Ritual Studies Unit

The Ritual Studies Unit invites individual papers and full panel proposals from a variety of religious and cultural traditions exploring ritual in various local and transnational contexts. Proposals should engage with ritual theory in some way. This year, in keeping with the AAR’s presidential theme of Future/s, we want to explore how ritual connects the past to future by preserving, adapting, critiquing, and creating modes of action that shape how the participants feel and think about who they are and who they can be. We are interested in sessions that experiment with new formats favoring increased interaction and discussion and we particularly encourage papers/presentations that involve actually doing ritual practices. We also like to see papers that bridge theoretical reflection with attention to specific practices, communities, technologies, texts, or case studies. Historical and philological scholarship is equally valued alongside ethnographic approaches.

This year, for the in-person conference in November we especially invite individual papers and full panel proposals that explore the following themes:

• The future of Ritual Studies: emerging scholars or theorists, new takes on foundational theories, new approaches or methods for studying ritual.
• Ritual and protest: ritual creativity in past, present, or imagined future protests; exploring when protest becomes a ritual.
• Secular/SBNR Ritual: rituals that emerge in secular spaces or for people who identify as spiritual but not religious; religion-like rituals for non-religious people.
• Artificial Intelligence in/as/for Ritual (for a possible co-sponsored session with the AI and Religion Unit): We invite papers that explore how artificial intelligence and ritual studies together illuminate questions of future(s). The convergence of these fields opens unique pathways for considering how futures are imagined, enacted, and materialized through both ancient practices and emergent technologies. Some papers may be related to particular practices (e.g., the AI Jesus taking confession in a church in Switzerland, algorithmic divination, virtual tarot, simulated rituals), or more theoretically at the intersection of ritual studies and artificial intelligence.
• Rituals and Mass Violence (for a possible co-Sponsorship with Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Unit): We invite papers that explore the intersections between ritualization and mass violence. Approaches to this topic may include themes such as rituals and victimhood, rituals and perpetration, and rituals and memories of mass violence. For example, how do communities facing violent persecution maintain rituals in situations of extreme disruption or develop rituals as a form of resilience and resistance? How do the perpetrators of large-scale violent acts ritualize their behaviours? What rituals develop for collective memory of violent histories and how do they draw on earlier traditions and/or create new innovations in community practice? 

Whenever possible, our sessions will be formatted to encourage interaction and group discussion on the basis of concise, pre-circulated papers of approximately five pages submitted for circulation by October 15, 2026. Because at least 30 minutes of every session will be reserved for discussion, presentation times will vary in accordance with the number of speakers in the session.

Statement of Purpose

This Unit provides a unique venue for the interdisciplinary exploration of ritual — broadly understood to include rites, ceremonies, religious and secular performances, and other ritual processes — in their many and varied contexts, and from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.