Rurality, Modernity and (De)Coloniality:

Unmaking the Legacies of Empire from Below

Call for Papers

Telciu Summer Conferences 5th edition

26-27 August 2016, Telciu-Bistrița, Bistrița-Năsăud County, Romania

Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2016.

The 5th Annual Telciu Summer Conference focuses on the intertwined topics

of rurality, modernity, and (de)coloniality. The concepts of modernity and

rurality remain theoretically and analytically contested. Nevertheless, our

premise is that that they are mutually constitutive on both the conceptual

and on the concrete socio-economic levels. Rather than opposite ends of a

continuum ranging from tradition (associated with rurality, the periphery,

and the past) to globalization (associated with modernity, the present, and

core power), both the rural and the modern are inherent to and heirs of

imperial, colonial and post imperial/postcolonial matrices of power and of

the particular configurations of national spaces derived from them. On a

conceptual level, therefore, our understandings of these concepts are shaped

by power/knowledge mechanisms that also structure fundamental

hierarchies of class, gender, race/ethnicity, and nation and create artificial

binaries. On the other hand, as variegated and concrete historical

phenomena, both rurality in modernity and rurality as the precursor of

modernity have been configured by global asymmetries of power and uneven

processes of socio-economic development. Against this background, we

encourage submissions that engage with these topics both theoretically and

in terms of specific historical experiences, across disciplines and on any

scale, from the local to the global. Seeking balance between specific case

studies and comparative/transnational approaches, we invite contributions

engaging with, but not limited to, the following thematic foci:

● Reconceptualizing Peasantries, Reassessing Modernities

● Rurality and Transnational Flows

● Capitalism, Socialism, and Cooperativism in the Rural World

● Modernities, Temporalities, and Ruralities

● Vernacular Religion and Peasant Culture

● Agriculture and Socio-Economic Modernization

● Folk-Populisms, Nationalisms, and Imperialisms

● The Countryside and Imperial/Post-Imperial Systems of Rule

● Projects of Internal Colonialism and Peasant Resistance

● Thinking from the Rural Periphery

● Reagrarianization and the "End of History"

To apply for the conference, please send a title and an abstract of your paper

(max 300 words) in English to telciuconferences@gmail.com until 30th of

April 2016. We will inform you about our decision by 15th of May 2016.

Accommodation for the speakers will be offered by the organizing

committee. Unfortunately we cannot cover the costs for transport.

Organizing Committee:

Valer Simion Cosma, University of Pécs, Pécs (Hungary)

Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (Germany)

Ion Matei Costinescu, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, (Romania)

Source: https://telciusummerconferences.wordpress.com/.