Religions in the Latina/o Americas Unit
Religions in the Latina/o Americas invites proposals for individual papers and pre-arranged panels on any topic related to the interdisciplinary study of religion in Latin America and Latine/x religion in North America. We invite critical engagements with this year's theme on "freedom"—liberal and liberationist notions of “freedom” including freedom of religion and expression or freedom of movement, such as how indigeneity, race, and diasporic identities are transformed by movement or displacement.
Members of our steering committee are particularly interested in:
- Museum studies
- Theory and method in the study of América Latina
- The circulation of Christian nationalisms
- Global detention and displacement
- How scholars have been incorporating new research into their teaching.
Emerging Scholars Session
Each year we try to dedicate one panel to emerging scholars, which includes advanced graduate students and recent PhDs who work in our field. Please do not hesitate to submit your work to our unit even if it is early in its development or exploratory; we provide a critical but encouraging environment for the professional development of early career scholars.
Co-Sponsored Sessions
Please see our co-sponsored call with our colleagues in the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit on Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert by Barbara Sostaita focusing on the themes of borders, fugitivity, migration, sacred space, sanctuary practices, and lived religion. Please email Wendy Mallette (wendy.mallette@ou.edu) if you would like to be considered as a respondent.
This Unit fosters interdisciplinary and theoretically innovative analyses of Latina/o and Latin American religiosities and spiritualities in the Americas. We explore the richness and diversity of religious traditions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, highlighting the complex and often explosive relations between religion and politics in the region, the centrality of religion in the Americas since pre-Conquest times, and the global significance of religious events and lived religion in the region. Our goal is to advance knowledge and ways of knowing that expand traditional areas of religious studies throughout the Americas, mindful of transnational and global realities. Thus, we encourage studies that explore non-Western beliefs and practices, including the indigenous, the African diasporic, Buddhist, and Islamic, as well as those that advance more complex understanding of culturally hybrid Christianities. We encourage feminist- and queer-centered perspectives as well as thought rooted in community experience. Diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives are highlighted in presentation of this scholarship.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Daisy Vargas | daisyvargas@email… | - | View |
| Justin Doran, Middlebury College | jmdoran@middlebury.edu | - | View |