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Conference on
'Religion, Law and Regimes of Control around the Indian Ocean'.

Conveners:

Bodil Folke Frederiksen – bodilff@ruc.dk – and

Preben Kaarsholm – preben@ruc.dk
Venue: Hotel Romantik, Bornholm, Denmark
Time: 1 to 4 November 2010

The deadline for submission of papers accepted for presentation will be 15 July 2010.

Accommodation in Bornholm for the three nights of the conference will be offered to paper presenters, but they will be expected to cover their own costs of travel. A small number of travel subsidies can be applied for from the organizers by paper presenters, who are members of the Indian Ocean network, and unable to raise their own travel funds.

Outline of conference focus

Earlier conferences of the Indian Ocean network were held in Johannesburg in January 2009 (’Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean’) and in Goa in November 2009 (‘Connecting Histories across the Indian Ocean: Religion, Politics and Popular Culture’).

In the third network conference on ‘Religion, Law and Regimes of Control’, we want to explore in greater depth aspects of power, control, and security in the Indian Ocean world in both a historical and contemporary perspective.

Recent research on the Indian Ocean has established a new understanding of the social and cultural networks of movement across the Ocean. It has demonstrated how capital and labour, merchants and seamen, scholars and saints intersected webs of regime to develop new notions of mobility and emancipation, and generate discourses and practices of nationalism, trans‐nationalism, and labour solidarity.

At the same time, new forms of legal regulation were imposed across the Indian Ocean to grapple with problems of predation, dissidence and sedition. The conference aims to explore the ambiguity of religious and jurisdictional fluidity co‐existing with new forms of moral fundamentalism and legal governance in the Indian Ocean, and to explore struggles around the creation of new spaces for respectability, entitlement and citizenship.

The conference invites papers from researchers and research students working on religion and religious practice, on law and resistance in the Indian Ocean, on the intersection of religion, law and politics, on the articulation of a wider public sphere in the Ocean through networks of labour, pilgrimage and religious propagation, and on the emergence of the Indian Ocean world in the 21st century as a major arena for security concerns and ‘the global war on terror’.

For further information about the Indian Ocean network, please see:

http://www.ruc.dk/isg_en/indianocean/

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