In the United States, the words »liberty« and »justice« have been central to discourse about public issues of every sort – both those commonly considered domestic and those considered foreign. The notion that liberty and justice are peculiarly American values is based, in part, on the idea that America represents a complete rupture from the Old World, a place to begin again separate from corruption and limitation. Yet rupture or complete separation – represented by such dichotomies as New World and Old World, domestic and foreign – has always been a fiction that ignored multiple kinds of mixing and hybridity. Today, America is present in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) economically, culturally, politically and militarily; and the MENA is present in America in multiple if asymmetrical ways. This conference will examine current and past encounters between America and the MENA with a particular focus on the many ways notions of liberty and justice have informed, or might inform, those encounters.

L'objectif du colloque est de rassembler des experts du monde entier, philosophes, médecins, épistémologues, anthropologues, spécialistes des cultures et des relations interculturelles, afin d'étudier les points suivants: les défis lancés à la rationalité par la médecine technoscientifique moderne et les médecines traditionnelles et/ou alternatives, la correspondance entre les types d'hommes engendrés par les diverses cultures et les divers modèles de médecine, les possibilités d'un dialogue interculturel sur ces questions, avec leurs conséquences pratiques, politiques, éthiques et économiques.

• Does the moral story of the »spiritual,« the »intangible,« and the »sacred« in contemporary environmentalisms present particular opportunities and/or dilemmas for the critical inquiry of religion, nature, and culture?
• What do current developments tell us about the relationship between science, religion, and environmentalism in the contemporary world?
• To what extent is the quest to save nature also a quest to save individual subjectivities from the presumed meaningless of the modern condition?
• Are we witnessing a renewal of eco-centric and/or religious worldviews, or did they ever decline?
• What is the role of indigenous traditional knowledge and indigenous religions in the Western re-enchantment of nature?
• Does the re-enchantment of nature provide an answer to the problem of meaning?
• Can we and – if so – how can we conceptualize emergent relations between the ethical, the religious and the political in ways that do not fit the paradigms of disenchantment/re-enchantment?

Ziel des Workshops ist es, unsere Dissertations- bzw. Forschungsprojekte sowie Entwürfe für Vorträge und Veröffentlichungen zu diskutieren. Den thematischen Rahmen bilden Fragen und Probleme aus dem Themenbereich Terrorismus und Terrorismusbekämpfung.

• Cultura, identidad y globalización
• Derechos indígenas: la política y la práctica
• Metodológicas y estrategias efectivas

• Are there native religions in India?
• Colonialism and religion in India
• Evolutionary explanations of religion
• Indians are Aryans, so what?
• The caste system and Indian religion

Submitters are invited to discuss how the flow of scientific information may be stifled within the scientific community as well as to the public at large. Topics may address issues such as private sector funding of research and the patenting of scientific technologies and information by private-sector companies and its impact on knowledge sharing as it relates to the greater good. With respect to the interaction between the scientific community and the public, topics may address what can happen when political policy overrides science through either shifts in funding or the dilution of scientific findings in the dissemination of information to the public. More generally, submitters are invited to discuss knowledge rights and issues in academic, personal, and social responsibility in information sharing.

• Religious-philosophical traditions of Asia
• Categories, images and symbols of Ancient Eastern cultures
• Western culture in Eastern countries: acceptance and rejection
• Eastern cultures in conditions of globalization
• Adaptation and understanding of Eastern cultures in Russia and in the West
• Artistic culture of traditional Asia
• Modern religious movements of Eastern origin
• Philosophy and methodology of religion
• Eastern psycho-practices and mystic-religious experiences

Globalization, multiculturalism, ethnic tension – evidence of cultures in contact is all around us. History shows us that transnational and cross-cultural interactions are not unique to the contemporary world. For centuries, different cultural groups have come into contact. The effects have been both positive – enrichment of languages and art, technological advancement, exchange of knowledge – and negative – wars, imperialism, racism, discrimination. The aim of the conference is to explore scholarly research into cross-cultural relations. We understand culture in its broadest sense as a shared system of values and attitudes, and as such would encompass religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, politics, class and gender.

• Diaspora, Identities and Globalization
• Identities and Popular Culture
• Middle Class and Globalization

• How is the definition of suicide based on western religious and philosophical ideas?
• How is suicide defined and understood within various cosmologies across the cultures?
• How is culture, nature, and society intertwined in our understanding of suicide?
• How do the western ideas of the relationship between the self and society, embedded in social research on suicide, cause biases for research in non-western cultures?

The conference seeks to explore the borderlines between Jews and the nations of the world, between Judaism and other civilisations. Literary, historical, theological, political and sociological approaches to issues such as authenticity, uniqueness, commonality, anti-Semitism, multiculturalism, communitarianism and exchange between outside and inside are encouraged. In what ways are Jews »a people that dwells apart«?

The conference seeks to investigate the breadth of issues underscoring the impact of counter-terrorism efforts upon the diverse concepts of justice at both domestic and international levels. In the efforts to counter the threats of terrorism, many observers see in assessing their effectiveness and an inherent conflict between the broad interests of security and the protection of individual rights and freedoms. The US Department of State's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism observed that promotion of liberal democratic views of justice will be a tool in efforts to counter terrorist groups. Restorative justice principles may be invoked in these efforts as longer-term developmental solutions to terrorism.

• Actors in violent settings
• Violence and legitimacy – power and identity
• Violence, subjectivity and the body
• Transformations of violent orders

For conference, work that engages the theme of »empire and identity« is especially encouraged. We will consider individual proposals on any theme in the fields of European expansion or global interaction during the early modern period, broadly defined as the 14th century to the middle of the 19th century. Panels are welcome, but may be re-organized to fit a larger program organized thematically, in order to encourage comparative thinking outside the bounds of regional histories.

• Language learning and teaching
• Translation
• Identity, politics and language
• Philosophy of language
• Language – literature interface
• Discourse analysis
• Sociolinguistics
• Anthropological linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Language acquisition

• sectarianism
• religion and identity
• interfaith relations
• pluralism/exclusivism
• (in)tolerance

The workshops intends to explore at a theoretical level what is or should be meant by recognition, considering how recognition relates to self-determination, and to explore challenges associated with recognition in practice. Further, the workshop is expected to draw intensely upon empirical cases of recognition, especially current developments in institutions and practices that mediate the struggles between indigenous peoples and political institutions.

• What are the epistemological frameworks that inform postcolonial, ethnic and indigenous studies? What is their relationship to modernity and how do they challenge and/or complement each other?
• What constitutes the subject of postcolonial and ethnic studies? How does the construction of these subjectivities limit possible conversations with indigenous studies?
• What are the limitations and pitfalls of sovereignty as popularly envisioned? How do postcolonial and indigenous communities reaffirm or rearticulate sovereignty within their respective contexts?
• What are the different theories and strategies of decolonization as laid out by postcolonial and indigenous studies, and how do they inform each other?
• How does the political status of indigenous peoples complicate dominant discourses on immigration and citizenship? Moreover, with regards to settler nation-states such as the U.S., how does the »nations-within-nations« status of indigenous communities complicate the project of ethnic and transnational studies?

How valid, in retrospect, is the founding claim of the postcolonial that it offers a different view of the real? If the world outside the west had been understood through traditions of western representation which ignored the reality of what was actually there, silencing different cultures, epistemologies, and the lives that were lived in them, how successfully has postcolonial studies intervened to enable the former subjects of Western representations to determine the representation of their own realities? Reflecting a desire to address the materiality of questions that provided the original impetus for postcolonial thinking, scholars from a range of perspectives have attempted to reinsert the notion of the ›real‹ at the center of their academic praxis. We seek to confront through this conference one of the ongoing tensions in postcolonial studies: the concern for articulating aesthetic issues of realism and representation and theoretical reflections upon the ›real‹, with the complex postcolonial realities of underdevelopment, violence, political instability and gender inequality.

The aim of the conference is to explore the legal and political content of the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine, examine its relevance to ethnic conflicts and identity-based atrocities, and address operational and implementation challenges.

• memoria y literatura oral
• mitos e historia
• narración e identidad
• literatura indigenista e indígena
• oralidad y literalidad
• mito y ritual
• medicina
• cosmovisión y espiritualidad
• religión y filosofía
• bellas artes

If home today is our globalized world, then its mother tongue cannot be but a translation, both linguistically and culturally. Should we form a nation of translation and claim its sovereignty in an independent state? Is it possible to articulate the emerging trans-national culture of translation in non-cultural terms or, in other words, are we able to translate a trans-national cultural space into a common trans-cultural political action?

1. Questions of Definition
2. Psychological Perspectives
3. Legal and Political Perspectives
4. Social, Cultural and Literary Perspectives
5. Religion and Forgiveness
6. Issues, Connections and Relations

• when and why is law evil or a source of evil?
• state violence and coercion
• enforcement of criminal law and other legal prohibitions
• law, citizenship, and political identity
• justifications for punishment, including capital punishment
• whether and under what circumstances the adversary or inquisitorial models of legal process generate, tolerate, or allow evil outcomes
• issues of equality and distributive justice in law
• the consequences of legal error
• the intersection of law with issues of choice, responsibility, and diminished responsibility
• state responsibility for terrorism, war, intervention, ethnic cleansing, and other problems of international law and international relations

The colloquium intends to explore fundamental and foundational problems and issues in comparative philosophy. What counts as successful, valid, valuable, useful or meaningful comparative philosophy? Can we determine criteria for progress in comparative philosophy? What are the appropriate methods to pursue? The colloquium seeks to encourage new reflection on old and familiar problems as well as debate current issues within, and about, comparative philosophy. The emphasis will be on Asian and western traditions.

The landscape of international relations (IR) research is diverse and vibrant, with a wide variety of ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. IR scholarship is empirical and normative, conservative and liberal, systemic and individual, activist and academic, material and ideational, positivist and post-positivist. While these different viewpoints give us great leverage for studying international relations, they often create artificial barriers between scholarly communities. The theme for the 2008 ISA meeting seeks to bridge multiple divides in the international relations community by creating dialogue and integrative research between scholars from different communities and viewpoints. We encourage the submission of papers, panels, and roundtables that create synergies between disciplines, subfields, theories, and methods and that foster greater self-reflection about our research and teaching.

• The global community and the beloved community
• Jewish responses to apartheid and to civil rights
• Expressions of and responses to racism within material and intangible heritage
• Politics and ideation of a post-racial state
• What are the influences of national struggles for civil rights on global claims to civil rights?
• The influence southern U.S. Civil Rights Movement on activist groups in other locales
• The influence of other activist movements on the southern U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the role of race in contemporary civil rights struggles globally
• Defining or narrating »civil rights« in other national contexts
• Transnational dialogue or collaboration among activist movements

• Cities, Capital Formation and Social Discontent
• The Social Costs of Growth
• Designs for the Future
• Searching for Models: A New Asian Social Contract?

• Human Rights
• Global Ethics
• Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
• Justice and Development
• Historical Perspectives on Global Justice
• The Ethics of Climate Change
• Indigenous Rights and the »New Colonialism«
• Cultural Relativism
• Global Governance
• War and Justice
• Global Poverty

• Learning to be Courageous
• Courage in Peace
• Leadership and Courage
• Cultural Variations on Courage
• Fear, Anger, and Pride
• Cowardice
• Courage in War

• Cosmopolitanisms
• Counterpublics
• Border Cultures
• Virtual Communities
• Collective Memory
• Fraternity and Sorority: Gendered Communities
• Urban Planning
• National Identity
• Fundamentalist/Extremist Communities
• American and International Regionalisms
• Organized Dissent
• Queer Cultures
• Families and Domesticities
• Linguistic Communities
• Ethics of Interaction
• Exile, Immigration, and Refugee

• Libraries and Human Rights
• Libraries and freedom of expression, freedom of access to information, academic freedom and libraries/ academic libraries
• Libraries and diversity, libraries and tolerance/ acceptance of the other