Program Unit Online June Annual Meeting 2026

Class, Labor, and Religion Unit

Call for Proposals

Proposals in response to this call should clearly indicate how the paper foregrounds issues of class, labor, or workers (while recognizing their intersections with other dimensions of inequality) and/or how consideration of class inequalities and dynamics shapes the paper's analysis or conclusions.

We invite paper or panel proposals that explore the role of class, labor, or worker issues in religious communities and traditions or the significance of class, labor, or worker issues in the study of religion and theology or address major questions in the study of class, labor, or workers. While open to any proposals relevant to these, the following are some broad themes that are especially generative for our conversations: 

  • Reproductive labor(s) and/or the relationships between economic production and reproductive labor;
  • Relationships between exploitation of labor and ecological destruction;
  • Forces (e.g., racism, neocolonialism) that obstruct or undermine solidarity among diverse workers or solidarity between working-class and middle-class people;
  • Capitalism as a religion;
  • Cooperative economy or cooperative movements (both religiously and non-religiously affiliated). 
Statement of Purpose

This unit fosters engagement in the study of religion with issues of class, labor, and workers. We embrace diverse methods of religious and/or theological studies to demonstrate how consideration of class, labor, and workers leads to more complex understandings of religious communities and traditions and vice-versa. We understand labor as both economic production and the labor of reproducing society, daily and intergenerationally, upon which economic production depends, and we understand class fundamentally in terms of unequal power within structures and processes of labor, which compels many to work just to survive. Moreover, labor and class are shaped by their intersections with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, nationalism, hetero- and cis-normativity, ableism, and other inequalities of power. Thus, we aim to examine classes in relationship to each other through such inequalities of power and not reduce class to income or consumption inequality by itself.

Chair Mail Dates
Kerry Danner, Georgetown University kerry.danner@georgetown… -
Review Process: Participant names are visible to chairs but anonymous to steering committee members until after final acceptance/rejection