Animals and Religion Unit

This Unit addresses the study of animals and religion and seeks to engage scholars of religion with the emergent field of animal studies. We welcome theoretically informed paper/panel proposals on all topics related to these themes. We value papers that attend to real animals alongside theoretical constructs, imagery, or representations pertaining to them, and papers that attend to intersectionality with race, gender, sexuality, disability and other matters of justice.

In addition to this open call for papers, the Animals and Religion Unit is interested in organizing sessions around the following topics, with an eye toward the 2025 Annual Meeting’s presidential theme: “Freedom.”

• Animal–human commonality outside of concepts like personhood, consciousness, moral standing, or subjectivity. How should we understand our commonality with other lives along the lines of breath, suffering, kinship, nourishment, or growth? 
• Consent and coercion. We are interested in papers analyzing the role of religion in the assumption and/or projection of animal consent, the manufacturing or mythologizing animal consent, and coercive relations to animal (e.g. containment, sacrifice, or labor of various kinds). 
• Family, kinship, packs, and relatedness. We are interested in analysis of religious texts, teachings, practices, and rituals that attend to the bonds between animals themselves, between different species of animals, and between humans and other animals. What role does religion have in shaping fictive kinships and chosen families?
• Fascism and animals. How do animals and animality play into the formation of civic pieties, national identities, racial and ethnic hierarchies, and narratives that validate authoritarian takeover in democracies? 
• Domestication and sacrifice: We are interested in papers that attend to the role of religion in the linked power structures inherent in relations of domestication and sacrifice. 
• Trash animals. How do religious texts and traditions engage with animals that are neither wild nor domestic, but occupy the liminal spaces at the edges of human society—the rats, racoons, squirrels, pigeons, and others that surround human habitation, but don’t quite “belong.”
• The religions of animals. We are interested in analysis of practices, traditions, and cultures among animals that could be recognized as religious. These “religious animals” might be found in human texts and traditions, or through empirical observation and ethological research. 
• Animals and the vegetal turn. How should ongoing research into modes of sentience, communication, and community beyond the animal world impact the ways that we think about animals and religion? 
• Finally, we welcome paper proposals and panel proposals that advance scholarship in the area of Animals and Religion, even if they don’t directly address the prompts above.