Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar
For our 2025 online meeting, we would like to convene a special session rooted in--but not exclusive to--Foucault, Iran, Islam, and political spirituality. Papers can also take a theoretical approach rooted in the conceptual resources and problems that emerge from texts, dialogues, and disputes around the Iranian intervention.
Foucault, Islam, Iran, and Beyond: What do we make of Foucault's Iranian dispatches over 40 years later? How do those texts and the controversy around them help us understand Foucault himself, post-revolutionary Iran, and broader questions around religion, spirituality, mass-movements, and political transformation? What do we make of Foucault's interventions on the other side of the Masa Amini protests? What, if anything, can Foucault contribute to understand that movement, and what can such recent movements contribute to our critique and understand of Foucault? Proposals that overlap or are in dialogue with more general questions of "Foucault and Islam" are very welcome.
The Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar is dedicated to collaborative research in a public setting, gathering scholars of religion whose research engages theoretical and historical approaches to the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's work has been transformative for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences over the last fifty years. We aim to continue Foucault’s tradition of public intellectual discourse in a way that illuminates the importance of the study of religion for understanding and critiquing his work on questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We hope to convene scholars of various religious practices and traditions to expand Foucault’s critical approach and enliven the contributions of this research for the public domain.
We understand this work to be ongoing, developing the complex questions that emerge from Foucault’s analytics of power, knowledge, and subjectivity central to many disciplines. The 2018 posthumous publication of his History of Sexuality volume on early Christian sexual ethics (Confessions of the Flesh) foregrounds the need for such critical and constructive engagement by scholars with expertise across religious traditions and methodologies. We hope to bring together scholars within the AAR and SBL—particularly those in philosophy of religion, queer theory, black studies, feminist theory, religion and literature, diasporic studies, affect studies, African American religion, religion and ecology, and the histories of differing religious traditions (ancient and early modern)—in order to pursue work that is historically and theoretically rigorous, reflecting Foucault’s own interdisciplinarity and the relevance his work has had across fields.