Presidential Plenary: Otherwise, From Here: Graduate Students on the Futures Religious Studies Could Choose

This session invites four graduate students to do something religious studies rarely makes institutional space for: speculate concretely about what the field could become. Rather than rehearsing familiar critiques, each presenter begins from a single tangible change in how we structure graduate education, organize knowledge, relate to publics, or sustain scholarly lives, and traces its implications forward in a creative, experimental form. The session practices futuring as method in the disciplined imagination of alternatives grounded in changes we could actually make. Together, these four short presentations compose a speculative map of the fields we might build from the one we've inherited. Following the presentations, the session opens into a guided conversation among presenters and attendees, inviting the room to think together about the futures we want to choose and what it would take to build them.