CFP — Religion in the Digital Age II: Mediating ‘the Human’ in a Globalizing Asia — NYU Center for Religion and Media, Sept 27-28, 2013

Conference Call for Papers, 2013

“Religion in the Digital Age II: Mediating ‘the Human’ in a Globalizing Asia”

Conference CFP, NYU Center for Religion and Media, Sept 27-28, 2013

Deadline for proposal, July 31, 2013 to angela.zito@nyu.edu

This conference:

This fall at NYU, as part of its Luce-funded initiative on Digital Religion: Knowledge, Politics and Practice, we will explore religious and ethically-driven new media (especially digital mediations) in the cultural forms of Asian globalization. We are happy to be joined by colleagues at NYUs Cinema Studies Department’s Asian Media and Film Initiative in co-sponsoring this weekend.

In ethnically diverse Asian countries, religion and politics are deeply intertwined. We will concentrate upon the question of “the human” in various forms, including political and economic movements to garner “human rights”; discourses on human difference and identity (race, class, sexuality, gender, ethnicity) that play out in the mediation of religious theologies and cosmologies, creating or destroying sense of community and personal agency; and regimes of the mediation of the senses in which the digital has a role. We hope especially to explore the relationship of human embodiment in its vulnerability to violence and its attendant suffering as a kind of liveness that is constantly mediated, especially through various forms of virtual circulation. Ethically engaged work that is not so named as “religious” but takes into account calling out the deeper categories of our humanity would be welcome.

We will include the various “geographical Asias:” East, South and Southeast and their diasporas, that is, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and so forth. But we are not tying ourselves necessarily to physical locality. In fact, “Asianess” itself seems to be a problematic and interesting issue in the digitally virtual, yet politically powerful, sense we hope to explore.

More details here: http://www.crmnyu.org/conference-call-for-papers-2013/