| Religion, Secularism and Developmentalism: Interrogating Contemporary African Philosophy of Religion Being Panel Proposal for ECAS 5 Conference Scheduled for Lisbon, Portugal, June,2013 Convener: Dr.Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religions, University of Abuja, Nigeria: ugwuanyiogbo37@yahoo.com Other Panelists: Professor Malachy Okwueze-Deputy Vice Chancellor, (Department of Religion), University of Nigeria, Nsukka Professor Mogobe Ramose,Department of Philossophy,University of South Africa,Pretoria Dr. Munyaradzi Felix Murove-Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal,Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Abstract Conceiving philosophy in broad terms as a critical investigation into the fundamental assumptions underlying beliefs, ideas or values; this panel sets out to apply the critical tools of philosophy to (i) point out the hidden tension between secularism and religion in contemporary Africa and the competing presence of both in African social and political life. It will (ii)articulate how and why both of them qualify to be categorized as agents of development in a contemporary African context and (iii)interrogate this state of affairs with the view to pointing out the dilemma of development ethics implied by this scenario. In particular the panel will attempt to locate the expectations contemporary Africans make both of religion on the one hand and of secularism on the other hand to see the extent to which these expectations could be right. It will address such questions as: Under what ethical framework will contemporary Africa emerge as a strong, organized and powerful human community? Does religion or religious ethics deserve any role in contemporary African life? Is secularism or secular ethics a basic condition for proper development in Africa? What role should be assigned to religion in contemporary Africa, assuming that it is the case that religion is a basic demand of contemporary African life and why? How can this be done without the reversal of the African mind to the overbearing influence of dogmatism and anachronistic thinking that discourages the critical turn which leads to new forms of life that can properly reconfigure the African world? Guidelines and details for forwarding your abstract are hereby provided below: CFP The call for papers is open and closes on the 16th January 2013. Please circulate the call, asking people to visit the website, to other lists you are members of, around your depts, and to students in your institution. Some convenors chose to circulate a call for their own panel to various lists. To do this you can either direct people to your panel by number (e.g. Pxxx) or circulate the direct link to the panel page (as opposed to the paper proposal link on that page), which allows visitors to read the panel abstract before proposing their paper. This will look like: http://www.nomadit.co.uk/ecas/ecas2013/panels.php5?PanelID=xxxx where xxxx is your unique PanelID (as seen in the URL of the page). I would place this URL on its own line due to the way some email handlers break up longer lines of text. PROPOSALS All paper proposals must be made via the online system, and not via email (except under exceptional circumstances). If approached by email please direct proposers to the website. When a proposal is made, you will be sent an email notification of the proposal. You do not need to respond to that email. (If you decide to do so, please do not hit 'reply all' as we have plenty of mail already!) It is possible that you will not receive the email and that it ends up in your spam box. It would be wise, if you have the facility to do so within your email, to whitelist any email from the nomadit.co.uk domain. But do not worry if you can't do this, as the best place to view the proposals is via our login environment ' Cocoa '. COCOA AND CONTACT DETAILS To login to Cocoa , go to the conference website and click on Login on the right hand side, using your name and date of birth to enter. Most of you will quickly proceed past your contact details, but please note a couple of points: - the name field can take the full range of accented characters. Simply paste these in from a word processor, and then your name can be correctly represented on the website and in the conference programme. - what you place in the 'Institution' field will be what shows on the website and on your conference badge. Give this some thought: if it's too long it won't fit on the badge; if it's too cryptic, no-one will know where you work, etc. How you are represented is under your control. :-) NUMBER OF SESSIONS Once past your contact details you will see the title of your panel. Please ignore for now the message about allocation of sessions. All panels are by default allocated zero sessions at this point; the final allocation will depend on the number of papers you accept. As no panel may go over one day you can be allocated from one to three sessions. Each session can hold four papers. It is important that all presenters within a panel are given equal treatment time-wise. Later on, when the CFP is closed, your decisions marked up, and the number of sessions allocated this line in Cocoa will be relevant. I will email all convenors at that point. PANEL DETAILS Click on the panel title to see the details page. There you will see your panel title, the two abstracts and listed below the paper proposals. Please note that the short abstract is the one which will be printed in the conference programme. Both abstracts will be shown online, and so will be searchable by search engines. We don't have a 'keywords' field for your abstract, so ensure that any relevant keywords are incorporated into your long abstract. You can add the name and institution (the latter in brackets) to the Chair/discussant fields at any time. Presenters are able to indicate their required AV equipment needs, so you do not need to make AV requests at panel level unless this is for equipment which your paper-givers have not requested. i.e. if in your introduction you wish to use an OHP or a 35mm slide projector or other such 20th century archaeological artefacts then you can indicate this in Cocoa . Otherwise just ignore that field. Please do not set your panel status to 'closed' during the CFP (we will close all panels when the CFP closes) nor to 'Open' once the CFP is closed! If you update any of these fields, remember to click the 'Save changes' button beneath the panel details. You can view and edit paper proposals by clicking on the paper titles. However if you wish to read all the proposals you have received it's easier to download a PDF of all the proposals to your desktop for happy reading later on your IPad or Kindle, ;-). Click the 'Paper Review Sheet' button beneath the list of proposals. At this stage the 'status' of all proposals is set to 'Pending', and the authors will be 'unregistered' (i.e has not yet registered for the conference, as registration will not open until 2013). MARKING UP YOUR PANELS Please do not make any decisions about which proposals to accept before the CFP ends. Given that most colleagues work to the deadline, do not worry unduly if your complement of papers seems a little low. Once the CFP is closed, please download your paper review sheet and make your decisions about which proposals you would like to accept. The Call is public so you may receive proposals from people you do not know. Please treat all proposals as equally as you can, and do not only accept the proposals you have solicited directly. Alongside the title of each paper you can alter the paper 'status' to one of Accepted/Rejected/Withdrawn/Transfer. 'Rejected' is for papers you do not wish to accept; 'Withdrawn' is for when authors inform you or us that they are no longer able to proceed with that proposal or attend the conference. (They do not always email us with this news so if you receive such info later in the conference process, please remember to set their papers to 'Withdrawn', so that we know, too. Thx.) 'Transfer' is for papers you would like to accept but don't have space for, or don't wish to accept perhaps because they aren't on your theme, but feel should be included somewhere within the conference. The SciComm will try to rehouse the 'transfer' papers in other panels if at all possible. Successful rehousing is not guaranteed! Please mark up all proposals by the 26th of January and do not leave any as 'pending'. Alter the status of each paper and then click on the 'Save changes to papers' button beneath the paper list. All accepted papers will immediately show on your public panel page on the conference website, beneath the panel abstract. EMAILING AUTHORS When you mark up a paper, the decision will show in the author's Cocoa . However Cocoa does not send an email to the author alerting them of the status change, so please do your colleagues the courtesy of sending them an email informing them of your decision. To make this a little simpler, please note that there is a new emailing tool in Cocoa to help you: click on the 'Email authors' button and you can choose which subsets of authors you write to, and these email addresses will then be transferred to a new email in your email programme. You can then write and send as per normal. SUBSEQUENT ACTIONS When all the convenor decisions are made, we will allocate your panel the appropriate number of sessions. The SciComm will try and rehouse the Transfer papers. If you are then aware of any limitations to the timetabling of your panel, you should then state those in the 'Timing request' field in Cocoa . We are aware of participants' dual roles where they are convenor or presenter; however if your discussant or chair has another role in the conference, please note that in this field. Nearer the time of the conference please put your papers in presentation order. This involves allocating each paper a number from 1 upwards, and the order is then reflected in the panel page. It will also be the order printed in the conference programme and we would ask convenors to try to stick to this order unless you face the good old 'exceptional circumstances'. You can also edit your contributor's papers directly within Cocoa . i.e. convenors have editorial control. We will not proof the conference programme content, so please ensure that both your authors and yourselves check the many short (for print) and long (online) abstracts once you've made your decisions. PRIOR CIRCULATION OF PAPERS ECAS does not require the prior circulation of papers. If however you as convenors wish to do this, Cocoa allows you to avoid a lot of emailing to and fro: each author can upload a PDF of their paper (not of their abstract!) via Cocoa and this is then available for download from your panel page on the site. Obviously this makes it available to the general public, so it is wise to head all such documents as 'draft' and 'not to be cited without permission'. LANGUAGE Panels should be conducted in English; if you wish to allow papers in your panel to be presented in other languages, you may, as long as you provide interpreting facilities. ENOUGH Congratulations if you've made it this far. In short: login to Cocoa to see all proposals and control your panel (ignore the number of sessions statement). Thanks for your hard work in making this conference a success. There surely can't be any queries after such an exhaustive (and exhausting) email. But if there are, email... -- ================================================== Elaine Morley ECAS5 Conference Administrator w: http://cea.iscte.pt/ecas2013 ================================================== 2 | 
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