Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 September 2015.
The 13th EATS Conference will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, 30 March-1 April 2016. The main theme of the conference is Powerful and Powerless.
Power relationships, broadly understood, pervade society on many levels and in many guises. They may be explicit or implicit, acknowledged or hidden, based on outright coercion or, instead, on more subtle forms of coaxing, manipulation, and indoctrination. They can involve individuals as well as collectives. In different contexts such as faith, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation, they can render people susceptible to the effects of power in different ways.
We invite participants to engage with the phenomenon of power in their respective area of research, be it social sciences or in the humanities, and to focus on the relationship between those who wield power on the one hand and those who are affected by the decisions of the powerful on the other.
By investigating the strategies, conventions, and tensions underlying the interactions between the two sides, we hope the papers of this conference will offer novel insights into such issues as persistence and change in power relationships over time; the shifting positions and multiple roles individuals as well as groups can assume in different contexts and vis-à-vis different counterparts; the significance of symbolic representations of power; historical, moral, religious, and political justifications of inequality; strategies employed in contesting existing power relationships; formal and informal structures established with the purpose to create, enforce or perpetuate hierarchical relationships; the scope of individual and collective agency in the face of the limiting effects of power. In this way, we hope to expand our knowledge of powerful and powerless in Taiwan and to enrich the discipline of Taiwan Studies.
For submission, please send an abstract of 500 words, including 3–5 keywords in MS Word document, to the EATS website and send a copy to info@eats-taiwan.eu.
Submission will be open from 1 August to 15 September 2015. After a double blind review process, we will announce the successful submissions by 31 December 2015.
Postgraduate students who are affiliated with European institutions, as well as Europe-based post-doc researchers who have received their PhD no longer than three years, are strongly encouraged to take part in the contest of Young Scholar Award (YSA). The winners of YSA will receive a modest monetary reward. If interested, please specify your participation in the YSA contest in your submission with a statement of your status (MA, PhD or post-doctoral). Further details of YSA will be announced in due course.
To nurture junior researchers at their formative stage, EATS will organize a MA panel for students to practice their presentation skills and to receive critical feedback. The MA panel is not confined by the theme of the conference, although it should be relevant to the broadly defined field of Taiwan Studies. For the submission to the MA panel, please write an abstract of 300 words on a topic of your choice.
Accepted postgraduate presenters (PhD and MA students) who are affiliated with European institutions will receive a travel grant of €150.
