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Dear friends and colleagues,

Tonight we are showing the next film in our Screening Religion series: at 7 pm, “Soviet Hippies” will be screening at the Cinémathèque at naTo. We hope to see you there!

Next week there will be the Colloquium with our Associate Member Liudmila Nikanorova. We also have another film recommendation for you as well as a guest lecture and two Call for Papers.

Enjoy and have a good week!

Anja & Lucy

REMINDER Screening Religion: “Soviet Hippies”, Tonight at naTo

Our Screening Religion film series continues: The film “Soviet Hippies”, directed by Terje Toomistu, tells the story of the Western hippie movement’s profound impact on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It will be shown tonight at 7 pm at the Cinémathèque Leipzig at naTo in Estonian, Russian and English language with English subtitles. There will be a discussion afterwards.

Tonight | 7 pm (CET)

Cinémathèque Leipzig at naTo, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 46, 04275 Leipzig

Free entry, donations welcome

Next week’s Colloquium: Liudmila Nikanorova on “Deshamanizing Siberia”, 30 November

Next Wednesday, our Associate Member Liudmila Nikanorova will give a presentation on her book project “Deshamanizing Siberia”.

The colloquium will take place in a hybrid format (on-site and online). If you would like to join in person, please register for the colloquium via e-mail. In the Member Area you will find the relevant readings as well as information on the zoom connection data.

30 November | 9.15–11.45 am (CET)

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

Guest Lecture (in German) by Steffen Mau on „Neue Ungleichheitskonflikte und die Frage der Polarisierung“ (“New conflicts of inequality and the question of polarization”), 29 November

We would like to point to the next lecture as part of the interdisciplinary colloquium series at the Institute for the Study of Culture at Leipzig University: Steffen Mau, Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, will speak about „Neue Ungleichheitskonflikte und die Frage der Polarisierung“ (“New conflicts of inequality and the question of polarization”). The thesis of polarisation has become a master narrative of social development. The lecture will explore whether this image is valid with regard to German society. With the help of an empirically informed look at important arenas of inequality, it will be shown how structures, patterns of attitudes and conflictuality go together.

The event will be held in a hybrid format and you can join via zoom. You will find the zoom link in the accompanying MOODLE course.

If you have any questions, please send an e-mail.

29 November | 5.15–6.45 pm (CET)

Leipzig University | Campus City, Auditorium 8, Universitätsstraße 3, 04109 Leipzig

Arab Fan Culture & the World Cup: Film Screening and Discussion, 30 November

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Football World Cup, our Associate Member Markus Dreßler recommends this film screening and discussion on “Arab fan culture & The World Cup”. Although the 2022 World Cup has brought a spotlight on Qatar, football has a much longer and richer heritage in the Arab region.

This event will explore the experience and meaning of fandom beyond sport by looking into the tragic history of Ultras fans in Egypt as an example. This subculture paid a heavy price for their role in the 2011 Revolution, and they help us rethink the labels ‘fans’ or ‘hooligans’. Writer and filmmaker Ronnie Close, will present his research on Cairo’s Ultras and host a discussion on Arab football culture.  

30 November, 6.15 pm

Leipzig University | Oriental Institute, Schillerstraße 6, M204

Call for Papers: Conference “Religious Infrastructure: From Africa and Beyond”, 6–10 June 2023

We would like to draw your attention to this call for papers for a conference on “Religious Infrastructure”, which sets out to create an interface between two important research trajectories in recent years: the “material turn” in the study of religion and the multidisciplinary “infrastructure turn”. Considered together, these research trajectories both seek to subvert the same conceptual binaries that organise how their respective units of analysis are conventionally apprehended (e.g., cultural-material, social-technical, intangible-tangible).

This conference experiments with the notion of religious infrastructure to generate new sites of empirical inquiry and conceptual elaboration for the study of religion and infrastructure alike. Conveners are Yanti Hölzchen from the University of Tübingen, Benjamin Kirby from the University of Bayreuth and Genevieve Nrenzah from the University of Ghana.

Deadline Call for Papers: 30 November

Conference Date: 6-10 June 2023, Institute for African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon

Call for Papers: Panel on “Religious Conversion” for European Academy of Religion (EuARe) 2023, 19–23 June

From 19–23 June 2023, the Annual Conference of the European Academy of Religion (EuARe) will take place in St. Andrews/Scotland. For this, our Senior Research Fellow Sebastian Rimestad together with Minoo Mirshahvalad from The Fondazione per le scienze religiose (FSCIRE, Palermo) is announcing a Call for Papers to a panel on “Religious Conversion”.

In our age, the waves of globalization, the rise in migratory flows, and modern communication technologies have boosted intercultural contacts and thereby also increased the number of individual religious conversions. The interplay between individual choices and the conditions that form those choices, both before and after the conversion, generates a multi-layered and processual phenomenon. Moreover, conversion has different meanings depending on the cultural context. Therefore, this multifaceted and processual human experience should be investigated with cross-disciplinary methods, taking different cultural and linguistic backgrounds into account. This panel aims to be such a venue for encounter between different disciplines.

Please send suitable abstracts via e-mail to the organizers Minoo Mirshahvalad and/or Sebastian Rimestad.

Submission of abstracts: 29 January 2023

Conference Date: 19–23 June 2023

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.