Space, Place, and Religion Unit

We welcome individual papers, papers sessions, and roundtable proposals for topics exploring space and place as they relate to religion. We are always interested in papers and sessions that employ theoretically or methodologically self-conscious and innovative approaches to understanding space and place as they relate to, condition, and constitute aspects of religious life including belief, ritual, meaning, aesthetics, and experience. We welcome ethnographically-informed studies of sites and historically-informed studies of texts that shed light on the role of space and place in religious traditions. Space, Place, and Religion dedicates one of its sessions to religious spaces in Asia. Our Unit is committed to diversity and inclusivity; pre-arranged panels and sessions should reflect gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as well as the diversity of field, method, and scholarly rank.

For the November 2026 meeting, we are particularly interested in:

1. Proposals that contend with issues of authority and agency—what decisions and negotiations swirl around the construction and use of space? We welcome submissions that treat the legalities of space, including zoning, land use, and the juridical frameworks of environmental protections and resource extraction. Sacred sites are never only sacred; they are deeply implicated in the legal, economic, infrastructural, and environmental systems that produce space itself. We also invite submissions that consider environmental issues and resource extraction more broadly, and that point toward new understandings of religion in contexts of resource extraction, and the management and exploitation of lands and waters, including rivers and watersheds, mountain ecosystems, and energy infrastructures.
2. Proposals that explore refugee spaces. Refugee camps, detention centers, informal settlements, shelters, etc., are usually temporary responses to crisis. But these sites frequently become long-term and even permanent, landscapes of social, political, and religious life. This session invites papers that analyze such spaces as religiously significant environments shaped by design, governance, material infrastructure, and everyday practices.  We are especially interested in how refugee spaces are planned, built, regulated, and inhabited, how they often transform from temporary to permanent spaces, and what that means in reference to religion, and how religious actors and material and embodied practices are constrained or improvised in such spaces.
3. Proposals that consider transpacific networks that connect Asian contexts to the American West. This includes proposals on Asian religious spaces in the US, including in the mountain West and in the Denver area. We are especially interested in proposals that explore religious understandings of space-making, resettlement, environment, and resources, as well as proposals that analyze tensions between transmitted spatial practices and those that are prevalent in the American West.
4. Proposals that employ spatial methodologies, especially those that leverage new or emergent techniques in data, visualization, modeling, and spatial theory. We are particularly interested in work that pushes beyond descriptive “mapping” toward analytical, critical, and interpretive spatial methods. These might include autoethnographic or other critical qualitative methods. These might also interrogate specific spatial characteristics (temporality, ambiguity, ephemerality, etc.) or the understanding of “space” in new ways.
5. For a co-sponsorship with Religion and Memory Unit, proposals that address how “The Land Remembers.” Does memory require sentience? Can rocks, rivers, trees, and dirt be said to remember? How do landscapes hold the memories of what has happened on or to them? How do religious beliefs and practices about land shape commemorative practices, and how do landscapes shape religious notions of remembering? We are interested in papers that explore the connection between religion, memory, and land across religious traditions, geographic contexts, and time (both contemporary and/or historical).