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Dear friends and colleagues,

This week we again would like to draw your attention to a recent publication, this time by our Fellow Roberto Blancarte. We also found a call for papers, that might be interesting for some of you. Furthermore, we would like to tell you about an upcoming film screening and Judith has once again found something cool on the internet. 

Enjoy and take care!

Publication: Sociology of Latin America

Our Fellow Roberto Blancarte recently published a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America with the titel "From Theoretical Dependence to the Discovery of Its Specificity." Here Roberto offers a general panorama of the trajectory of the subdiscipline of Latin American sociology of religion and the development of a robust academic field. The reasons for this intellectual explosion go from the development of a scientific institutional framework for social sciences in emerging economies to the changing structure of religions and the social awareness of a historical plurality of beliefs in Latin America.

You can find this article in our Member Area.

Blancarte, Roberto. "From Theoretical Dependence to the Discovery of Its Specificity." In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America. Edited by Xóchitl Bada and Liliana Rivera-Sánchez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.*
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190926557.013.18

* This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication.  

Call for Papers: Routledge Encyclopedia of African Studies

Toyin Falola (University of Texas, Austin) and Emmanuel Mbah (City University of New York, Staten Island) are co-editing the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Studies and are seeking contributors in different areas, including religion in Africa.

Movie Screening: For Sama

The Documentary "For Sama" (2019) by Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice – whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.

"For Sama" was one of the filmes from Cinémathèque Leipzig’s March and April program, which had to be cancelled due to Corona, but definitely belongs on the screen. This is one of the reasons why the film is now shown in the open-air film series "2cl Sommerkino" of Conne Island.

Screening: 30 July, 9:30 p.m. (Arabic with German subtitles)

Venue: Conne Island

Findings: From the toolbox of the Digital Humanities

Our former Fellow Michael Stanley-Baker started a very interesting project in the Digital Humanities a while ago that we would like to share with you here.

This section the development of online collections of pre-modern medical texts, and tools to analyse them. This work began with the Drugs Across Asia project, which investigated ways to better situate drug medical terminology in the Daoist and Buddhist canons. Drugs Across Asia produced digital tools and explored new methodologies for the historical study of materia medica and related medical practices from digital texts. The specific tools are also applicable to the study of Chinese religions. This project is the foundation for a transregional collaboration to study the migration of drugs across language corpuses.

On Stanley's website there is among other things a Online-Lecture by him about "Data-mining the Buddhist and Daoist Canons", in which he gives an overview of scholarly questions and digital tools for the study of pre-modern Chinese texts and discusses the combined use of specific tools to track the distribution of term clusters in the Daoist and Buddhist Canons.

And the tools are also linked there.

Feel free to take a look!

If you have any content that you think suits the purpose of the weekly, please feel free to send it to us at multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de.