Motherhood and Religions Unit

For the 2026 Annual Meetings, the Unit welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as for pre-arranged panels or roundtables provided that they include at least four different contributions on various religious and cultural contexts. The Unit strongly encourages proposals of panels foregrounding cross-cultural comparative perspectives (e. g. a similar topic explored in different religious traditions). Ideally, drafts of the contributions or long abstracts should be circulated in written form through the AAR/SBL app before the conference. Panels and Roundtables may also include a respondent. A co-chair or steering committee member of the Motherhood and Religions Unit will be added to the session as presider. 

With the 2026 call for papers, the Unit seeks proposals that critically assess how religious narratives, practices, and materialities of motherhood engage the presidential theme of FUTURE/S —whether through representations (e.g. iconography), discourses, practices (e.g. rituals), and artifacts (“material religion”).

We look forward to receiving proposals that enrich scholarly conversations on motherhood, religion, materiality, and the futures that communities create through their stories, practices, and everyday lives.

Motherhood, Religion, and Material Practices

The Motherhood and Religions Unit invites proposals that examine motherhood —embodied, imagined, contested, and enacted— through the material and lived dimensions of religions. Maternal practices and representations, including those tied to religions, are persistently grounded in objects, bodies, spaces, and sensory forms that complicate textual descriptions. These material elements often reveal how individual and communities imagine, resist, or foreclose possible futures, whether through everyday maternal labor, ritualized gestures, or iconic figures.

We welcome papers that investigate how religious narratives (not necessarily textual ones) and practices surrounding motherhood take shape materially: through figurines, ritual implements, clothing, foodways, built environments, bodily techniques, or sensory engagements. Such materialities frequently offer access to counter-memories and alternative religious imaginaries, including those of futures that are not just dystopic, ambiguous, or constrained, but also hopeful. Contributions may address past or contemporary contexts, as well as fictional ones, with links to religions; local, transnational, or diasporic communities; and diverse methodological approaches including archaeology, art history, material culture studies, ethnography, and lived religion.

Proposals might engage questions such as:
• How do objects, artifacts, and embodied practices construct, regulate, or reconfigure religious ideals of mothering?
• What sensory or artistic expressions (touch, sound, scent, taste, image, movement) shape maternal spiritual experience or devotional life?
• In what ways do material traces of mothering —such as votive offerings, domestic spaces, burial sites, clothing, or healing implements— express visions of collective flourishing, protection, or endurance?
• How do ethnographic accounts of pregnancy, birth, postpartum rituals, and infant care reveal forms of “futuring” enacted through maternal bodies and relationships?
• How might material practices challenge dominant textual narratives about motherhood, sanctity, gendered authority, or spiritual lineage?
• What alternative temporalities or speculative futures emerge from the study of maternal material religion, especially in communities facing political, economic, or ecological precarity?

We also encourage approaches that place feminist (especially matricentric feminism), womanist, queer, postcolonial, Indigenous, or ecological frameworks into conversation with material religion. Papers may explore maternal figures (historical or mythical), ritual specialists, spiritual mothers, and maternal archetypes whose material representations or embodied practices open or restrict future possibilities. Papers that address tensions between lived maternal realities (such as grief, loss, endurance, refusal and communal care) and idealized imagery or models shaped by religious frameworks are particularly welcome.

This session seeks to illuminate how religious traditions materialize motherhood across time and space, and how the material study of maternal lives can expand scholarly conversations about FUTURE/S in the academic study of religions. 

Nourishing Futures: Motherhood, Food, and Religion 
(possible co-sponsored session with the Food and Religion Unit)

The Motherhood and Religions Unit and the Food and Religion Unit invite proposals for a joint session exploring how the intertwined realms of motherhood and food practices shape religious communities, identities, and imagined futures. Food is a central site through which religious meaning, ethical formation, and cultural continuity are enacted, and mothers often act as the primary religious enculturators in this regard, through feeding, withholding, preparing, cultivating, sharing food, and passing on culinary and dietary traditions to maintain the continuity and future of the community. Foodways, as implemented by those who perform mother work for individuals and communities, also serve as powerful arenas of regulation, resistance, risk, and hope.

This session seeks papers that examine how religious traditions envision futures through maternal nourishment practices, dietary rules, prohibitions, and the transmission of food-related knowledge. We are especially interested in studies that highlight the material and embodied aspects of food and motherhood, asking how these practices sustain or unsettle inherited narratives of belonging, hierarchy, purity, gender, or kinship.

Topics may include:

• Maternal teaching of religious food systems: how children learn to inhabit food rules, taboos, and ethical or ritual foodways (such as selecting licit food, doing food offerings, fasting, etc.)
• Fasting, fattening, or food-based rites of preparation for motherhood
• Pregnancy food avoidances, cravings, and taboos as religious or spiritual practices
• Breastfeeding, human or other-than-human lactation, and maternal nourishment in religious traditions
• Embodied forms of care (growing, harvesting, preparing, or distributing food) as sites of ethical formation or spiritual responsibility
• How histories of scarcity, abundance, and ecological precarity shape maternal food practices and imagined futures
• Methodological and theoretical approaches to futuring in relation to motherhood, food, and religious community-making
• Seeds and growing things; generativity
• Creation and care, in particular Indigenous creation and care