Quaker Studies Unit

Quaker Studies is accepting proposals on the following topics:

LGBTIA Quakers; Abolitionist movements, Quakers and their allies; Settlement, colonization, boarding schools, and Quakers; Quakers and the voiceless; and Bayard Rustin in history and memory.

For a panel that would be co-sponsored by the Religion and Human Rights Unit, the Religion and Politics Unit, and the Quaker Studies Unit, we especially invite papers that consider:

• the religious logics of nonviolent protest in the U.S. and beyond
• relationships between nonviolence and colonialism/dispossession: explorations of the ways in which nonviolent resistance might place actors at an advantage or a disadvantage in relation to regimes that have already dispossessed them of resources and/or rights
• the question of what counts as “violence,” and who decides when this label is used.

For a panel that would be co-sponsored with the Ecclesiological Investigations Unit, we also especially invite papers that consider how particular communities (especially, but my no means exclusively, the historical "peace churches" of Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren) enact their philosophies of nonviolence and principles of peacemaking in situations of violent conflict. In particular, we hope to direct attention to how the varieties of commitments to peace create ecclesiologies that equip individuals and communities for civil resistance, intercommunal solidarity, or martyrdom.