In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The 2026 Media and Religion pre-conference workshop will reflect on the intersections of media, religion, and community—not as fixed categories, but as active and unstable formations through which people come to belong, to struggle, and to imagine otherwise. In keeping with this year’s presidential theme of “Future/s,” how might we think about what the study of religion and media can offer to the theoretical and practical work of community formation and vice-versa? How are communities mediated, fragmented, destroyed, or newly constituted in our hypermediated moment, and what form(s) do they take? And how might these questions help us think about a range of possible futures: political, planetary, professional, intellectual?

This workshop is for anyone who is involved in (or interested in being involved in) programs/centers/institutes or initiatives related to religion and public life.

The workshop offers a full day devoted to networking and community building, peer resourcing, skills building, and leadership development. Special sessions will be devoted to skills-building such as funding, staffing and infrastructure, and collaboration across disciplines. We will also be diving into the key content issues and opportunities for increased scholarly engagement and effectiveness at the intersections of religion and public life as well as envisioning pathways for future mutual coordination and collaboration.

This is an ongoing forum for sharing best practices, pool ideas, and developing collaborations. We welcome all who are interested to join our network.

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.