Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Unit

CARV Call 1: Future/s and Overcoming Violence: Minor Religion, Postidentity, and Becoming (co-sponsored by the  Drugs and Religion Unit)
In response to the 2026 presidential theme FUTURE/S, this session explores how comparative approaches to religion and violence can move beyond identity-centered frameworks that increasingly shape both scholarly and public discourse. Religion is often addressed through regimes of recognition, inclusion, and minority rights that treat religious difference as a stable identity. While such frameworks seek to mitigate violence, they frequently reproduce epistemic, gendered, racialized, and colonial forms of harm by fixing difference and reinforcing hierarchical modes of governance.

This session proposes a shift from minority to the minor as a critical and comparative analytic. Rather than a demographic category, the minor names a practice of disidentification, deterritorialization, and becoming that opens new ways to analyze how violence is produced, justified, resisted, and transformed through religious and secular formations. Bringing CARV’s attention to structural, symbolic, and epistemic violence into dialogue with feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, the session asks how “minor religion” can enable future-oriented scholarship that resists both dystopic foreclosure and superficial hope. It invites reflection on what forms of futurity religious studies can imagine when violence itself becomes a site of critical reconfiguration rather than identity management.

CARV Call 3: Religion and Violence on the 20th anniversary of 9/11

2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The impacts and implications of those events continue to animate scholarly attempts to understand the nuanced relationships between religion and violence across a range of traditions. CARV encourages submissions from scholars working in various disciplines and using varied methodologies, that:
• consider 9/11 in relation to other examples of spectacular violence or conflict, religious or otherwise 
• reflect on and interrogate the intersections of religion and violence on September 11 itself 
• place 9/11 into broader contexts by exploring the prehistory and/or legacies of the attacks, be they in the religious politics of South Asia, the Middle East, the United States, or elsewhere

• connect 9/11 to the enduring consequences of the American "War on Terror"; or 

• examine the impact of 9/11 on the field of religious studies itself.

CARV Call 4: Coffee as Religious Technology (co-sponsored by the Drugs and Religion Unit)

This proposed roundtable explores the contributions that coffee’s pleasures, perils and ambivalences can bring to studies of religious community.  If coffee has long been instrumental to worship, so too have its psychoactive properties, its role in fueling Euro-Asiatic colonial extraction and slavery, and its development as a global commodity made its legacies contested.  As an evolving and surprising accessible religious technology, how does coffee mediate religious ties and differences?  How does “coffee” – a wild and/or domesticated plant, a beverage, a commodity, a status-symbol, a metaphor, a ritual – facilitate encounters across religious, racial, and sexual boundaries?  What cross-disciplinary studies and questions are helpful for identifying and exploring the stakes of these caffeinated encounters?