In the last couple of decades, our embodied actions with others have become increasingly more fluid and disentangled from fixed/static contexts so much so that the materiality of social life has been filtered through texts produced in a variety of semiotic resources that bind people together while keeping them apart. By further blurring online/offline boundaries, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the long-lasting mediatization of social life leading to a reconceptualization of phenomena such as corporeality and matter and their relationship with both virtual and physical environments.

We welcome papers for our ECSAS panel on Muslim Counterpublics in the Indian Nation-state Public Sphere which will bring together emerging and advanced scholars of Muslim identity in South Asia in the context of the nation-state public sphere. We wish to explore the deep history and contemporary imaginings of Muslimness from the vantage point of songs, music and sound, literary studies, history, anthropology, dastangoi, oral historiography, and cinema. We aim to shed light on the multiperspectival and pan-national Muslim identification process as it also intersects with ideas of ideological homogenisation, modernity, and religious revivalism.

Sacred Journeys 12th Global Conference: Canberra, Australia

June 3-6, 2025. Venue: Australian Center for Christianity and Culture, Ngunnawal Country. Sponsored by the Indiana University Events and Tourism Institute (ETI), in partnership with the Sacred Journeys Project, and Réseau québécois pour les études pèlerines/ Quebec Network for Pilgrimage Studies, Laval University. Hosted by Rev’d Cameron West, Defence Anglicans, Australia.

Call for Papers

This conference aims to examine the question of figurative art at the beginning of the 21st century. Nowadays, figurative artistic models are challenged by increasingly sophisticated technologies that reshape our definition of “the real,” and more particularly, of reality. AI-generated images tend to normalize manipulated and distorted representations of the world we live in and can sometimes become indistinguishable from real images (“deepfakes”).