Call for Papers - Seeing Muslimness Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference

Seeing, whether through the lens of perception or representation, plays a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of the world and of those who inhabit it. Within this web of visual perception, knowledge construction, and power dynamics, we take ‘Muslimness’ as a focal point at which various modes of seeing converge, intersect, and often clash. This inquiry encompasses a study of ‘Muslimness’ as expressed in literature, film, culture, architecture, food, animal studies, fashion, and more broadly, as ‘presence’ in physical digital and spectral forms. The act of seeing goes beyond mere observation; it influences our perception, understanding, and further representation of Muslimness. These modes of seeing, whether they be oppressive, digital, communal, individual, self-perpetuating, or self-fulfilling, create discursive notions of authenticity, representation, and self-fashioning within Muslim communities. We seek to explore the multifaceted dimensions of seeing, presenting, and representing Muslimness and its profound impact on being. Building on scholarship that considers Muslimness as a plural and heterogenous social category, we aim to query what epistemological hierarchies determine how Muslimness is seen, shown and performed. What are the affective responses to Muslimness, and how do they manifest? In other words, what does Muslimness do, and what does seeing Muslimness do.

We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners from across disciplines and genres to unpack these complex ways of seeing Muslimness and question its forms, formations and transformations. We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars engaged in fields such as cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, media & film studies, digital humanities, literature, and architecture. Potential paper topics include but are not limited to:

1. Gaze, surveillance, and stereotyping
2. Ideas of ‘Muslimness’ in animals, the supernatural, and the extra-human
3. Digital/Physical Visual symbols in local, vernacular and global contexts
4. Built and Digital Infrastructures
5. Muslimness in Everyday Life: personal and communal experiences.
6. Cross-border and cross-cultural Muslimness: Diasporic and migrational perspectives
7. Politics of unseeing, exclusion, and erasure
8. Politics of secularization
9. Violence (material and non-material)
10. Digital Activism
11. The Spectacle and the Narrative in art, media and popular culture
12. Muslimness in/as Environmentalism
13. Humanist and Posthumanist Perspectives

Please submit an abstract, not exceeding 300 words, along with a brief biography.

• Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2024
• Notification for final acceptance: May 15 2024

Please note that this is an in-person conference. Participants will be required to be present in Cambridge on the date of the conference. We would not be able to provide travel or accommodation bursaries for the participants.

Please direct all queries to seeing.muslimness@gmail.com

For more details, please follow this link https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/41566/#description