In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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This workshop will introduce religious studies instructors to a collection of case studies for classroom use, curated by Interfaith America. These twenty-seven case studies present real-life scenarios from health care settings. In this interactive workshop, participants will practice using these case studies and will leave more equipped to incorporate them into their classrooms. Sample case studies feature a Sikh patient with head trauma, a Buddhist patient resisting pain medicine, a Hindu patient self-administering Ayurvedic cleansing, a Native American patient requesting a smudging ceremony in hospice care, a Haredi Jewish patient concerned about radiation tattoos, and Muslim parents concerned about hospital food and insulin therapy for their diabetic child. These case studies raise issues of religious literacy, intercultural competency, diversity accommodations, and ethics. The case studies also immerse students in practical applications of their knowledge. Workshop facilitators include case study authors and faculty who use these case studies in their teaching.

This workshop will introduce religious studies instructors to a collection of case studies for classroom use, curated by Interfaith America. These twenty-seven case studies present real-life scenarios from health care settings. In this interactive workshop, participants will practice using these case studies and will leave more equipped to incorporate them into their classrooms. Sample case studies feature a Sikh patient with head trauma, a Buddhist patient resisting pain medicine, a Hindu patient self-administering Ayurvedic cleansing, a Native American patient requesting a smudging ceremony in hospice care, a Haredi Jewish patient concerned about radiation tattoos, and Muslim parents concerned about hospital food and insulin therapy for their diabetic child. These case studies raise issues of religious literacy, intercultural competency, diversity accommodations, and ethics. The case studies also immerse students in practical applications of their knowledge. Workshop facilitators include case study authors and faculty who use these case studies in their teaching.

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.

The Status of Racial and Ethnic Minoritized People in the Professions Committee recommends policies and good practices to assure the full access, belonging, and academic freedom of racial/ethnic minoritized persons within the Academy and develops programs to enhance their status in their professions. If you identify as belonging to this constituency among AAR, we invite you to participate in our listening session. During this time, we hope to gather and learn more about how CREM can better represent the needs and interests of our constituency.