Change and Continuity in the Middle East
Rethinking West Asia, North Africa and the Gulf after 2011

Graduate Section of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies
Annual Conference
11 June 2012

The London School of Economics
and Political Science
London, United Kingdom

The fact that 2011 has been a year of momentous importance for West Asia, North Africa and the Gulf can hardly be disputed. For this reason, the Graduate Section of BRISMES hereby extends an invitation to all young researchers and PhD candidates to present research that addresses the political, economic, social and cultural transitions taking place across the region. We welcome submissions of papers and panel proposals from any disciplinary field which reflects on these events and the resilience displayed despite the pressure of mass uprisings, regime changes, and the emergence of new conflicts. Will the Middle East become more democratic? What is the role of political Islam? How do the events of 2011 influence the conflicts in the region? Is the Middle East finding a new civil conscience? How is the political economy of the region changing? To what extent were the arts, social networking, civil society or collective memory relevant factors of change in the region? What was the impact of foreign policies towards Middle Eastern states? Is the discourse of “resistance” outdated or is it a factor of change? Are human rights the new political vocabulary of the Middle East? Is women’s emancipation really happening in the region?

The BRISMES Graduate Section and its co-host, the LSE Middle East Centre, look forward to welcoming you in London in June 2012 to address these and many other questions in its annual conference: “Change and Continuity in the Middle East: Rethinking West Asia, North Africa and the Gulf after 2011″.

For more information and to submit your paper or panel proposals go to: https://sites.google.com/site/brismesgs2012/

Alternative mirror website: http://brismesgs.blogspot.com/

Deadline for submissions: 13th April 2012

The provisional details of the panels organised by the Historical Sociology and International Relations Working Group are now out and are reproduced below. Hope to see many of you there!

International Studies Association Annual Conference
San Diego, 1st-4th April 2012

Monday 2nd, 4pm: The Social Technologies of Protest

Chair/Discussant: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (American)

George Lawson (LSE), ‘The Social Technologies of Revolution’
Eric Selbin (Southwestern), ‘Small Worlds, Slow Memory/ies, and Redes: Who ‘Writes’ Stories of Revolution and Who ‘Hears’ Them’
Meera Sabaratnam (LSE), ‘Music and Revolutions: Performances, Motifs, Rhythms and the Improvisation of Political Consciousness’
Robbie Shilliam (Queen Mary), ‘The Message is in the Memory: News of the Haitian Revolution’

British International Studies Association-International Studies Association Joint International Conference
Edinburgh, 20-22 June 2012

Thursday 21st, 11.30: Roundtable: History, the Past, and the Study of Global Politics

Chair: Patrick Finney (Aberystwyth)
Peter Jackson (Strathclyde)
George Lawson (LSE)
Jack S. Levy (Rutgers)
Jan Ruzicka (Aberystwyth)
Andrew Williams (St Andrews)

Thursday 21st, 2pm: New Directions in Global Sociology

Chair/Discussant: Robbie Shilliam (Queen Mary)

Paul Musgrave and Dan Nexon (Georgetown), ‘Is Liberalism Compatible with Imperial Stability?: Ireland and India in the British Empire’
Julian Go (Boston), ‘Relationalism and Postcolonial Sociology’
Barry Buzan and George Lawson (LSE), ‘The Global Transformation: The 19th Century and the Making of Modern International Relations’
Iver B. Neumann and Einar Wigen (NUPI), ‘Where Have All The Mongols Gone?’

Prize Call
Sussex International Theory Prize

www.sussex.ac.uk/cait/prize

In 2011, the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) was established by the Department of International Relations within the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex.  The core mission of the Centre is to support and disseminate innovative fundamental research in international theory. 

To this end, the Sussex International Theory Prize will be awarded annually for the best piece of innovative theoretical research in International Relations. 

In the autumn of 2012, a prize will be awarded for the best piece of research published in book or article form in 2011. 

Prize Details

Submission/Nomination

• The award is made annually on the basis of nominations by individuals.
• Nominations should take the form of a statement of less than 200 words on why the work could be considered the best piece of innovative theoretical research in International Relations from the previous year.  Nominators are limited to one submission. 
• If the nomination is for an article, the published version should be attached as a PDF document to the email nomination
• If the nomination is for a book, it is the nominator’s responsibility to contact the publisher and request that five copies of the title be sent by the nomination deadline to Centre of Advanced International Theory, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Falmer, East Sussex, BN1 9RH, UK.
• Nominations can be made by email submission through March 31, 2012 to the CAIT Administrator, Joanna Wood cait@sussex.ac.uk.  Nominated books must also arrive by this date.
• Recipients are notified in June, 2012.

Prize

• The recipient will be invited to present their research in a Public Lecture at the University of Sussex.
• The winner receives £150 worth of books from Cambridge University Press and a two-year print and online subscription to International Theory.

Spaces of Work 1770 – 1830

A one-day interdisciplinary conference
University of Warwick, Saturday 28^th April 2012

Spaces of Work 1770-1830 will address the relationships between workers and spaces in Britain. We aim to showcase current research and are particularly interested in interrogating under-analyzed types of work and space. For example, we hope to develop the theorization of types of work that critics have not conventionally understood as ‘work’ (the performance of music as practical activity, for instance). We also aim to bring attention to under-analysed spaces. For example, due to Romanticism’s traditionally rural focus, literary critics of this period have only recently begun to interrogate urban spaces; interdisciplinary discussion of urbanism in this period would therefore be particularly valuable. We aim to analyze the interfacing of work and space as two factors that fundamentally shape everyday life in order to gain a greater understanding of material life in the period. To these ends, 500 word abstracts are invited which attempt to answer questions such as the following:

• How do workers and their work uniquely shape space?
• How does space facilitate or hinder workers and their work?
• How does the social relationship among workers and between them and their supervisors/masters alter according to the work they are doing and the spaces in which they perform it?
• How does gender, race, and/or class inform workers’ relationship to each other in different contexts of space and work?

Possible approaches could include, but are not limited to: genteel work and the city; work in spaces of ‘leisure’; work and (sub)urban domestic spaces; men’s work in the home; space and female accomplishment; work and emergent manufacturing/industrial spaces.

Please send submissions to the conference organizers, Kate Scarth and Joseph Morrissey, at j.morrissey@live.co.uk by 1 December 2011. Papers at the conference will be thirty minutes in length, with a generous allocation for questions.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Karen Harvey (University of Sheffield)                 Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent)

A poster and pdf Call for Papers are also available.

Many journals now allow authors to post their work online, either in pre-publication format or in finalised form once a certain period has elapsed. If you have published articles or books relevant to the work of the Group, please send copies to Paul Kirby, the new Group administrator, for inclusion.

If you are a Working Group member, you may also want to check that your details are correct on our Members page. If there are any mistakes (or if you’re not listed) get in touch. We also hope to make more use of this site as a news source for new publications, conferences, debates, events and funding opportunities related to historical sociology and IR. If you’re interested in staying updated, please click on the subscribe button on the left-hand side of this page.

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