We are delighted to announce an upcoming international conference on Gramsci in the Middle East and North Africa, to be convened at the London School of Economics (LSE).
The conference is organized by the LSE Middle East Centre in cooperation with the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG) and the Politics of the Margins Research Project at the University of Ghent
Call for Papers:
We live in a time of global crisis marked by uprisings, revolutions and an urgent need to imagine different futures, not least in the Middle East and North Africa.
In thinking about our contemporary moment in historical context, Antonio Gramsci has emerged as a popular theorist in work focused on resistance, revolution, popular movements, capitalism, political economy, memory, temporality, transnationalism and internationalism.
This conference aims to bring together scholars working with Gramsci on any of these themes, with the ultimate aim of publishing a Special Issue on Gramsci in the Middle East and North Africa.
Gramscian approaches to the Middle East and North Africa offer a rich opportunity to bring together postcolonial and Marxist thinking. Scholars in the Middle East and North Africa have long thought with Gramsci, and in the wake of 2011 there is a significant revival in Gramscian perspectives in Middle East Studies.
We aim to build on this growing interest in Gramsci across the globe. We hope to explore, especially through empirically-grounded research, how Gramsci’s work can help us make sense of a moment marked by a significant expansion in resistance and uprising.
We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes:
- Capitalism & Crisis: neoliberalism, financial, rentier, and crony capitalism, marginalization environmental crisis, financial crisis, and new and old forms of dispossession;
- Hegemony & Resistance: everyday resistance, popular struggles and uprisings, the politics of the margins, organization, ideology, and strategy, new forms of war-making and domestic repression, right-wing populism, revolution, counter-revolution, and counter-reform;
- Subalternity & Intersectionality: class, culture, gender, identity, language, marginality, race, religion, sexuality;
How to Apply:
To offer a paper, please send a title, abstract (max 300 words) and 4-6 keywords to Nadine Almanasfi at N.Almanasfi@lse.ac.uk.
Please include ‘Abstract Submission – Gramsci Conference’ in the email subject field.
If your abstract is accepted we will also ask you to supply a written paper in advance of the conference, which will be distributed to all participants in advance. Ideally, our expectation is that this will take the form of a fully-referenced working paper, of 6-8,000 words in length in MS Word .docx, Adobe .pdf or compatible format. However, speakers may wish to submit different kinds of documents (e.g. extended notes; powerpoint slideshows, videos and so on). We are open to the submission of such documents instead of a working paper as long as they successfully communicate the main argument and evidence base for your paper to a scholarly audience and without the need for specialist software.
Deadlines:
- Receipt of abstracts: Monday 13 September 2021 We aim to respond by the week beginning 11 October 2021
- Conference registration: Monday 17 January 2022 Note: there will be no registration fee to pay, and some funding is available for presenters without access to institutional travel funds, but we need firm confirmation of attendance by this date in order to create a programme.
- Receipt of full papers: Friday, 1st April 2022
These are final dates. The earlier we receive abstracts, and actual papers, the better.
The Organizing Committee
Sara Salem, LSE Department of Sociology; Brecht De Smet, Ghent University; John Chalcraft, LSE Department of Government; Nadine Almanasfi, LSE Middle East Centre