• The Idea of Africa
• Re-engagement/Collaboration between Academics and Traditionalists
• Indigenous Languages as Expressions of Authenticity
• Africa and the Diaspora
• Africa, Globalization, Poetics, and Aesthetics
• Civil Rights, Human Rights, and Post-colonial Laws
• Class, Caste, and Gender
• Territories, Borders, and Creativity
• Nomadism, Transnationalism, and Cosmopolitism
• Language, Culture, and Globalization
• Cultural Hybridity and New Ethnicities
• Nation and Nationalism
• Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and African-ness
• The Future of African Thought
• Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop
• Bridging the Gap between Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa, and Lusophone Africa

• How do borders of race and ethnicity define our lives?
• How are they part of our individual and collective thinking?
• How do they become internalized, politicized and turn into boundaries?
• How do issues of race and ethnicity defy demarcation?
• How do race and ethnicity challenge the interests and power struggles implicit in shaping borders and boundaries?
• How do race and ethnicity affect the collapse and/or transgression of borders and boundaries?

• secularization, progress and modernity
• religion, nationalism and community
• pluralism and tolerance
• knowledge and faith
• empire and the unassimilable »Other«
• political theology and public religions
• alternative religious histories
• conversion, historicity and secrecy

Topics in all humanities disciplines related to both Western and non-Western cultures will be considered. We are especially interested in proposals that take interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches.

The conference looks for presentations that investigate new meanings, assumptions, and implications of migration, border crossing, and nation building as well as papers that explore the representations of emigration, borderlands, and nation-states in different cultural forms, literary genres, and technological media. Te organizers welcome both proposals that examine the interrelations among migration, border, and the nation-state in political and historical terms and projects that offer innovative interpretations of cultural productions that foreground the new dynamics in relation to our everyday life, social practice, and planetary awareness.

This conference seeks to explore the new meanings, dimensions and implications of multiculturalism, and to examine the reality and experiences of diversity under the new circumstances. We welcome proposals relating multiculturalism to the following sub-themes: assimilation, integration, citizenship, exclusion, marginality, othering, plurality, nationhood, nationalism, transnationalism, patriotism, borderlands, cosmopolitanism, identity, minorities, globalization, representation, hybridity, repression, etc.

• How we understand human security
• How human security translates into policy
• The link between the theory of human security and its application

Philosophy of Human Rights · Human Rights: Theory and Practice · Psychology of Violent Group Behavior · Social, Political and Religious Right · Human Genome Project · Health Care Prioritization and Autonomy · Hegel on Violence and International Relations · Human Rights Approach to Public Health Ethics · Genocide, Rebelion, Cults · Hegel and Hobbes and Global Responsibilities · Kant and Hegel on Torture Warrents and Preemptive Attack · Mass Murder · Intentional Criminality and Criminal Violence · Workplace Violence · Collective Violence and Social Pluralism · Collective Violence in Groups and Social Pluralism · Groups and Government · Violence and Collective Responsibility · Violence and Politics · Bio-Terrorism and Counter Measures · Gender Violence · Collective Identity and Escalation of Ethnic Conflict · Collective Violence and Individual Punishment · Criminality of Mass Atrocity · Computer Ethics and Collective Violence · Violence in Prisons · Globalization and International Law · Pluralism and Global Justice

• Under what conditions have ethnic minorities suffered during democratization and when have they benefited?
• How should ethnic communities be recognised and accommodated in the process of regime transition?
• Under what conditions is the sequential introduction of collective group rights a desirable strategy?
• What has been/should be the role of international institutions in ensuring that ethnic recognition/accommodation, and minority rights are preserved during this process?

• What kind of international legal order should we work for in the 21st century?
• How should human rights be understood in the 21st century?
• How should intellectual property rights be balanced against the need for life-saving drugs?
• What rights should poorer countries have against wealthier ones?
• How should the international community address global warming?
• What rights should the world's poor have to be protected from the effects of global warming?
• How should medical research be done to protect the world's poor from exploitation?

• immigration law policy and practice
• religious freedom
• education
• work
• precarious status
• health care
• inclusion, exclusion and marginalization
• language issues
• the duties of citizenship
• issues in law for a diverse population

• Islam and Politics
• Genocide and Ethnic Violence
• Anthropology of Identity
• Citizenship and Nationality
• Religion
• Language Politics
• Conflict Resolution
• Autonomy
• Gender
• EU Integration
• NATO Expansion
• Diaspora Politics
• International Law
• etc.

• relationships between language and identity
• problems of translation
• interpretations of colonial narratives
• ethnography in contemporary Nahua communities

• How do we Talk about and Describe War?
• Representations and Experiences
• History and Development of Warfare and War Fighting
• Extent, Conduct and Morality
• Human Rights and Human Security
• The Boundaries of War
• Prevention and Peace
• Non-state Actors and NGOs in War
• Future War: Revolutions in Military Affairs – Emerging Types of Warfare

• Identity, otherness and migratory movement
• Contact of languages and cultures
• Intercultural space
• Cultural relativism
• Mediterraneity

• Perspectives for Understanding Violence
• Motives and Goals of Violence
• Generating Enemies, Being Violent
• Contexts of Hostility and Violence
• Violence, Victims and Others
• Resisting, Countering and Preventing Violence
• Representations of Violence

Striving for community is at the heart of ubuntu, the African philosophy that stresses mutual obligations and responsibility. From far-flung kinship networks, artisan guilds and women's informal associations to regional or pan-African political movements, Africans across the ages have looked to communities to give meaning to their lives and to resolve conflict or find protection. Yet dysfunctional communities such as gangs, cliques, and tribalist groups have been a bane to efforts to develop and democratize. New media are rapidly changing the ways that communities cohere and the ways that scholars and activists relate and research them. The conference intends to consider transformations in the many different types of communities and community-building initiatives in Africa and among Africanists.

• Climate Change (Global Warming)
• Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
• Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development
• Energy Shortage
• Economic Prosperity and Equality
• Poverty and Foreign Aid (ODA)
• Higher Education for Humane Purposes and Social Responsibility
• Global Justice and Social Harmony
• Political Development and Political Stability
• Human Rights Issues and Human Security
• Cultural Diversity and Tolerance
• Global Peace and Global Governance
• Dialogue Among Civilizations
• Human Use of Technology
• Crisis Management such as Post-conflict and Disaster

• Identity, Religion and Spirituality
• Identity and Time
• Identity and Language
• Identity and Politics
• Identity and Space
• Identity, Theory and Disciplinary Boundaries

• The idea of Europe
• European values
• European citizenship
• Constitutional Patriotism and the European State
• The boundaries of Europe
• European integration and enlargements
• Europe and multiculturalism
• Federalist principles
• Nation, state, and sovereignty
• Justice, solidarity and the European social policies
• European foreign and defence policy
• Europe and distributive justice

• Media and Multiculturalism
• Media and Globalization
• Media and Politics
• Media, Popular Culture, and the Construction of Identities
• Representation of Gender / Ethnicity in Media
• Ideology, Power-Relation and Media
• Understanding Media Discourses
• Mediamorphosis, Mediaspora, Mediaddict: A Media-Minded World
• Quo Vadis Postmedia?
• Media for Brand Communication
• CSR in Marketing Media
• Codes of Ethics in Media Practices

• linguistic representation as socially constituted and constitutive
• media and representation
• images and representation
• collective memories and linguistic representation
• ideologies of power in the media
• racial stereotypes in the media
• language as a tool of racial discrimination
• rhetoric of anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism and xenophobia
• race and propaganda
• metaphor and racial representation
• religion and the media
• religious images and concepts in contemporary culture
• spoken and written forms of sacred texts
• performativity and religious discourse
• metaphor and religion
• myths, archetypes and symbols
• language and conflict
• ethnic conflicts and representation in the media
• language and identity
• Jews and Polish-Jewish relations in art, media and literature
• Islam and the Middle East in art, media and literature
• African culture(s) in art, media and literature
• Asian culture(s) in art, media and literature
• Gypsy culture(s) in art, media and literature
• Yiddish language and culture
• new and changing Polish identities
• Łódź and its cross-cultural challenges

The conference examines the shared cultural heritage that emerged from the interaction of various peoples in East Asia from the perspective of »commonality« and »regionality« from antiquity to the modern period. Our particular focus will be on the cultural interaction between China and Japan and we hope that the broad temporal frame of the conference will allow us to see distinct patterns of cultural interaction through the case studies that the speakers will be proposing on political, scholarly, linguistic, literary, artistic, and religious aspects of that interaction.

• Interrelationship between Human Rights and Peace
• Religions and Peace
• Peace, Justice and Democracy
• Peace and the Role of NGOs and Religious Institutions
• Peace, Women and Children
• Peace and the Threats to it

• The End of »The End of History«
• Globalization or Demise of the Neoliberal Regime?
• The Dominant Powers of the 21st Century
• The Future of »Democracy«
• The Obama Presidency
• American Critical Theory vs. Critical Theory in America
• Feminist Futures
• Perils and Promise of Pragmatism
• Critical Theories: Race, Class, Gender
• The Global Crisis of Capitalism
• The Present and Future of Social Justice
• Environment, Catastrophes, Risk
• Utopia and Dystopia
• The Purpose and Place of Postmodernism
• Individual Identity and Social Structure

• Politics – New Frontiers: Indian-White Relations in the Political, Economic, and Ecological Realm
• Ethnology – Issues dealing with Sacred Remains from Archaeological Sites and Ritual Artefacts in Museums
• Humanities – Resistance and Cooperation in Contemporary Literature, Film, and the Arts
• Educational Systems – The Role and Function of Native Educational Systems: Education and Vocation as Tools of Post-Colonial Power

• How did colonial systems position themselves between the global and the local?
• How malleable were these categories? What kind of dialogue emerged between the local and the global in defining heritage and its practice in colonial contexts?
• In what precise ways did these categories define and restrict the autonomy of colonial officials?
• To what extent did they allow room for local agency and a more flexible application of heritage ideas from metropolitan sites?

• The relation between coercion, law and (global) justice
• The effectiveness of international law as a means to realising global justice
• Global justice, international law and state sovereignty

• multi-culturalization, multi-ethnicity, and multi-religiosity of the society as a result of globalization as well as globalization itself
• secularization and the conflict of values: confrontation between new life standards and the sphere of the traditional values; philosophical and theological meaning of the secularization and the outcomes of religious life
• nihilism and secularization as challenges of the contemporary world and their representations in everyday life

• Community Identity
• Community Representation
• Community Recognition
• Community Diversity, Division and Dissent
• Community Engagement

• Multiculturalismo, minorías étnicas, y representación política
• Democracia y derechos humanos
• Políticas de integración y diversidad cultural
• Nacionalidades mayoritarias en Estados Pluriculturales
• Pueblos indígenas: inclusión, exclusión, and marginación
• Ciudadanía multicultural
• Doble marginación: etnicidad, racismo, y multiculturalismo
• Interculturalidad y multiculturalismo
• Identidad cultural
• Minorías étnicas inmigrantes
• Afroamérica: La tercera raíz
• Globalización y multiculturalismo en las Américas
• Minorías y mayorías: relaciones étnicas y raciales
• Nuevas minorías étnicas en las Américas
• Inmigración y diversidad cultural en el México contemporáneo

• Border regimes and border-crossings
• Imagining translocal space
• Representations of forced and voluntary relocations (incl. slavery, indentureship, transportation, migration)
• Postcolonial cultural transformations
• Authority and authenticity in postcolonial texts
• Transmigration
• Translation and translocation
• Translocal food and its representations
• Moving species: biological transfers
• Online writing, online reading
• Cyber diasporas
• Diaspora literature
• Travel writing
• Academic locations and reallocations of Postcolonial Studies

• Debating conflict theory
• Ending political violence
• Post-conflict democracy
• Reconciliation and civil society
• Assessing the Irish model
• Exporting the Irish model
• Comparing the Irish model

• The impact of the media on social life
• Media and the construction of identity (nationality, ethnicity, gender)
• Mediatization of politics, everyday life and the public sphere
• Place of media theorizing in contemporary discourse of humanities
• Media art and its place in contemporary culture

• Normative questions pertaining to the rights of people who immigrate to nation states with strong ethno-cultural identity, and the use of immigration policy as a method of changing or maintaining an internal demographic situation
• The relationships between states and their respective diasporas
• The implications of considerations of global justice in the domains of culture and economic welfare for immigration

What is of express interest to this conference is the way in which civilisational shifts, fusions, faultlines and oscillations of the Mediterranean world have given rise to extraordinary interpretations, life-world strategies and symbolic constructions. Such activity is manifested in the remarkable literature and art, philosophies, religions, archaeological readings, political theories and economic practices of the region. We seek thought-provoking papers exploring the symbolic/ideational dynamics of changing perceptions in and of the Mediterranean world.

• Ibn Khaldun and Modern Social Science: Primitive Precursor or Alternative?
• Applying Ibn Khaldun to History and Contemporary Society
• How to Read Ibn Khaldun Today?
• Ibn Khaldun and the Islamic Sciences Today

• Theories from the Global South
• Theorizing Violence
• Opening Up Epistemes
• Trauma, History, Memory and Democracy

• Rivers: Routes, Rites, Rituals and Sacredness
• Ports and Peoples in South and Southeast Asia
• Religion, Faith and Beliefs in Island Southeast Asia
• Mainland Southeast Asia: Water and Symbolism
• Culture and Religions along the Rivers
• Religious Trends and Patterns of Life in South and Southeast Asia
• Maritime Routes and Religious Links in South and Southeast Asia
• The Indonesian Waters and the Malay World: Syncretism and Society
• Islam: Trade and Traditions
• Hinduism and Buddhism across the Seas
• Christianity: Spread and Localisation
• Art and Religion in Jambudvipa and Beyond
• Religious Languages, Texts and Literature
• Pilgrimage: Concepts and Centres
• Diaspora Overseas

The organizers invite proposals for papers in informal logic or rhetorical or argumentation theory on topics related to the above theme. »Argument Cultures« may be understood as the various cultures of theorizing about arguments and argumentation, or as argumentation about cultural differences, or as ways ›argument‹ and ›argumentation‹ are understood or practiced in cultures.

• The Language Policy Response to Glocal Issues
• Philosophical, Sociolinguistic, and Psychological Perspectives on English Studies and the Formation of Identities
• English Studies and Cross-cultural Awareness and Sensitivity
• Values Formation and Spirituality Through English Studies

• Identity
• Migration, diaspora and metissage
• Critical indigenous perspectives
• New epistemologies
• Race, gender and sexuality
• Queer issues
• Globalization and transnationalism
• Art as resistance
• Critical pedagogies

• comparative psychology and animal cultures
• culture and cognition in cross-cultural perspective
• evolutionary psychology and the adapted mind
• cognitive neurosciences and cultural learning
• the modelisation of cultural evolution
• the evolution and origins of language
• the evolution of culture and cognition in the human lineage
• epistemological issues related to the study of cognition, evolution, and culture

• Is time treated differently in various humanistic disciplines nowadays?
• Do they regard it as a sequence of discrete moments or as a continuous flow?
• How is temporality used in the investigation of individual psychologies and of social groups?
• How is it interpreted today in different culture areas?
• What are the possible mutations which that notion may undergo in the near future?

• Conflict transformation and civil society engagement
• Human rights in ethno-religious conflicts
• Identity in conflict: concepts of nation, ethnicity and practices in conflict
• Gender issues in conflict: what role for civil society?
• The EU-civil society relations in conflict zones

• The place of narrative: architecture and the disposition of imagery theories of narration
• Word and image: illustration and interpretation
• Printed texts and images: semiotic dialogue
• The social embeddedness of narrative
• Narratology
• The role of non-narrative or anti-narrative elements in imagery

• Migration, settlement and diaspora: modes, stages and forms
• Representation, performance, discourse and language
• Subjectivity, emotion and identity
• Objects, practices and places
• Beliefs, values and laws
• The role of youth in relationship to diasporas, migration and identities
• Diasporic economics and labour markets
• The recognition of multiple origins and mixedness
• The politics of immigration and integration
• Public opinion and public policy
• Ethnic identity politics

• Intercultural Communication
• Intercultural Mass Communication
• Cross-Cultural Studies

• Phenotype and social construction
• Expressions of identity
• Interethnic conflicts
• Representations of ethnicity (remembrance, history, media, statistics, stereotypes, etc.)

1. Dimensions of Diversity
2. Governing Diversity – Community in a Globalising World
3. Representing Diversity – The Influences of Global Tourism and the Global Media
4. Learning Diversity – Education in a World of Difference
5. Working Diversity – Managing the Culture of Diversity

• hierarchical and net structures in the history of cultures and civilizations
• civilizational and evolutionary models of socio-political development
• historical and ethno-cultural variability of the forms of socio-political organization
• from simple societies to the world-system: pathways and forms of political integration
• socio-political and cultural-mental factors of social transformations
• cultural and socio-biological foundations of dominance in human societies
• ideology and legitimation of power in different civilizational contexts
• cultural models of power's perception in different civilizations
• violence and non-violence in the history of political institutions
• access to information as a means of political manipulation and mobilization
• power, society, and culture in the era of globalization
• the study of »hierarchy and power«: schools, trends, and methods

• Globalization of Politics – Globalization of Protest?
• Transnationalism within Right Wing Protest Movements
• Filling the Gap: European Protest Movements as a Result of a Lack of Democracy within the EU
• EU Polity and Europeanization of Protest
• Applying the Concepts of »Civil Society« and »Social Movements« in Eastern Europe and non-European Countries – Potential and Limits
• Even Newer Social Movements – Creating new Public Spheres?
• Building Transnational Protest Identities – Languages, Images and Actions
• European Anti-Corporate Campaigns in a Globalized Economy
• Migration and Ethnicity as a Source of Protest
• Professionalizing Protest
• The Future of Political Participation: Social Movements, Lobbying or Party Politics
• Taming Protest: The Rituals of Violence

• The persistence of colonial forms of exoticism, or exoticist practices, discourses
• The contemporary emergence of new forms, practices or discourses of exoticism
• The adequacy or otherwise of postcolonial theory or critique to intervene in and subvert exoticist discourses
• Contemporary circuits of exoticist representations
• Exoticism and indigeneity
• The relation of exoticism to other forms of difference, otherness
• The politics of the exotic as applied to plants and animals
• Desires or affects of the exotic; exoticism/eroticism; fetishism
• Banal vs. spectacular exoticism
• How exoticism articulates race/racism, or nation/nationalism/culture
• The place of exoticism in postcolonial studies teaching and research

• How are ethnic minorities in Asia transformed from subjects into citizens?
• Under what conditions are ethnic minority rights claims to citizenship justifiable?
• What are the duties and obligations of states to accommodate their ethnic minorities as citizens?
• How have the post-colonial ideologies of multiethnic Asian states, which were often constructed as political entities along arbitrary colonial borders, influenced their conferral of citizenship to ethnic minorities?
• How have the philosophies that Asian states and their ethnic minorities attach to citizenship changed over time, and in their interactions with each other?

• What can Europe bring to Turkey? What can Turkey bring to Europe? What shouldn't they bring to each other?
• Which relationships could or could not have today Islamic, Christian, Ottoman, Arab, European, Greek traditions? What can they bring to each other?
• What are the points of conflicts? How can they be solved? What are the ones of harmony?
• How is peace possible within those issues?
• How can transcendental philosophy help us to realise peace?

• The Politics of Democracy in History and Philosophy
• World Religions and Environmental Protection
• The Right to Food in Law and Morality
• Agriculture, Genetically Modified Food and Water
• Environmental Refugees and Climate Change
• Ecological Integrity and Protected Areas
• Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: Threats to their Survival
• Human Rights and Sovereign States
• Neocolonialism and Ecological Footprint: The Interface
• The Common Heritage of Mankind: Recent Perspectives
• Sacred Spaces and the Wild
• Governance for Sustainability
• Public Health and Globalized Threats

• Means and Ends: Reconciliation, Truth and Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Transitional Justice
• Reparations
• Local Justice

• Continental Crossings: The Political Lives of ›the Nation‹
• Borderlands: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Difference
• Global Capitalism and the politics and Practice of Citizenship
• Politics of the Border

The conference aims to join specialists in Husserl's work, in phenomenology and in European studies to reflect on the cultural, moral and spiritual roots of Europe.