Author: Tanja Dreher File Type: pdf This edited collection focuses on the ethics, politics and practices of responsiveness in the context of racism, inequality, difference and controversy. The politics of difference has long been concerned with speech, voice and representation. By focusing on the practices and politics of responsivenesslistening, reading and witnessingthe volume identifies vital new possibilities for ethics and social justice. Chapters focus on the conditions of possibility, or listening as ethical praxis unsettling or disrupting colonial relationships and ways of listening that highlight non-Western traditions and move beyond the liberal frame. Ethical responsiveness shifts some of the responsibility for negotiating difference and more just futures from subordinated speakers, and on to the relatively more privileged and powerful. **Review This exciting and well researched volume offers a conceptualization of responsiveness that will make an enormous contribution to knowledge. In its pages, political responsiveness functions as a supplementary valence to shed new light on by now well-worn debates about voice, silence, and listening. Particularly commendable are the collections broad and intelligent coverage, the impressive line-up of scholars, and the timely and urgent topics addressed (these include Rhodes Must Fall, 911 and the rise of Islamophobia, Indigeneity, the resurgence of populism, and the global refugee crisis). The emphasis contributors place on the need for settler colonialists to listen, and their attentiveness to gender are especially welcome. (Claire Chambers, Senior Lecturer in Global Literature, University of York, UK) About the Author Tanja Dreher is an ARC Future Fellow, UNSW Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her work on the politics and ethics of listening has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Information, Communication & Society and Continuum. Anshuman A. Mondal is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK, and is author of Islam and Controversy The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie.

Author: Bernd-Christian Otto File Type: epub History is one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of ones situation, to establish identity, define otherness, and explain change. This is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion, taking into account religious groups both as producers of historical narratives as well as distinct topics of historiography. Coming from different disciplines, the authors of this volume ask under which conditions and with what consequences religions are historicised. How do religious groups employ historical narratives in the construction of their identities? What are the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the History of Religion? The volume aims at initiating a comparative historiography of religion and combines disciplinary competences of Religious Studies and the History of Religion, Confessional Theologies, History, History of Science, and Literary Studies. By applying literary comparison and historical contextualization to those texts that have been used as central documents for histories of individual religions, their historiographic themes, tools and strategies are analysed. The comparative approach addresses circum-Mediterranean and European as well as Asian religious traditions from the first millennium BCE to the present and deals with topics such as the origins of religious historiography, the practices of writing and the transformation of narratives.