CFP: Feminism and Hospitality: Religious and Critical Perspectives in dialogue with a Secular Age

Scholars, students, artists and activists are invited to participate in the first conference of the Nordic Summer University study circle Hospitality and Solidarity: Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action (2020-2022) on the themes of Hospitality and Solidarity.

For our first winter symposium we want to engage in a discussion on Hospitality. Many religions and philosophical worldviews seem to uphold the concept of hospitality as a core value. We want to ask, are there differences in what is meant with hospitality in different traditions and how does solidarity with the ‘other’ take concrete form? Historically, hospitality has often been associated with the practices of family life where women are expected to serve and be at the “giving” end of care and comfort. What kind of demands does hospitality place on people as an emotional labour? What happens to the practices of hospitality when society becomes secularised? Recent studies (e.g.
Scott 2017) show that there is a much closer relationship between increased gender inequality and the rise of secularism, than earlier presumed. Especially religious women have fallen under the double burden of being seen as a-rational due to both their gender and their religious views. However, one may also ask: does a religious worldview have a unique contribution to offer in an increasingly secular society where the values of market economy and new public management are spreading across institutions and political structures? Are there forms of resistance to be found in the values of religions and faiths, which can offer tools to combat the increased marginalisation of people in our secular society? Recent studies in Finland, where churches offer refuge for immigrants seems to point in this direction (Ahonen 2019) Hence, the symposium strives to explore what can be discovered at the intersection of:

• feminist thinking,
• hospitality,
• solidarity with the other,
• religious and philosophical worldviews,
• practices in a secular age.

We invite papers that approach any combination of these themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives and in relation to various religious and philosophical traditions.

The conference is organised by the network Hospitality and Solidarity: Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action of the Nordic Summer University in collaboration with Åbo Akademi and the Donner Institute for Research in Religion and Culture.

More information: http://nordic.university/study-circles/3-hospitality-solidarity-feminist-philosophy-thought-history-action/

Publication

A special issue of the journal Approaching Religion will be published based on the symposium. AR is open access and has a wide readership among academia. It is indexed in some of the largest scientific databases in the world (DOAJ, EBSCO, ATLA, ERIH Plus, Web of Science), as well as Google Scholar. Thus, the journal articles are searchable at more than 90 % of the world’s universities. AR is primarily a channel for publishing presentations given at conferences that DI has been involved in, and scholars from a wide range of fields have published with us – not just scholars of religion as the title might suggest.

After the workshop, we cordially invite you to submit manuscripts for this special issue (Vol. 10/2), to be published in the autumn issue of 2020. The submissions will undergo peer review. You find editorial policies, guidelines for authors as well as information on the review and publication processes at the journal website. If you do not wish to submit a full-length research article, we also welcome shorter reflections from the workshops during the conference, review articles and book reviews.

Schedule:
Submission of articles for peer-review: 10.4 2020
Response from reviewers: 10.6 2020
Final submission: 10.8 2020
Publication: 10.10 2020
Participation

Interested in participation in this conference?

Anyone interested in presenting a paper at the symposium is invited to submit an abstract of 300 words to [email protected] no later than November 15th 2019. Presentations can be given in English or a Scandinavian language. If you want to participate without a presentation, please submit a short bio by the same date. Decisions regarding acceptance will be communicated no later than December 15th.

Format of the presentation

We strongly encourage you to craft a format that suits your presentation, such as a workshop, experiment, exercise, or interactive dialogue. Include at least 10 minutes for discussion, out of the 40 minutes allotted to each presentation. It will also be possible to have a few participants attend the sessions through an internet connection – particularly if you are wishing to save time and the environment by lessening travelling costs. If this is of interest, tell us which times and dates work for you and we will do our best to accommodate the program for this.

If you wish to contribute to the journal with an article and want to have it read by peers for comments during the week, please indicate this and we will arrange a workshop slot in the program for such peer support.