Provincializing the Social Sciences

Provincializing the Social Sciences

Veranstalter
Ruth Streicher, Schirin Amir-Moazami, Freie Universität Berlin
Veranstaltungsort
Freie Universität Berlin, Henry Ford Building, Senate Assembly Hall, Garystraße 35, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem
Ort
Berlin
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
04.06.2015 - 06.06.2015
Von
Ruth Streicher

The three-day workshop departs from the insight that the much lamented ‘crisis’ of area studies has to be understood and coupled with as a larger ‘crisis’ of the social sciences. Important area studies initiatives have embarked on formulating transregional perspectives in response to inter-nationalization efforts and postcolonial critique, yet many social science faculties have remained remarkably untouched by these developments. In addition, funding for area expertise in social science faculties has been drastically reduced, further widening both the institutional and episte-mological gap between the often evoked disciplinary binary of ‘major’ social sciences and ‘minor’ area studies.
We want to use this moment of ‘crisis’ as a productive opening to foster a critical conversation on the interface of area studies and social sciences. Following Chakrabarty’s call to ‘provincialize Europe’, we deploy the notion of ‘provincializing the social sciences’ as a point of departure for such an exchange. The workshop thereby aims not only to foster reflection about false claims to universality and tendencies to marginalize ‘other’ knowledges in the social sciences, but also to work towards a more political and theoretically reflective formulation of area studies.
The workshop is designed as the inauguration of a longer conversation leading to a broader research project located at Freie Universität Berlin. The workshop is open to the public but re-quires advance registration (mkurz@zedat.fu-berlin.de). For more information, see: http://www.bgsmcs.fu-berlin.de.

Programm

Thursday, 4 June, 2015

14.00
Welcome Remarks by the Convenors
Schirin Amir Moazami, Ruth Streicher, Freie Universität Berlin

Panel 1: Rethinking the Social Sciences From the Areas

14.30
Islamic Law, Social Sciences and the Provincialization of Knowledge
Alexandre Caeiro, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar

15.15
Re-Thinking Society from Elsewhere: Studying Thought and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast
Kai Kresse, Columbia University, New York

16.00
Coffee Break

16.30
Rethinking Humanism and Politics in a Global Age: A View from Southeast Asia
Goh Beng Lan, National University of Singapore

17.15
Buddhism, Secularism and the Regulation of the ‘Muslim Minority’ in Thailand
Ruth Streicher, University of California, Berkeley/Freie Universität Berlin

18.00
Discussion

18.45
End of First Day

Friday, 5 June, 2015

Panel 2: Contesting Social Science Epistemologies

09.30
Decolonizing State Theory: The Absent Presence of ‘Latin America’
Markus-Michael Müller, Freie Universität Berlin

10.15
Negotiating ‘Area’ and ‘Discipline’ after the Arab Uprisings – Political Sciences in Turbulent Times
Cilja Harders, Freie Universität Berlin

11.00
Coffee Break

11.30
Critical Theory after the Rise of the Global South
Boike Rehbein, Humboldt Universität Berlin

12.15
Discussion

13:00
Lunch Break

Panel 3: Decentering Theoretical Categories of Gender and Religion
Part I: Categories of Gender

14.30
Gender Studies and Its Travels - Discipline and Disciplining
Allaine Cerwonka, University of East London

15.15
Coffee Break

16.00
Between [Dis-]guise and [Dis-]orientation: The Case of a Female Fakir in Pakistan
Omar Kasmani, Freie Universität Berlin

16.45
Discussion

17.30
End of the Second Day

Saturday, 6 June, 2015
Cont. Panel 3, Part II: Categories of Religion

09.30
The Movement of Critique
Ruth Mas, University of Colorado, Boulder

10.15
A Transcultural Perspective on the Sociology of Religion
Armando Salvatore, McGill University, Montréal

11.00
Coffee Break

11.30
A Post-Colonial Critique of Weber’s Theory of Race, Religion and Ethnicity
Manuela Boatca, Freie Universität Berlin

12.15
Knowledge Production as a Secular Practice: The Social Scientific Measurement of Muslims in Europe
Schirin Amir-Moazami, Freie Universität Berlin

13:00
Discussion

13:30
Lunch Break

Panel 4: Genealogies of (German) Area Studies

14.30
History, Primitive Peoples and the Abyss of Race. Territorial and Temporal Orders in German Anthropology and Folklore Studies, 1850s-1930s
Christof Dejung, University of Cambridge

15.15
Coffee Break

15.45
Universalizing the Province: Projections, Stereotypes and Premises in Research on African Law in the German Colonies
Ulrike Schaper, Freie Universität Berlin

16.30
Discussion

17.15
End of the Workshop

Kontakt

Ruth Streicher

Altensteinstr. 48, 14195 Berlin

r.streicher@fu-berlin.de

http://www.bgsmcs.fu-berlin.de/events/workshops_seminars_conferences/workshop_2015_provincializing/index.html