Religion and Economy Unit

This Unit welcomes individual papers, paper sessions, and roundtable proposals related to the group's mission. We strongly encourage the submission of pre-arranged paper and roundtable sessions, including and especially sessions with innovative formats and modes of presentation that substantively engage audience members. Proposals for individual papers are most likely to be accepted if proposed in relation to one of the themes listed below, due to the higher probability that they might complement other individual submissions.

Successful proposals not only will reflect theoretical and methodological rigor and clarity but also will engage existing scholarship around the study of religion and economy. A successful pre-arranged session also must incorporate gender and racial/ethnic diversity. Diversity of academic rank, theoretical method, and field also are highly encouraged and more likely to be successful.

Potential themes include but are not limited to the themes listed below, which we present in two categories: ideas proposed by participants in the unit and members of the steering committee, as well as ideas generated in dialogue with other program units. We welcome proposals on these themes, but we also invite proposals on any other themes that contribute to the Unit’s work or push it in new directions.

1. Politics of aesthetics, religious sensibilities, and political economy

We are interested in proposals that explore the relationship between the politics of aesthetics, religious sensibilities, and political economy. Potential questions might include:

• How are aesthetic and economic value produced and circulated? How does or has religion shaped such production and circulation?
• What are the limits and possibilities of aesthetic critiques of racial capitalism? Or, more generally, what role can aesthetics or artistic production play in the critique of political economy?
• How does art operate as an otherwise mode of knowing, seeing, and feeling in response to structures domination? 
• What are the (religious) aesthetics of fascism? 
• What sense of freedom does capitalism produce?
• How do religious settings or spaces cultivate an aesthetic sensibility that aligns with or resists economic systems?
• What is the relationship between a Marxist aesthetics and a Marxist critique of religion?

2. Economies of Caste:

Thinking with Isabel Wilkerson's expansion of the category of caste to demonstrate the intransigence of social hierachies across cultures, the Religion and Economy unit seeks contributions that think broadly about caste and capitalism in various contexts. We welcome papers thinking through racial capitalism and other systemic structures of exploitation across time and space.

3. Economies of Enslavement and the Costs of Freedom: We invite paper proposals focused on histories of slavery and narratives of enslavement and constraint that explore the moral, social, economic, and emotional costs of freedom and unfreedom across time and space. We especially welcome proposals that address one or more of the following:

1. What are acceptable personal and public costs of political freedom? How do we know? How should histories and theories of settler colonialism, enslavement and coercion, private property, and feudalism intervene in attempts to reckon with the moral and material toll of imperial and ideological expansion?
2. Is it possible to calculate unfreedom's costs when it injures love? When love relationships, families, and romantic partnerships are affected by a poverty of choices, liberties, access, wealth, time, and time-off, who pays (or who in society pays most) for the loss of love? In what ways do coercion and various forms of slavery (e.g., sex trafficking, chattel slavery, incarceration, debt bondage, etc.) impact human and divine love?
3. What do sacred literature and ancient texts reveal about slavery, freedom, and the costs of slavery and freedom in theological imaginaries? and the incalculable debt of divine sacrifice?
4. What are the economies of educational institutions, religious bodies, and seminaries who are studying their legacy in slave trading or pursuing reparative acts for participation in enslavement? What are the implicit and explicit values in these institutions, and how/can efficacy be measured? something on the efficacy of institutions, religious bodies, and seminaries pursuing reparative acts for slave-trading.

For Possible Co-Sponsorship:

• The Religion and Economy Unit and Religion and the Body Unit invite proposals on Economies of Reproduction/Ethics of Freedom:

We invite proposals that explore intersections of bodies, religion, and economies. We are interested in examining how bodies are shaped, regulated, and transformed through religious and economic frameworks, with a particular focus on themes of reproduction, sovereignty, and freedom.

• Individual Paper proposals or Roundtable proposals might include, but are not limited to:

• The politics of reproductive rights and access, including the role of religion in shaping reproductive policies
• The intersection of religious beliefs and practices with the reproductive industry
• Economic systems that shape reproduction, from reproductive labor to the commodification of fertility and bodily autonomy
• The relationship between bodies, captivity, and freedom in religious and socio-political contexts
• Affect and the embodied experience of reproduction, birth, and bodily autonomy in religious settings
• How religion, bodies, and economies interact to create structures of power, oppression, and resistance