Secularism and Secularity Unit
We welcome all types of proposals, including but not limited to individual papers, prearranged papers panels, roundtables, keyword sessions, and other creative and experimental formats. All proposals related to secularism and secularity will be considered. In addition, we especially welcome proposals on the following topics:
Secularism Studies in a Fractured Age: Where Do We Go from Here?
Following the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 and a renewed consolidation of white Christian nationalism in the United States more generally, we invite proposals that inquire into how the academic study of secularism and secularity should respond to our current political moment. We especially welcome topics exploring how the field may offer unique insights into contemporary American life, the role secularist logics may have played in producing our current moment, or the possibilities and limitations of secularism as a framework for bolstering critical intellectual resistance to theologically-inflected authoritarian politics.
Is “Freedom” a Secular Category? (Co-Sponsored with the Colonialism and Postcolonialism Unit)
Drawing from the 2025 AAR presidential theme of “freedom,” we invite proposals that seek to critically interrogate how the very concept of “freedom” has been theorized, valued, and enacted within the organizing logics of Western secularism. Though recent scholarship has inquired into the Christian theological underpinnings of the category within Western thought and the mobilization of “freedom” rhetoric within and through projects of colonialism and empire-building, less focus has been placed on how “freedom” is conceptualized and articulated within modern political discourse. Especially amid the intense political polarization in the contemporary United States, various groups invoke the language of “freedom” to engage concerns of religious liberty, substantive equality, and protections against state action—sometimes to dramatically different ends but often within the same putatively secular registers. We are interested in further showcasing work that strives to better document and analyze this “freedom” discourse. How does "freedom" function as a concept, which transfers theological grammars into political meanings that frame the globalization of western nation-state logics, and ongoing colonial structuration of relations between the so-called global north and global south? Here, following critiques of feminist studies, queer studies, Black studies and postcolonial studies, how is what is indexed as religion used to mark the gendered, sexed, raced and colonial underside of freedom. What opportunities emerge from this under (or other) side, often called religion, to disrupt, decolonize or dismantle political-theological practices of freedom built on an other?
This panel celebrates and thinks with Anthony Petro’s Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 2025). This is a largely pre-arranged author-meets-respondents session, and we are interested in including scholars interested in queer, gay, lesbian, feminist, and trans visual culture, and twentieth-century American religious histories who would like to participate. Please email Siobhan Kelly (siokelly@bu.edu) if you would like to be considered as a panelist.
The Secularism and Secularity Unit explores a broad a set of questions associated with the secular, including its complex entanglements with religion and spirituality. This inquiry entails the study of political secularism and its role in the construction of religion, as well as the study of secular people, who can be described with a variety of labels including atheist, agnostic, humanist, and freethinker. It also includes an ongoing reappraisal of the historical transformations named by “secularization,” which signal the emergence of the modern and presuppose a break from the premodern. The group fosters new directions in secular studies by encouraging theoretically informed research that makes empirical contributions and engages with the subfield’s rapidly growing interdisciplinary literature.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Eric Stephen | eric_stephen@mail… | - | View |
| Rafael Vizcaino, DePaul University | r.vizcaino@depaul.edu | - | View |