CO-SPONSORSHIP: Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit and Secularism and Secularity Unit
“Is Freedom a ‘Secular’ Category?"
Is “Freedom” a Secular Category? 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 putatively secular registers. We are interested in further showcasing work that strives to better document and analyze this “freedom” discourse as it relates to the study of secularism and secularity.
How does the secular 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?
• Pentecostalism and the postcolony
• Theorizing relationships between settler and non-settler colonialisms
• Colonialism and space exploration
• The coloniality of US anti-colonialism
• Gender and decolonial epistemologies
• Colonialism and ecotheology
• Settler colonialism and Marxism, in particular the role of “primitive accumulation” and “commodity fetishism” in these debates
• Secularism and/or liberalism of liberation