Call for Papers

Date: December 12-13, 2019

Venue: University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Deadline: June 1, 2019

Conveners: Professor Marjo Buitelaar (University of Groningen) and Dr Richard van Leeuwen (University of Amsterdam)

Key note speakers

1. Professor Seán McLoughlin (University of Leeds)
2. To be announced

The main focus of this conference is on the pilgrims’ lived engagement with the rituals of the hajj, Meccan space and their fellow pilgrims. It studies how pilgrims have made sense of Meccan pilgrimage by asking how they select from and creatively combine cultural discourses and emotional repertoires in their stories about expectations, experiences and recollections of Muslim pilgrimage? How do these stories relate to the wider sets of social relations, cultural contexts and power structures they are embedded in?

Additionally, it explores the ways this engagement is informed by (1) the discursive traditions in which Muslims have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and articulated their experience of it; and (2) how these interpretations and experiences been shaped by the various cultural discourses which co-constitute their habitus and moral and aesthetic sensibilities. In particular, the conference explores the ways in which the experience the pilgrimage to Mecca, most specifically but not exclusively the hajj, has been articulated in relation to the self and society.

The conference aims to map the dynamic development of the pilgrimage to Mecca until today by producing insights in the ways the ongoing technological, cultural, political and economic transformations in pilgrims’ lives have affected their experiences.

Source: University of Groningen