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Tales of Trickery, Tales of Endurance: Gender, Performance, and Politics in the Islamic World and Beyond - A Conference in Honor of Margaret Mills

May 18 - May 19, 2012
4:00 am - 4:00 am
Mershon Center for International Security Studies

Organizers
Dorothy Noyes, Director of the Center for Folklore Studies and Associate Professor at The Ohio State University
Barbara Lloyd, Associate Director of the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University

Overview

Professor Margaret Mills, retiring in June 2012 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, has made major contributions to the study of women in contemporary Afghanistan, the folklore of the Persian-speaking world and South Asia, women’s oral traditions, and traditional pedagogies. She has helped us to think about the rhetorical dimension of oral traditions; the gendering of religious experience; the partitioning of the traditional public sphere into gendered and performative situations; how literacies and pedagogies are mobilized to form political identities; how individual and collective expressive repertoires respond to war and displacement.
 
This conference assembles some of her former students and longterm colleagues to discuss new developments in these lines of research. Expected participants include:
 
Joyce Burkhalter-Flueckiger (Religion, Emory)
Cati Coe (Anthropology, Rutgers-Camden)
Yücel Demirer (Political Science, Kocaeli U, Turkey)
Ben Gatling (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, NYU)
Deborah Kapchan (Performance Studies, NYU)
Derya Keskin (Education, Kocaeli U, Turkey)
Frank Korom (Religion and Anthropology, Boston U)
Ulrich Marzolph (Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Göttingen)
Susan Niditch (Religious Studies, Amherst)
Ruth Olson (Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, UWMadison)
Arzu Öztürkmen (History, Boğaziçi U, Turkey)
Leela Prasad (Ethics and Religious Studies, Duke)
Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies, UC-Santa Barbara)
Susan Slyomovics (Anthropology and Near Eastern, UCLA)
Meltem Türkoz (Humanities and Social Sciences, Işık U, Turkey)
Susan Wadley (South Asian Studies, Syracuse)
Bill Westerman (American Folklife Center Green Fellow)
 

Program

Friday, May 18

9 a.m. -- Continental Breakfast
9:15 a.m. -- Welcome
Dorothy Noyes, Director of the Center for Folklore Studies, and Sebastian Knowles, Associate Dean for Faculty and Research,
Division of Arts and Humanities
9:30 a.m. -- Finding and Shaping Performance
Performance in the Ottoman World: A Folkloric Approach to Historical Research  
Arzu Öztürkmen, Bogaziçi University
Kinship & Borders: The Worlding of Genres in the Writings of a Telugu Folklorist in Colonial India
Leela Prasad, Duke University
In Search of Islamic Feminist Poets: Memoir, Ethnography and Storytelling
Deborah Kapchan, New York University
Chair: Morgan Liu, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
11 a.m. -- Break
11:15 a.m. -- Tricksters and Goddesses
Abu Zayd Al-Hilali: Hero, Trickster, Sufi, Poet
Dwight Reynolds, University of California-Santa Barbara
"Dancing with Chains" and the Ambiguity of Power: Women Tricksters in the Hebrew Bible
Susan Niditch, Amherst College
"Crazy for the Goddess": Personal Narratives of a Consuming Relationship
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Emory University
Chair: Bruce Fudge, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
12:45 p.m. -- Buffet Lunch
2 p.m. -- Expressive Agendas and Audience Design
Likhiya: Painting Stories in the Mithila Region  
Susan Wadley, Syracuse University
Satire Under the Conditions of an Islamic Republic
Ulrich Marzolph, Enzyklopädie des Märchens and University of
Göttingen
Guru Bawa's Funny Philadelphia Family
Frank Korom, Boston University
Chair: Dick Davis, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
3:30 p.m. -- Break
3:45 p.m. -- Old Forms, New Politics
Algerian Women's Buqalah Poems: Cultural Politics, Oral Literature and Anti-Colonial Resistance  
Revisiting the Headscarf Issue after a Decade: Changing Forms and Images at the Intersection of Religion, Politics and Economics in Turkey
Derya Keskin, Kocaeli University
Folk Hagiography and Islamic Revivalism in Tajikistan
Benjamin Gatling, The Ohio State University
Chair: Sabra Webber, Departments of Comparative Studies and
Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
5:30 p.m. -- Reception, Dinner, and Roast in honor of Margaret Mills
Master of Ceremonies: Ulrich Marzolph

Saturday, May 19

9:15 a.m. -- Continental Breakfast
9:30 a.m. -- Re-forming Place
Of Argonauts and Afghans, Rowing to Lesbos
Bill Westerman, American Folklife Center
Multivocality in the Construction of Place in Şile, Turkey: Experiments with Photo-Elicitation
Meltem Türköz, Işık University
Mosque Architecture as Conflict Transformation: The Cases of Göztepe Park, Taksim Square and Şakirin Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey
Yücel Demirer, Kocaeli University
Chair: Amy Shuman, Department of English
11 a.m. -- Break
11:15 a.m. -- Pedagogies at Cultural Boundaries
Work Stories, Gossip, and the Ethnicization of Pedagogy among Ghanaian Immigrant Parents
Cati Coe, Rutgers University, Camden
Learning about Survivance: A Critical Approach to Teaching Native American Culture
Ruth Olson, Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures,
U Wisconsin-Madison
Chair: Katey Borland, Department of Comparative Studies
12:30 p.m. -- Lunch Buffet

Sponsors

Mershon Center for International Security Studies
Division of the Arts & Humanities
Deparment of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures