Seminar on Transnational Narratives @ Kozhikode

The Department of English

Govt. Arts and Science College

Kozhikode

Invites you for a

Three-Day National Seminar

on

‘Traversing Boundaries: Readings on Transnational Narratives’

9 to 11 January 2018

Over the last few decades there has been a surge of interdisciplinary interest in the investigation of social transformations. In recent years, a significant body of interdisciplinary literature has recognized transnationalism as an important macro phenomenon emerging in relation to the de-territorialisation of cultural, social and economic practices, which are moving away from nationally rooted apparatuses. The term transnationalism has been used not only in social anthropology to account for new forms of social interaction resulting from intensified cross-border mobility (whether related to diaspora or triggered by economic factors) but also in political theory with regard to practices of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to highlight the fact that at least one of the actors involved is a non-state entity.

Transnationalism has thus conceptually emerged as a range of complex social phenomena which interface discursively with powerful narratives of cultural ‘inbetweeness’, territorial ‘unboundedness’, and post-national politics.

Transnational narratives aim at constructing literatures emerging through supplementing and challenging the existing models of literature based on fixed notions of space and time. The objective of transnational literature is to complicate the idea of place and location as fixed, making it cross cultural which in effect creates spatial and temporal understanding as fluid and ambiguous. Transnational narratives mainly focus on New Literatures. It has given a novel shape to literary and cultural studies since the last few decades.

The Department of English, Govt. Arts and Science College, Kozhikode proposes to conduct a Three-Day National Seminar on ‘Traversing Boundaries: Readings on Transnational Narratives’ from 9th to 11th January 2018.

Confy on Folklore Studies At KIIT, Bhuvaneswar

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

ON

INCORPORATING FOLKLORE STUDIES IN MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

26th -27th December 2017

AT

KIIT University, Bhuvaneswar

The word, ‘folk’ has wide range of understanding and connotations – ranging from ‘natural’ to ‘native’ to ‘traditional’ to ‘rural’ and in some cases ‘from the heart.’ The ‘outpourings from the heart’ of native or traditional people later takes the form of folklore. folklores are oral traditions, traditional knowledge and beliefs of cultures often having no written language and they are transmitted, generally, by word of mouth. Like the written literature they contain both prose and verse narratives in addition to myths, dramas, rituals etc. All the cultures have their own folklores. In contrast and traditionally, literature is understood to mean any written work.

Literature, in written form, helps in preserving the folklores and oral traditions. But for the literature in this form, the world would have lost almost all the folk and oral traditions. Written books, as recordings of folklores help in passing on the lofty thoughts and ideas to posterity with no or very little changes in contrast to oral traditions where they often get lost in transition. Literature also can highlight the relevance of the stories of the past to the generation of the present, something which the oral traditions cannot strongly do.The existing professional literature would have us believe that the primary managerial action is that of a reflective and systematic planner. Conversations with preservation practitioners and community members led him to identify 14 reasons. These include creativity, architecture, beauty, history, sacred, learning, sustainability, and economics, However ancestors, identity (individual, civil, state, national and universal), continuity, memory, and—perhaps most significantly—community can also be included . Significantly historic preservation needs to pay more attention to "cultural significance.

Heritage tourism, as a cultural tourism segment, is “the evocation of the past and inherently about visions or understanding of the present, and a key justification for the preservation of both material cultures and traditional practices, in what they can tell contemporary communities or tourists about themselves and others. It is something of a paradox of modernity that at the same time that relentlessly seeks modern people, also hankers after something older, more authentic, or traditional.”

Incorporating folklore literature in management practices in corporate world can definitely work wonders. It is argued that all businesses must have a plan and, if for but no other reason than by default, it is the manager's responsibility to see that one is developed. Therefore myths, stories, fables etc can be considered as exemplary in our daily life as professionals, leaders in corporate world.

Workshop on ESL Teacher Support @ MEPCO SCHLENK, Sivakasi

A Two Day Workshop

on

ESL Teacher Support and

Teaching Enhancement

Organised by

Department of English

 Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi (Autonomous)

in association with

Department of English

Anna University

Chennai

WHO CAN ATTEND

Faculty Members from Engineering, Arts & Science Colleges and Polytechnic Colleges can attend. Selection will be made on first come first serve basis.

REGISTRATION FEE : Rs.500/-

Demand Draft should be drawn in favour of “Mepco Schlenk Engineering College” payable at Sivakasi. Lunch, Snacks and Registration kit will be provided to all the participants.

Accommodation will be provided within the college campus on request at a nominal charge of Rs. 100/- per day.

Confy & Workshop on Translation Studies

Workshop on Theory and Literature @ BAIT, Erode

Confy @ SSRNM College, Virudhunagar

Seminar on 'Re-thinking Renaissance' @ West Bengal State University

Confy @ Jadavpur University, Kolkata

International Conference on Canadian Studies

9, 10, 11 January 2018

CENTRE FOR CANADIAN STUDIES

JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

CALL FOR PAPERS

150 Years of “Solitude”: 

Narratives on Canada’s Conflicts and Reconciliations

The Canadian Confederation of 1867 had been instrumental in the consolidation and emergence of Canada as a nation. Today, in the year 2017, as Canada celebrates its 150 years as a nation, with pride and splendour, by organizing various cultural and academic events and distributing free entry passes to its national parks, museums, art galleries, this conference seeks to explore and interrogate the different forms of resistance- resilience, conflicts- reconciliations that have informed the myriad contours of Canada’s nation building process over the last century and half.

It also strives to look into the power politics involved in constructing the official discourse of history in Canada as a singular monolithic entity that takes cognition of only the history of the ‘founding’ nations, thereby undermining the necessity to understand the Canadian nation in terms of the multiple histories that informs the lives of its racially diverse population.

The concept of “two solitudes” that had been largely used to define Canada’s socio-political reality since the nineteenth century, predicated solely upon the equations shared by the members of its ‘founding nations’, the English and the French, is essentially exclusivist in nature, denying its indigenous and diasporic population the right to be a part of what Ben Jonson would call “the imagined community” of the nation. Even the name Canada, derived from the Spanish word acanada (“nothing here”), refutes the presence of the original inhabitants of the land prior to the establishment of the Euro-Canadian settler colony therein. While centuries of colonial battering and coercive forces of cultural assimilations have shaped the existence of Canada’s aboriginal communities, the diasporic communities were accorded a “visible minority” status and continue to face the onslaught of racial discrimination within the mainstream society. However, certain apologies offered by the Canadian government in the recent times have come as an acknowledgement of the hitherto denied disjunctions within its “multicultural mosaic”, marking the first step towards reconciliation, if not resolutions of age old conflicts. Do the present times promise the emergence of an idea of nationhood that would be more inclusive in its stance? It remains to be seen whether this attitude would finally induce Canada to abide by its promise of providing its citizens with equal rights and opportunities irrespective of their racial, ethnic and gender identities and help it to emerge as an all-inclusive multicultural nation.

The Conference invites papers that address the one hundred and fiftieth year of Canada’s independence with special reference to the ensuing conflicts and subsequent reconciliations. The abstracts may have direct bearing on one of the sub-themes mentioned below or may also address other related and relevant issues. However, interdisciplinary approaches would be preferred.

Welfare state histories

Immigration/ Migration / Diaspora

National myths

Landscapes

Story-telling

Nations and Nationhood

Memory/ Commemoration

Inclusivity/ Exclusivity

Federalism

Official Multiculturalism

Indigeneity and Social Policy

Abstracts (500 words) are to be sent to canadacentreju@gmail.com by 3rd December, 2017.

Spivak's Plenary @ SS College, Malappuram

Confy @ DRBCC Hindu College, Chennai

Workshop on Semantics @ Baroda, Gujarat

National Workshop

on

Radical General Semantics

(Based on The Book of Radical General Semantics)

15, 16, 17 December 2017

Balvant Parekh Centre For General Semantics and Other Human Sciences

Baroda, Gujarat

at

National Institute of Science and Technology

Berhampur, Orissa

The eleventh annual national workshop of Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences will be organized in collaboration with The National Institute of Science and Technology on the theme, “Radical General Semantics” during 15-17 December 2017 at The National Institute of Science and Technology, Berhampur, Odisha. The Workshop will use The Book of Radical General Semantics as the study material. The author of the book, Gad Horowitz and the editor, Shannon Bell will conduct the workshop.

The Workshop will be based on Parts I-V of The Book of Radical General Semantics. However, for the benefit of participants with little experience with General Semantics, we shall begin with a video lecture which reviews Alfred Korzybski’s Structural Differential, the path breaking invention that brings General Semantics into being: A three dimensional structure that differentiates and relates the ‘event level’ (‘what is going on’ or ‘wigo’), the ‘object level’—abstracted from the event—where living beings see, hear, feel, smell, taste, move, grow old and die, and the ‘label levels’—abstracted from the object—where human beings construct meaning in language. We demonstrate how to work with the structural differential, including a discussion of the central General Semantics notions of ‘consciousness of abstraction’ and nonidentity. Sanity requires non-identification of these levels. Label is not object, object is not event.

We then engage with Part III of The Book of Radical General Semantics – “The Devices of General Semantics”. In this session we focus on the first of these devices – the Index – which facilitates liberation from the domination of experience by generalizations, concepts, etc., bringing into view the uniqueness, the singularity of each and every person and happening.

Confy @ Bilaspur University, Chhattisgarh

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

on

“QUALITY ENHANCEMENT OF

HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA & CHANGING PARADIGM”

Organised by

Bilaspur University, Chhattisgarh

on

4, 5 January, 2018

Venue:

Bilasa Auditorium, Bilaspur University

Bilaspur (C.G.) 495001

Objectives

The Conference is being organised to accomplish the following:

The new education policy prospective for enhancing the quality of education.

Innovative Teaching Learning Process.

Equity and Access for Quality Education.

Education and Entrepreneurship.

ICT and Online Education.

Education Abroad.

Inclusive Education.

Spivak @ SS College, Malappuram, Kerala

'The Dawn Watch'

Book Review

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

Sudipta Datta

Understanding our world through the stories of Joseph Conrad

Us versus them; you are with us or against us; black or white — as communication across lines break down, is the inability to understand each other pushing us to the brink? Amid an existential crisis, comes this remarkable retelling of Joseph Conrad’s life and work and its resonance with the present dysfunctional world by Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff.

In 1975, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave a public lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novella, he said, “projected the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe, and therefore of civilisation...” Calling Conrad, a “bloody racist,” Achebe found the book “rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans.” Jasanoff mentions Achebe, as also Barack Obama’s retort when asked by a friend why he was reading “this racist tract.” It’s because, he said, “the book teaches me things... About White people... A particular way of looking at the world.”

Jasanoff says she values Conrad’s perspective for the same reason — “not just despite its blind spots but because of them” — and what it tells about civilisation and savagery, imperialism, genocide, insanity and about human nature itself. She explores how in 1889, a Polish sailor, Konrad Korzeniowski, made a trip to the Congo.

He was supposed to stay three years, but quit after just one trip up and down the river between Kinshasa and Kisangani. “He saw in Congo a European regime of appalling greed, violence and hypocrisy,” and in 1899 after settling in England and anglicising his name, he recollected his experience in a novella called Heart of Darkness.

Jasanoff, in the writer’s footsteps, arrived in Congo wanting to see “whatever I could of what Conrad had seen.” The Democratic Republic of Congo is in turmoil, the people caught in an ongoing civil war. As she read in her guidebook, “this is a huge area of dark corners, both geographically and mentally... where man has fought continuously against his own demons and the elements of nature at large,” still a heart of darkness.

Seminar @ University of North Bengal

National Confy @ Ethiraj College, Chennai

Ethiraj College for Women (Autonomous)

Chennai

A Three-Day National Conference

On

Contextualising Asian Literatures

21, 22, 23 March 2018

Organised by

PG Research Departments of English and Tamil

 The last date for submission of abstracts has been extended to 20 November 2017 

Scholarly Papers from Research Scholars and Faculty Members are invited on the following topics - 

Asian Literature as Cultural Texts

Literary Genres and Forms in Asian texts

Critical Literary and Aesthetic Traditions of Asia

Asian Literature and the Politics of Positioning

History and Asian Literature

Temporality and Spatiality in Asian texts

Gender and Asian Literature

Spirituality and Asian Literature

Representation of Asia in Western texts

Asian Literatures in Translation

Tamil Legacy in Asian Literature

Special focus: Tamil words/root words in other Asian Languages

For more information, click on their brochure HERE

Workshop on Tribal Life @ Markadhana, MP

Workshop on Tribal Life, World View and Alternatives

Markadhana, Madhya Pradesh

29, 30, 31 December 2017

About the Workshop

The current times are one of the most difficult eras in history. Our society and civilization face grave dangers, be it through wars, environmental degradation, increasing inequality and injustice or poverty and unemployment.

Many young people in the decades of 80’s and 90’s went away from careers and seminars to live and work in different tribal areas and started political and innovative work there. In the process, they have found some ideas of how to challenge the current order and look for alternatives, through the indigenous/tribal world-view and resistance.

Last year, along with the Shramik Adivasi Sangathan/Kisan Adivasi Sangathan, we held a workshop in a tribal village about the role of indigenous thought and resistance in the efforts for socialism, change and alternatives.

We are organizing a similar workshop this year where Alok Sagar (activist working in the area for last 30 years), Phagram (Tribal political activist and representative), Anurag Modi (Activist and thinker on tribal issues), will be present along with local indigenous activists.

The workshop is to be self-financed by us, therefore participants are expected to pay or collect contributions for their travel expenses to the place and contribute Rs. 700 more for food and stay.

We are not offering any certificate, but a genuine chance to hold a one of a kind dialogue between activists, local residents and students/researchers interested in fundamental change.

Workshop Dates: December 29-31, 2017

Place: Markadhana village, District Betul, MP

The accommodation/food etc will be in sync with the local life, and therefore participants should be prepared for a different experience.

Excerpts from "Development Poetics: A tiNai Aesthetic View"

Excerpts from a scholarly chapter on Development Poetics: A tiNai Aesthetic View

By Dr. Nirmal Selvamony, Professor, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Tiruvarur.

If you are in need of the entire chapter, kindly mail me or write to Dr. Nirmal Selvamony at nirmalselvamony@gmail.com. I strongly recommend that you read this chapter in its entirety, to imbibe the qualities that go into the making of a good research paper. This is obviously a scholarly paper of the highest calibre. And well, Dr. Nirmal Selvamony needs no introduction. He is well-known to the academic fraternity the world over, for having pioneered Ecocriticism as a subject of study in Colleges/Universities across India, way back in the 1980s.

Development Poetics: A tiNai Aesthetic View

If our “late capitalistic”, crisis-ridden and post-humanist contemporary societies seek development, they should get rid of those unnecessary acquisitions since the post-primal era which began around 10,000 BCE (Selvamony 2015c). We should shake off those deterrents acquired from the time of state formation—agricultural economy, domestication of plants and animals and all contagions that disrupted the kinship relation among human and non-human members of the community—in order to realize the underlying ultimate eco-moral vision. In short, development consists in letting the primalness of a society manifest itself.

Primalness of societies consists in the primordial relation among the social members. In early Indian tradition, such relation was known as “tiNai”. Etymologically, tiNai is union, not unlike the "fifth relation in music in which the two tones become one and yet remain different like spouses (cilappatikaaram 8. 32; 3. 59–60). Such a relation, as among spouses and in kinship, is ontically continuous though differentiated.

Is it true that mantiram is an appropriate genre to convey the truth apprehended by seers? 

Aurobindo conveys this idea when he says that mantra is always 

the highest and intensest revealing form of poetic thought and expression. What the Vedic poets meant by the Mantra was an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realization, to use the ponderous but necessary modern word, of inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed (2012, 217).

We may compare Aurobindo’s idea of mantiram, derived from Vedic learning, with the one found in tolkaappiyam. According to the latter text, mantiram has three characteristics: It is uttered by those whose words take effect when uttered (niRaimozi, Tamil Lexicon IV, 2289).

...

Eliotic oxymoron is based on what we may call “absolute monism” (probably derived from Vedantic sources), which annihilates difference. Difference is ensured only by the categories of place and time, which govern the real world. Identification of one place with another and the annihilation of diachronic time result in anarchy. Such identification is different from its counterpart in the primal society. For example, the coastal girl who regards an Indian Laurel tree her sister (naRRiNai 172) identifies a particular tree (in a particular place) with her sister and such identification ensures continuity without violating the laws of place and time, and jeopardizing ontic difference.

For the entire chapter, kindly mail Dr. Nirmal at nirmalselvamony@gmail.com

Nirmal Selvamony

Central University of Tamil Nadu, Tiruvarur, India

© The Author(s) 2017

J. Clammer and A.K. Giri (eds.), The Aesthetics of Development,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95248-9_11

National Seminar @ Annamalai University, Chidambaram

SIR SIMON RATTLE CONDUCTS HYDN´S CREATION

Fri, 10.11.2017

7:00 PM

GOETHE-INSTITUT

No.4, 5th Street, Rutland Gate

Chennai 600006

The concert begins with a symphonic poem by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas.

“When my words fail I have to speak in music. I have tried to compose a ritual. A ritual for healing and light.” To be performed directly before Haydn’s Creation inevitably lends it a certain context: “healing and light” – the universe’s primal chaos is healed in the order brought by light.

The Première of Creation, conducted by Haydn in Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna in 1798, set off a chain of events that the city had never experienced. The impact of the triumphant success was tremendous. The audience expressed with a thunderous applause.

The work spread like wildfire throughout Europe. In 1801, the Press stated: “Never has a musical artwork caused such a sensation or found such a wide audience as Haydn’s Creation”.

Paid Internships @ OUP, Delhi

Oxford University Press

New Delhi

Offers

OUP India Global Academic Publishing Internship Programme

Oxford University Press is offering paid internships in our Delhi office across six main functional areas:

Commissioning

Editorial

Marketing

Sales

Demand Planning

Production

The key objective of the internship programme is to help students to gain a range of valuable skills and work experience, which will in turn support them with future applications within the publishing industry. It will also be a chance to experience work and life at a leading university press.

The internship programme spans 8 weeks during the summer months. The successful candidates will work on a range of activities for the eight-week period.

Each will work within one of the six core departments.

Intern hours vary based on department needs and the intern’s schedule.

What We Are Looking For

The work we do is fast paced, demanding, and intellectually stimulating.

We are looking for dynamic candidates with a fresh outlook and excellent analytical and communication skills.

You must have the ability to work well under pressure and tight deadlines.

You should also be adaptable, able to manage projects independently, and ready to assume a high level of responsibility as a team member.

A well-rounded academic background with coursework in social sciences, humanities, management, commerce, or sciences (including medicine) is recommended.

Application Process and Next Steps

The application and selection process has three stages:

Application

Please email the following documents to Geetanjali.Negi@oup.com latest by 30 November 2017.

Your CV

A covering letter explaining why you are interested in an internship at OUP and the

functional area in which you are interested in interning

Applications not indicating the functional area may not be considered.

We prefer soft copy applications. However, if you wish to send a hard copy, please post it to:

Geetanjali Negi (GAI Internship 2018)

Global Academic Publishing, Oxford University Press

12th Floor, World Trade Tower, C-1, Sector 16, Main DND Road,

Rajnigandha Chowk, Noida 201301

The selection committee will go through the applications received and candidates eligible for the interview stage will be informed.

2. Interview

There will be a single interview that will take place either in person or via Skype or video conferencing.

3. Selection

The candidates who are finally selected for the internship programme after the interviews will be informed through email regarding when they are expected to join and further details.

Contact

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Geetanjali.Negi@oup.com

or call +91 (0120) 4512448.

For full details, please view the official brochure given HERE.

Seminar on ELT @ University of Hyderabad

CENTRE FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD

&

ELTAI HYDERABAD CHAPTER

Announce a Seminar on

English Language Education in India: Theory and Practice

9-10 March 2018

The Centre for English Language Studies, University of Hyderabad and ELT@I, Hyderabad chapter announce a national seminar in March 2018. The theme of the Seminar is English Language Education in India: Theory and Practice, the same as the first seminar jointly organised by these organisations. It is hoped that the success of the first seminar will be repeated this time too.

English is the primary language of education in India today. The demands made on language teachers are steadily increasing, so is the awareness among teachers for the need to improve their own understanding of the field, teaching and professional skills. The matter is compounded by the younger generation’s increasing use of technology and the teachers’ need to keep pace with them in matters of communication. In this context, it is essential to understand the several dimensions of English language education thus gaining a holistic picture and simultaneously becoming aware of the wide range ofissues that impact language education. This seminar aims to fulfil this purpose.

English determines our access to domains of knowledge and is also used as a medium of communication. The importance of this language in modern India cannot be overstated. Yet, the reception of English was not always straightforward. It was often brought in as a policy decision and was politically determined. Interpreting these language policies and the accompanying syllabi and textbooks(where available) constitutes one part of the discussion in this seminar.

Further, language, society and culture are closely interrelated and any reading of teaching practices must incorporate these aspects in them. Therefore, the seminar aims to examine aspects of society and culture in language policy making and materials creation. The use of technology is all pervasive and the manner in which classrooms may be equipped with this dimension is another focal point of the seminar.

Seminar on Ethno-Eco-Mytho Facets @ Central University, Tamil Nadu