Religion and Cities Unit

The Religion and Cities Unit welcomes paper and panel proposals for the 2025 AAR annual meeting in Boston. In addition to the specific calls described below, we welcome submissions that explore the practice of religion in the city, including papers that cover urban design, architecture, religious approaches to issues of justice in the city, interfaith encounters and collaborations in the city, and the practice of religion in public space. 

We especially invite submissions that problematize and expand notions of infrastructure; examine case studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and engage the religious landscape of Boston and surrounding communities. We also encourage scholarship that explores the 2025 AAR Presidential Theme on Freedom.

Religion and Housing. Many countries, including the United States, face housing shortages that have spurred increases in housing costs and homelessness/houselessness. Religious communities have responded with new approaches to ministry and community-building. We welcome papers that critically engage with such approaches, especially those that occasion interfaith collaborations. This panel might serve as the basis for an edited volume on religion, housing, and homelessness/houselessness.

Religion and Urban Ecology. We invite papers that explore the intersection of religion and urban ecology. Proposals might explore religious responses to urban environmental issues such as climate change, pollution, urban wildlife, and reforestation. Papers might also explore urban religious understandings of indigenous knowledge, interfaith engagements with ecology, local landscapes and ecosystems, environmental justice, the urban soundscape, and the relationship between human beings and other species.

Harvard and the Hood: Religious Scholars and Community Practitioners: We seek papers and panel proposals that consider the theoretical, historical, and/or phenomenological considerations around collaborations between scholars of local religion and practitioners. By “practitioners,” we mean participants in practices and activities associated with local religion, broadly construed, especially leaders within religious communities, non-profits, local government officials, and activist organizations whose work is both informed by scholarship and the subject of study by scholars. While we are inviting papers examining Boston, this call is open to papers examining scholar practitioner engagement in any locale. Possible questions to explore might include (but are not limited to): How do academic understandings of “rigor” structure dialogue between scholars and practitioners? How do scholar-practitioners negotiate their multiple roles? What ethical questions arise in interactions between scholars and practitioners? Proposals may examine specific instances or case studies of scholar-practitioner collaboration or dialogue along with analysis of theoretical questions or insights that arise through these examples.