You are here

Home

Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Unit

Call for Proposals for November Meeting

Children, Youth, and Competing Religious Future

CARV invites papers on the ideological, rhetorical, ritual, and/or pragmatic roles of children and youth in emerging religious nationalisms, particularly in light of migration, ecological collapse, and climate skepticism. It also encourages papers that explore the roles of LGBTQIA2S+ individuals and movements, particularly those that center children and youth, in determining (and resisting) the boundaries of the “nation” in discourses and practices of religious nationalisms.

 

Centering Religious Marginalization: Displaced Peoples and their Allies

In response to this year’s Presidential Theme, CARV invites proposals that explore religion at the margins and with regards to the marginalized: refugees, displaced persons, children, other-than-human beings, disabled persons, sexual minorities, and/or others who face exclusion or violence at the margins. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • How do boundaries and borders—conceptual, political, geographic, spatial, and natural—reinforce or mitigate processes of violence, exclusion, or marginalization? What role does spirituality play in shaping, policing, or breaking these divisions?
  • How do the politics surrounding social, political, economic, religious, or educational institutions—currently and/or in historical perspective—illustrate questions of marginalization? Does religion play a unique role in this political processing? How might such analysis provide more nuanced insight into institutional futures?
  • What methods or theories can acknowledge and possibly mitigate the marginalization of displaced people and/or nonhuman beings in studies of religion?

 

Teaching Religion / Teaching Violence in the Global Ecumene: Radical[izing?] Religious Subjectivity in the Classroom

How does religion play host to violence, dispossession and erasure in the classroom, whether by directly enacting them or by informing youth with habits of mind that sanction such destruction and discrimination? In what contexts do religion and education map onto charges of, or anxieties about, “extremism”? In what ways can the study of religion and violence in educational settings shed light on religious communities’ shifting boundaries and/or changing understandings of religion? What opportunities does this approach offer to better understanding the multiplicity and relationality of religious groups or movements that are often thought to be distinct or separate? With these questions in mind, CARV invites papers that explore the ways in which educational goals and/or settings stage the naturalization of selfhood, bodies, places, social imaginaries and teleologies in ways that recruit religion toward violent and often political ends. Issues of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Violence as education regarding religious ways of being / acting, especially those that venture beyond the traditional bounds of religious identity.
  • Configurations of “nation” and citizenship that employ discriminatory violence in institutions of religious learning.
  • Charges of, or anxieties about, “extremism” and “wokeism” in the context of religion and education.
  • Homeschooling as an (ironic?) effort to combat or preempt violence, and to safeguard the religious ideals of youth.
  • The work of Michael Faris and the evangelical Home School Legal Defense Association in preventing legal safeguards and educational regulations designed to protect children educated outside of traditional schools.
  • Competing claims by parents and educators on the minds and bodies of young persons, and the stakes for the “victory” of either side.
  • The rise of individual activists and non-state organizations like Moms for Liberty, which seek (among other things) to ban books they perceive as dangerous to children’s moral and religious formation.
  • The cooperation of religious and state organizations in enacting violence on Indigenous Peoples through boarding schools.
  • Indigenous communities’ strategies of resistance to settler colonial (extractivist) educational regimes that undermine traditional ecological knowledge/s.
  • Meaningful ways that scholars of religion might seek to address problems and injustices that arise when religion is weaponized by authors, parents, pundits, state authorities, non-governmental organizations, and other educators, for the purposes of creating, amplifying, and/or enforcing the marginalization of others.

Call for Proposals for Online June Meeting

Violence at the Ballot Box: Religion in the Crosshairs of the Electoral Cycle

In light of this year’s Presidential Theme, CARV seeks to unpack the relationship between religion and marginality as it fuels election-related violence. Broadly, CARV invites proposals that address the role that religion plays in fomenting, negotiating, or mitigating threats and acts of election violence, voter suppression, voter intimidation, online and in-person harassment, and rioting. It likewise welcomes reflections on how these acts of violence relate to, or overlap with, religiously-inspired nationalist movements and identities, as well as analyses of comparative religious and secular nationalisms.

 

While these issues are of obvious salience for the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle, CARV also welcomes research that situates religion, marginality, and election violence within a comparative global framework. Fruitful lines of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

 

Proposals that engage the subject of (non-)violence at the margins, understanding marginality to include broader themes of borders and limits, more specific cases of marginalized peoples and groups, the intentional marginalization of others, and efforts to lay claim to the margins and marginalized identities.

 

Proposals that recognize the place of gender and sexuality at both the margins and center(s) of politics. These may address the (dis)location of genders and sexualities within the context of election-related violence, and could pursue questions like: How is gender / sexuality rendered central or peripheral to advocacy for, and resistance to, electoral violence? How do patriarchal religious traditions influence actors or movements who commit / support / oppose electoral violence? How are gender and sexuality leveraged as subjects of religious concern, and what role do these presumed entanglements play in the advocacy for, and resistance to, electoral violence? Why?

 

Proposals that query the role(s) that young people play in advancing or opposing (non-) violence as forms of religious advocacy / protest, especially those that spotlight the shifting ways in which youth and young adults are remaking or redefining religious experiences. What roles are LGBTQIA2S+ children and youth playing in determining (and resisting) the boundaries of the “nation” in religious nationalisms? What ideological, rhetorical, ritual, and/or pragmatic roles are they playing in emerging religious/secular nationalisms? Why?

Statement of Purpose

Since the end of the Cold War, acts of religiously motivated violence have all too often become part of our quotidian existence. Scholars from various disciplines have attempted to account for these incidents, noting such issues as a resurgence of anti-colonialism, poverty and economic injustice, the failures of secular nationalism, uprooted-ness, and the loss of a homeland, and the pervasive features of globalization in its economic, political, social, and cultural forms. What are the religious narratives that help animate these violent actors? This Unit contends that the theories, methodologies, and frameworks for studying the expanding field of religion and violence remain under-explored and require interdisciplinary work and collaboration to provide greater insights into the complex issues involved. The sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, economics, and political science of religion all have provided great insights into the nature of religion and violence over the last few decades and all are arguably interdisciplinary by nature. This Unit provides a venue devoted specifically to interdisciplinary discussions of the subject. We hope to channel and enhance contributions from the historically delineated (albeit constructed) humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. In that vein, we hope to hear papers presenting cross-disciplinary dialogue and research on the topic of religion and violence.

Co-Sponsoring

Chairs

Steering Committee Members

Method

Review Process

Proposer names are visible to chairs but anonymous to steering committee members