{"word_count": 384, "character_count": 2647}
&#160;The SSHRC partnership project “From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions” based in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia cordially invites participation in this 3-day (April 20-22, 2018) conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.This conference explores the many ways in which animals have been understood and depicted in Buddhism. We welcome contributions from scholars who work on texts and visual representations. In many of their views on animals Buddhists were not alone, and the conference will include contributions on Hinduism and Jainism in India, Confucianism and Daoism in China and Shinto in Japan. While our focus is largely historical, we will also examine the relevance of earlier understandings of animals for the many contemporary debates about animal rights.Interested scholars are invited to email proposals and CVs to FrogBear.Project@ubc.ca by August 30, 2017. All conference-related costs, including local transportation, meals and accommodation during the conference period, will be covered by the conference organizers, who—depending on availability of funding—may also provide a travel subsidy to selected panelists who are in need of funding.Our goal is to bring approximately 25-28 scholars, both established and emerging, to the conference. Please see the list below for those who are already confirmed.We expect that this conference will generate two conference proceedings: one in English and the other in Chinese. The English volume will collect all the papers in English, and the English translations of several papers written in non-English languages; the Chinese volume, to be published in mainland China or Taiwan, will include the Chinese versions for all non-Chinese papers in addition to those papers contributed by our colleagues based in China. Only scholars who are confident in finishing their draft papers by March 2018 and publishable papers by the end of 2018 are encouraged to apply. Barbara Ambros (UNC Chapel Hill) Naomi Appleton (University of Edinburgh) T.H. Barrett (SOAS) Daniela Berti (CNRS) Stephen Bokenkamp (Arizona State University) Ben Brose (University of Michigan) Jinhua Chen (UBC) Huaiyu Chen (Arizona State University) Phyllis Granoff (Yale) Petra Maurer (Bavarian Academy of Sciences) Michael Nylan (UCBerkeley) Reiko Ohnuma (Dartmouth University) Meir Shahar (Tel Aviv University) Robert Sharf (UC Berkeley) Koichi Shinohara (Yale) Fabrizio Speziale (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) Gilles Tarabout (CEIAS) Mimi Yiengpruksawan (Yale)[image credit – Yale University Art Gallery]&#160;Source: CJBS News Blog.