In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Museums are sacralizing institutions. They make decisions about what material culture will be preserved, set apart, and narrated as valuable, special, irreplaceable, priceless. Museums make the sacred throughout various forms of frontstage and backstage labor: from forming and maintaining collections to managing research access, curatorial choices and practices, and designing public exhibitions. The sacralizing work of museums is capacious, transecting contingent binaries such as religious-secular, religion-culture, religion-science, religion-heritage, and religion-politics. This pre-conference workshop invites participants who are interested in collaboratively exploring the ways in which museums perform sacralization.

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This media workshop is designed for religion scholars interested in exploring podcasting, youtube, and other platforms as venues for advancing the public understanding of religion. Participants will gain an understanding of foundational skills necessary to launch and maintain audio or video projects, including scripting, recording, editing, and publishing. The workshop will offer critical insight into the evolving pedagogical landscape, examining how these media can be powerful tools for teaching, public scholarship, and engagement beyond the classroom. Whether you're looking to integrate these efforts into your curriculum or launch your own scholarly series, this workshop will equip you with the knowledge and confidence to get started.

This 4-hour workshop, Experiential Religious Studies Pedagogies for Flourishing Animal and Multispecies Futures, convenes instructors in religious studies—particularly those teaching animals and pluralist religion courses—to cultivate concrete, transferable pedagogical practices capable of creatively engaging the current state of multispecies destruction.

We aim to craft experiential, interactive, and reflective assignments that thread the needle between action and reflection while navigating embodied experience, tendencies among students for conflict avoidance, balancing empirical animal data with theoretical arguments, intersectional overlap with race, gender and species violence, and overlooked forms of knowing among more-than-human entities and marginal people.

Over four sessions, presenters/participants will frame a course, scaffold skills and trust-building, evaluate assignments, and draft their own embodied encounter-reflection assessment. Participants will leave a pedagogy packet of sample assignments, rubric elements, interactive techniques, and a new network of teaching colleagues committed to advancing experiential religious studies pedagogies for multispecies flourishing.

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