16th Annual CIBER Business Language Conference

The Centers for International Business Education and Research (CIBERs) would like to announce the Call for Proposal for the 16th Annual CIBER Business Language Conference. The conference will take place on April 24-26, 2014 at the Canyons Resort, Park City, Utah. The theme for the conference is “Embracing a New Era for Business, Language, and Culture” and the conference’s goal is to link the needs indicated by U.S. businesses and the professions’ with the skills of language administration, instructors, and researchers at all levels (k-12, college and university, etc.) in the commonly taught languages, as well as those languages for which the current needs are critically lacking or are in a developing stage.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION deadline is February 1, 2014. For details on how to submit the proposals, please visit https://marriottschool.byu.edu/event/ciberblc/paper. Please, make sure you follow the guidelines for the proposal submission.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION deadline is April 1, 2014. To register and learn more about the conference please visit http://marriottschool.byu.edu/event/ciberblc. The website will be updated regularly.

Call For Applications: 2014 University of Toronto Connaught Summer Institute of Muslim Studies

Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies, 2014
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The University of Toronto's 2014 Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies invites applications from pre-dissertation PhD students for the second innovative, intensive 8-day seminar on Islamic studies and research design. Using the City of Toronto as the backdrop to our inquiry, the 2014 Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies will address the implication of competing publics for the study of Islam. “Islam” does not exist in a vacuum. A context always accompanies the use of the labels “Islam”, “Islamic”, or “Muslim” in the academy, government, civil society and elsewhere. Accounting for that context and recognizing its effect and implications for advanced research in Islamic studies are the aims of the 2014 Summer Institute.

For example, Canada’s political landscape gives shape to the discourse of Islam across the country. If we use the metaphor of a “container” to flesh out what we mean by “public”, we can understand that Canada’s history and current socio-political climate give shape to the "container" within which debates (academic and otherwise) on Islam occur. Shifting the container—i.e. shifting the public—arguably shifts the imagined possibilities for any study of Islam. As an example, the discourse on gender and sexuality in Canada makes possible certain research questions in Islamic studies at the university (e.g. the implication of gay marriage on the creation of religious spaces for LGBT Muslims) that might not even be possible or imaginable in places like Somalia, Malaysia, and Pakistan.

The focus on publics is designed to help graduate fellows grapple with how their research projects also are embedded in a public, to account for the effect of that public on their research, without at the same time seeking some illusory possibility of achieving a research standpoint outside of all such publics.

Centering attention on competing publics is particularly appropriate in this historical moment in Islamic studies, given the crises and conflicts around the world that invoke in some way or another questions about Islam. The military ousting of Mohammad Morsi in Egypt raises fundamental questions about how that particular public imagines “Islam” and the “Islamic”, and what that imagined reality implies for the study of Islam in Egyptian institutions of higher education. Alternatively, Quebec’s recent effort to regulate whether government officials can wear religious symbols reflects a different public in which Islam and the Muslim subject are imagined in light of a distinct history and nationalist movement, and with potential implications for the study of Islam in universities in that province and in Canada more broadly. Indonesia is yet a different public, in which a federal government that represents a majority Muslim population must contend with a religiously diverse nation, vigilante and, in some cases, governmental persecution of Muslim minorities (i.e. the Ahmadi Muslim Community), and an autonomous region, Aceh, that seeks to implement a more extensive and rigorous form of Sharia than the federal government would permit within its jurisdiction. What this context implies for the study of Islam (and the possibility of what Islam can be and mean) in Indonesian institutions is, by virtue of the public context, going to be different than other examples.


Toronto is home to a wide range of communities, all of which co-exist in an expansive, but nonetheless defined geographic space. Among those communities is a vibrant, diverse, and at times even fractious, Muslim population. Home to Sunnis, Ismaili Shi’a, Twelver Shi’a, and Ahmadis, Toronto hosts immigrants from South Asia, the Arab World, West India, China, and Africa. In addition, the city is home to an active LGBT Muslim community. Toronto provides a field for inquiry that will provoke fundamental discussions among the participants about research subjectsin Islamic studies and the researcher’s relationship to those subjects.

The Institute utilizes a distinct pedagogy to reorient the researcher’s subjectivity. The pedagogy involves: site visits to different Muslim communities in the Greater Toronto Area; formal classroom engagement on research method and design; and structured small-group discussions about epistemic questions that, once clarified, help to create the conditions for more effective and innovative research. Attention to how knowledge is embedded, reasoned, and affective will enhance reflections upon research subjects in Islamic and Muslim studies. In particular, the Institute will help participants reflect upon the research endeavor as being indelibly marked by claims of difference, inclusion, exclusion and belonging.

To foster an intensive research seminar, the number of fellows in each year’s Summer Institute is small, diverse, and reflects a diverse range of perspectives and interests. As such, the application process is an open, international competitive process. Successful applicants will have their travel and accommodation costs fully covered. Applicants must be pre-dissertation graduate students enrolled in a PhD (or equivalent) academic program, and focused on the study of Islam. Applicants from all fields of Islamic studies are encouraged to apply. Pending final approval of funding, applicants will be notified of final selection process within two weeks of the application deadline.

Application deadline: January 7, 2014 15, 2013

For Application materials, please visit: www.csiis.ca.

Woolf Institute Visiting Fellowship 2015

The Woolf Institute, which specializes in the study of relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims from a multidisciplinary perspective, invites applications for its annual visiting fellowship.

The Fellowship is tenable for a two to three month period that overlaps one of the Cambridge terms 2015:

Lent term: 13 January–13 March 2015
Easter term: 21 April–12 June 2015

The successful candidate will be expected to be involved in a project of academic research, public education or of the arts in an area relevant to the Institute’s work. The Fellow will be asked to present their work at a symposium on the subject of their project proposal.

There is no stipend attached to the Fellowships, but Fellows will be entitled to free accommodation in Cambridge and round-trip travel from their country to Cambridge. They will also have access to the Woolf Institute and Cambridge University libraries.

The Fellowship is available for a postdoctoral scholar of any academic rank, a policymaker or analyst in a relevant area of work, or an artist (writer, painter, photographer, etc.) and will most likely be asked to participate in some of the Institute's teaching or practice-based activities. Further information about the Institute can be found at: http://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk.

A letter of application, CV, the names of two referees who may be approached, a project proposal (1,500 words max.), and a sample of work should be sent to:

Electors of the Visiting Fellowship, Woolf Institute, Wesley House, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, CB5 8BJ, UK or e-mailed to Tina Steiner at mailto:bs411@cam.ac.uk.

Questions may be addressed informally to the Deputy Director, Dr Shana Cohen at sc736@cam.ac.uk.

Deadline for the submission of applications is 24 January 2014.