This roundtable brings together a diverse panel of interdisciplinary scholars to celebrate, reflect on, and think with Lynne Gerber, Siri Colom, and Ariana Nedelman’s 10-episode podcast series “When We All Get to Heaven” (Eureka Street Productions, 2025). The product of over a decade’s worth of rigorous scholarship, “When We All Get to Heaven” looks at how a queer church in San Francisco (MCC San Francisco) faced the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. It weaves together a rich audio archive of over 1,200 cassette tapes and dozens of oral history interviews. It also incorporates the most recent, cutting-edge scholarship on religion and sexuality. The panel will critically engage with the podcast’s major contributions and themes. It will also reflect on the continuing relevance of this history today and on the promise and potential for new forms of audio media to reach broader academic and popular audiences.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
All time are listed in Eastern Time Zone.
Please note that this schedule is subject to change and is currently being updated. Please excuse our appearance as we finalize the schedule. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org.
Thank you to our 2026 Online June Annual Meeting Sponsors
Diamond: The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion - The Wabash Center | Wabash Center
Platinum: The Louisville Institute - Louisville Institute
Gold: Religion and American Culture: A journal of Interpretation - Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation - Religion and American Culture
Silver: Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life (APRIL) - Home - April Online
Baker Academic - https://bakeracademic.com/
Baylor University Press - https://www.baylorpress.com/
The Institute for Religion, Politics and Culture - https://www.iliff.edu/iliff-irpc/
The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture - https://www.issrnc.org/
This roundtable brings together a diverse panel of interdisciplinary scholars to celebrate, reflect on, and think with Lynne Gerber, Siri Colom, and Ariana Nedelman’s 10-episode podcast series “When We All Get to Heaven” (Eureka Street Productions, 2025). The product of over a decade’s worth of rigorous scholarship, “When We All Get to Heaven” looks at how a queer church in San Francisco (MCC San Francisco) faced the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. It weaves together a rich audio archive of over 1,200 cassette tapes and dozens of oral history interviews. It also incorporates the most recent, cutting-edge scholarship on religion and sexuality. The panel will critically engage with the podcast’s major contributions and themes. It will also reflect on the continuing relevance of this history today and on the promise and potential for new forms of audio media to reach broader academic and popular audiences.
“Where Do We Go From Here? A Decade of Black Liberation Theology of Disability,” commemorates the 10th Anniversary of the first Black Liberation Theology of Disability panel presented at the American Academy of Religion.
This anniversary gathering seeks to honor a historic and generative moment within the guild — one that expanded the discourse of Black theology, foregrounded the lived realities of persons with disabilities, and deepened our collective commitments to justice, embodiment, and liberation. As we mark this milestone, the panel will both reflect on the significance of that inaugural session and critically engage the question before us now: Where do we go from here?
The use of horror as a methodological and analytical tool for engaging religion, rituals, and sacred texts has recently emerged as a significant area of study. Brandon Grafius, twice nominated for the Bram Stoker award, is among the scholars working at this intersection, and his research has gained attention in both academic circles and broader discussions of horror. His scholarship provides scholars and students with an innovative framework for examining religion, ritual, and sacred texts through horror, especially film. This roundtable brings together scholars to engage Grafius’s work. Participants will explore how his approach reframes scriptural narratives, interprets the monstrous, and expands the methodological range of religious studies. They will also model this method and insights via recent films (Is God Is), building on the success of Sinners. The session invites critical dialogue on the interpretive possibilities and challenges that arise when horror theory and religion are placed in conversation.
The use of horror as a methodological and analytical tool for engaging religion, rituals, and sacred texts has recently emerged as a significant area of study. Brandon Grafius, twice nominated for the Bram Stoker award, is among the scholars working at this intersection, and his research has gained attention in both academic circles and broader discussions of horror. His scholarship provides scholars and students with an innovative framework for examining religion, ritual, and sacred texts through horror, especially film. This roundtable brings together scholars to engage Grafius’s work. Participants will explore how his approach reframes scriptural narratives, interprets the monstrous, and expands the methodological range of religious studies. They will also model this method and insights via recent films (Is God Is), building on the success of Sinners. The session invites critical dialogue on the interpretive possibilities and challenges that arise when horror theory and religion are placed in conversation.
Law in all of its modalities is intimately involved in the formation of subjectivity. Law sets expectations, shapes the bounds of propriety, creates and constrains possibilities, and disciplines and punishes. This is true whether law is imposed from the outside by authorities such as the state, cultivated as an internal set of norms and practices, or both. This panel examines the role of law in shaping religious subjectivity and the role of religious subjects in shaping and responding to the law. Panelists will explore the role of California's Alien Land Law of 1913 in shaping Asian American Islam; developmental orthodoxies in education and the forming of the American child; the impact of the asylum process on Korean immigrant religious practices and self-understandings; and the effect of school discipline laws that understand disabled children through the frame of deviance. Collectively, this panel interrogates whose futures the law makes possible.
Papers
After the passage of the Alien Land Law of 1913 in California, the well known statute excluding Asians from land ownership as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” South Asian migrant farmers found a variety of contractual loopholes to keep their lands and livelihoods. While scholars have written many social histories of these creative workarounds, this paper attempts to understand how they shaped Asian American religion -- specifically, Asian American Islam. Using archival materials, I examine how this period’s land lease contracts between South Asian migrants, white lawyers, and white business people produced bureaucratic intimacies that were normatively rich and socially complex, shaping these individuals’ deeply personal modes of relating to land, ownership, and the state. The paper will show that, by giving early South Asian Muslim migrants an American secular vocabulary of economics, these legal encounters were crucial in their story of immigrant religious formation.
This paper introduces the concept of "developmental orthodoxy" to analyze how American law governs children's futures by sorting developmental trajectories into orthodox and heretical categories. Through a close reading of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) alongside Tennessee's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for minors, I trace how the figure of the child operates in legal reasoning as a site where the state's investment in futurity becomes visible. In Yoder, the Court celebrated Amish parents' right to withdraw children from formal education because their alternative schooling produced "good farmers and good citizens"; in Tennessee, the state overrides parental authority to prevent treatments that "might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex." Drawing on Lauren Berlant's work on citizenship and futurity and Lee Edelman's concept of reproductive futurism, I argue that both cases reveal the state functioning as arbiter of which children, and which futures, merit legal protection.
How does immigration law shape migrant subjectivities? The paper examines whether and how migrants’ engagement with the asylum institution brings about changes in their religious practices and self-understandings, drawing on ethnographic research among ethnic Korean migrants from China who applied for asylum in the U.S. as Christians. The paper unpacks the black box through which immigration law shapes migrant subjectivities in variable and dynamic ways by focusing on their future-making. Various intermediaries and transnational migrant communities provide competing cultural scripts, creating frictions in migrants’ future-making. Whether and how these frictions are coordinated shape migrants’ self-transformation. The paper demonstrates how the interplay between asylum law, Korean immigrant churches, and transnational migrant communities shaped whether Korean Chinese migrants applied for asylum as Christians, how they organized the prolonged refugee status determination process, and how they made futures out of it, refusing or embracing Christian conversion as a desirable and plausible future.
This paper examines how contemporary school discipline laws shape the futures of disabled children in the United States. Placing recent policies such as Texas House Bill 6 in conversation with the historical precedent of Buck v. Bell (1927), it argues that legal frameworks governing school discipline can translate disability-related differences into behavioral deviance, legitimizing exclusion in the name of institutional order. While Buck v. Bell sought to regulate the reproductive futures of disabled persons, modern disciplinary regimes increasingly govern their educational futures through suspension, removal, and alternative placements.
Building on Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” this roundtable considers the various historical, colonial, and contemporary appropriations of yoga toward a “politics of death” (Mbembe 2003). Focusing both on yoga as spiritual philosophy and yoga as a psychophysical practice, the panelists in this roundtable interrogate how governmental institutions and far-right movements use yoga in varying ways to advance state and political power and dictate how certain populations become destined for life and others become destined for death and structural violence. Together panelists explore broader topics of yoga as power, the Western white supremacy to conspirituality pipeline, the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, yoga diplomacy, necropolitical individualism, Zionist appropriations of omwashing, and Brahmanical Hindutva to show how powerful political actors instrumentalize components of yogic practices, meditations, and spiritual philosophies as weapons against oppressed people and, ultimately, themselves.
Building on Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” this roundtable considers the various historical, colonial, and contemporary appropriations of yoga toward a “politics of death” (Mbembe 2003). Focusing both on yoga as spiritual philosophy and yoga as a psychophysical practice, the panelists in this roundtable interrogate how governmental institutions and far-right movements use yoga in varying ways to advance state and political power and dictate how certain populations become destined for life and others become destined for death and structural violence. Together panelists explore broader topics of yoga as power, the Western white supremacy to conspirituality pipeline, the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, yoga diplomacy, necropolitical individualism, Zionist appropriations of omwashing, and Brahmanical Hindutva to show how powerful political actors instrumentalize components of yogic practices, meditations, and spiritual philosophies as weapons against oppressed people and, ultimately, themselves.
Building on Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” this roundtable considers the various historical, colonial, and contemporary appropriations of yoga toward a “politics of death” (Mbembe 2003). Focusing both on yoga as spiritual philosophy and yoga as a psychophysical practice, the panelists in this roundtable interrogate how governmental institutions and far-right movements use yoga in varying ways to advance state and political power and dictate how certain populations become destined for life and others become destined for death and structural violence. Together panelists explore broader topics of yoga as power, the Western white supremacy to conspirituality pipeline, the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, yoga diplomacy, necropolitical individualism, Zionist appropriations of omwashing, and Brahmanical Hindutva to show how powerful political actors instrumentalize components of yogic practices, meditations, and spiritual philosophies as weapons against oppressed people and, ultimately, themselves.