Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Unit
With the 2025 presidential theme (Freedom) in mind, the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Unit is seeking proposals for individual papers, panels, or roundtables on the following topics:
- Critical discourses on religion and/as freedom: Religion has long served as a site for theorizing freedom, whether as the antithesis to freedom (as in Enlightenment narratives of charlatan priests duping and controlling the gullible masses), as a site for the achievement of freedom (whether in classical notions of moksha or "liberation," or in modern political struggles like the US civil rights movement in its connection to the Black Church). The CTDR unit asks for papers that probe the ways in which religion has been understand in relation to freedom across a range of intellectual archives, toward collaborative conversation on this theme.
- Freedom of expression in Religious Studies: The Current Crisis: In Florida and elsewhere, new legal regimes have placed significant pressure on religious studies curricula, restricting certain kinds of academic speech, even as popular mobilization against the attacks on Gaza has underlined the persistence of the 'Palestine exception' to free speech ideals. How does "freedom" operate as a principle that shapes, overdetermines, or otherwise structures the field today? In what ways is "freedom" an adequate sign for contesting the present conjuncture?
- We are also interested in new book or Author-Meets-Critics panels.
The Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion (CTDR) Unit offers an interdisciplinary and international forum for analytical scholars of religion to engage the intersection of critical theory and methodology with a focus on concrete ethnographic and historical case studies. Critical theory draws on methods employed in the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, literary criticism, and political theory in order to bring into scrutiny all kinds of discourses on religion, spanning from academic to nonacademic and from religious to nonreligious. This Unit seeks to provide a forum in which scholars of religion from a wide range of disciplines can examine and question their disciplinary presuppositions. The work of this Unit can be placed under three main rubrics: • Critical investigation of the categories generated and employed by the discourses on religion, such as experience, the sacred, ritual, and the various ‘isms’ that can be found in classic and contemporary studies of religion • Analysis of new and neglected theorists and works central to the critical study of religion, including those produced in cognate fields such as anthropology, political science, or literary theory • Theoretically-informed examination of elided and often neglected themes in religious studies, including class, race, gender, violence, legitimation, and the material basis of religion
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Katja Rakow | k.rakow@uu.nl | - | View |
| Kristin Scheible | scheiblk@reed.edu | - | View |