In response to the 2026 presidential theme FUTURE/S, this session explores how religion shapes and transforms conditions of violence beyond identity-centered frameworks. Rather than approaching religion primarily through the category of “minority,” the panel advances relational, material, and postidentity perspectives that foreground processes of becoming, worldmaking, and critique.
The papers examine how violence is produced, contested, and reconfigured across diverse contexts. Contributions include an analysis of Indigenous-led repatriation practices that reframe museum collections as kin and articulate a non-punitive critique of colonial violence; a study of climate adaptation workshops in the Rocky Mountains that mobilize religious narratives to mitigate conflict over increasingly scarce water resources; and a global history of coffee that traces Islamic and postcolonial networks of solidarity and alternative social imaginaries. These case studies are grounded by a conceptual intervention that develops “minor religion” as a critical analytic for rethinking religion beyond regimes of recognition, governance, and fixed identity.
Together, the panel reframes religion as a dynamic field of relations through which violence is both reproduced and transformed, highlighting how alternative epistemologies and practices open pathways toward more just and sustainable futures.
This paper develops a genealogy of the “minor” in relation to religion, tracing a shift from “minority” as a juridico-political category toward “minor” as a postidentity, critical mode of theorizing religion. Contemporary approaches to religious diversity and inequality remain largely framed by recognition, rights, and inclusion, yet often reproduce the epistemic hierarchies through which religion is defined and governed.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor, alongside queer-of-color critique (Muñoz) and postsecular feminist theory (Mahmood), I conceptualize “minor religion” not as identity but as practice: a process of becoming that destabilizes majoritarian norms in theology and religious studies. Examples from space - such as the “Overview Effect” and adapted ritual practices - highlight religion as relational, situated, and open to alternative futurities beyond identity-centered paradigms.
Indigenous calls to repatriate human remains rehumanize objects in museum contexts: skulls, skeletons, hair, once called specimens, become relatives (again). This profound moral shift from ‘objects’ to ‘subjects’ recognizes violence in a field that was once progressively named "science." This paper considers a critique of violence in the rehumanization process in one repatriation, in this example, through the return of 14 Yawuru and Karajarri ancestors to Broome, Australia, from an Ethnographic Museum in Leipzig, Germany. It draws on ethnographic and historical research alongside Walter Benjamin's essay Toward a Critique of Violence to consider how naming kin allows speakers to understand something anew as violence without issuing guilt, catalyzing a sense of obligation and not punishment. Drawing from her experience as a repatriation coordinator and museum conservator as well as historical research on Yawuru kinship systems, Hamburger will discuss repatriation and religion in terms of the rhetoric of kinship that might describe an Aboriginal critique of violence that asks Western institutions to consider relations to Indigenous people.
This paper reports on transdisciplinary scenario planning workshops that imagine viable futures with Indigenous and settler communities in the Rocky Mountains, home to headwaters of three major rivers with Indigenous heritages that provide water for millions of people downstream: the Snake River (Columbia River), the Wind River (Missouri River), and the Green River (Colorado River). As water futures grow more uncertain on a warming Earth, the risk of violence increases. The paper frames the relationship between natural resource scarcity and the activation of religious language to justify violence. With the ascent of settler community Dominionism and white Christian nationalism, water futures adaptation planning networks on both sides of the contact zone might shelter burgeoning Indigenous, sustainable worldmaking. The orientations forged in scenario planning workshops, where memories and stories meet best science future scenarios recall parable and storytelling traditions and provide a vehicle for religious studies analysis and community engagement.
With the aim of advancing the study of Islam’s contributions to anticolonialism in southern Africa, this paper focuses on the legacies of ʿAlawiyyah Sufi thought and practice in diasporic engagements with the global coffee trade. Bringing my fieldwork and archival research in South Africa’s Western Cape to literary analysis, I explore the ways in which the pleasures and perils of coffee have constituted and re-animated ʿAlawiyyah-centered strategies for building solidarity against the ravages of Euro-Asiatic slavery and mortgage capitalism. In line with Africana studies, my paper considers insights made available through greater attention to global histories of food and the environmental humanities.