for papers|History
  Analysis of relics, hagiographic legends and Carolingian memories
  15/09/2022

  Since the 14th century, the Basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse has been proud to possess the entire body of James the Greater. After a first preparatory seminar on 11 March 2019 in Toulouse (Vraies et fausses reliques: un vrai faux problème), a workshop was held on 10 December 2021 (Les reliques toulousaines de Jacques le Majeur), focusing on the material aspects (examination of bones, reliquaries, and authentic items). In a final stage, the results of these analyses should be put into perspective during a meeting which would lead to the writing of a monograph bringing together all the studies carried out on the relics of Saint James in Toulouse.

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• Call for papers|Sociology
  Queering Blackness
  30/04/2022

  The election of Barack Obama to the American presidency has ushered in a so-called “post-racial” era. This phenomenon is spreading to all popular media, from television and its hit series to comics and video games. It is from this observation of representations of black identities, which question any form of binarity and operate intersectional deployments within African American popular cultures, that the main question at the origin of this project emerges. Based on papers about these representations in the popular arts, accessible to a large majority as well as within the Black American community, this one-day conference aims to examine the evolution of these representations over the past ten years and the obvious efforts to move away from the binary normative representations still attributed to U.S. racial minorities—more so than to the so-called dominant white majority.

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