Class, Labor, and Religion Unit
Proposals in response to the calls below should clearly indicate how consideration of class inequalities and dynamics shapes the paper's analysis or conclusions and/or how the paper foregrounds issues of class, labor, or workers (while recognizing their intersections with other dimensions of inequality).
General Call: We invite paper or panel proposals that explore the role of class, labor, or worker issues in religious communities and traditions or the significance of class, labor, or worker issues in the study of religion and theology or address major questions in the study of class, labor, or workers.
Special Emphases This Year: While open to any proposals relevant to the general call, this year we especially welcome paper or panel proposals addressing the following:
- Reproductive labor(s) and/or the relationships between economic production and reproductive labor;
- Relationships between structures of violence and of capital/profit;
- Forces that obstruct or undermine class solidarity, solidarity among workers, solidarity between working-class and middle-class people;
- Impact of new technologies on workers, class inequality, and/or capitalism;
- Capitalism as a religion;
- Class and labor within global structures of capitalism;
- Cooperative economy or cooperative movements (both religiously and non-religiously affiliated);
- How capitalism/worker exploitation and White supremacy/anti-Blackness reinforce and sustain each other.
Co-sponsored session on Evangelicals and labor: For a co-sponsored session with the Evangelical Studies unit, we invite responses to Ken Estey's recently published book Labor Evangelicals: Faith, Authority, and Resistance at Work (Palgrave, 2024) or papers examining working-class evangelicals' theo-ethical perspectives on or engagement with work, unions, class, and/or workplace power.
Co-sponsored session with the Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Commtitee (ALCF): For a co-sponsored session with ALCF, we invite papers addressing any aspect of contingent faculty experiences or academic labor more generally. In addition, we invite papers that (a) engage the Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce's recent book Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World (New Press, 2023) or other change strategies for academic labor; or (b) consider the "enrollment cliff" and its consequences for academic institutions and labor.
This unit fosters engagement in the study of religion with issues of class, labor, and workers. We embrace diverse methods of religious and/or theological studies to demonstrate how consideration of class, labor, and workers leads to more complex understandings of religious communities and traditions and vice-versa. We understand labor as both economic production and the labor of reproducing society, daily and intergenerationally, upon which economic production depends, and we understand class fundamentally in terms of unequal power within structures and processes of labor, which compels many to work just to survive. Moreover, labor and class are shaped by their intersections with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, nationalism, hetero- and cis-normativity, ableism, and other inequalities of power. Thus, we aim to examine classes in relationship to each other through such inequalities of power and not reduce class to income or consumption inequality by itself.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Kerry Danner | kerry.danner@georgetown… | - | View |
| Jeremy Posadas, Stetson University | prof.posadas@gmail.com | - | View |