Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Join AAR leadership to learn about the American Academy of Religion, member benefits, program offerings, and how to get involved. 

This workshop will present and invite discussion of a draft proposal toward new “AAR Guidelines on Faculty Employment Practices in the Study of Religion.” These guidelines are based on revisions of the previous "Standards Pertaining to Contingent Faculty in the Study of Religion Board Statement (2015)."   Expanding on the earlier Statement and addressing current circumstances of academic labor at a time when tenure-track appointments are no longer the norm, the new guidelines, drafted by Noh and the ALCF committee, will be proposed to the AAR Board for adoption in November 2026.  Workshop participants will be provided with the current draft. Feedback from discussion will help shape the final draft that will go before the board.  Please bring your experience and expertise and contribute to this important process.

Religious studies instructors and TAs are ideally positioned to equip future clinicians to offer person-centered care to patients from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds yet applying scholarly expertise to clinical contexts requires additional support and resources. This workshop, a collaboration between the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding and the Institute for Spirituality and Health, addresses that need directly. 

Drawing on Tanenbaum's Trigger Topics framework — which identifies areas where religion and spirituality most consequentially shape clinical decisions, including end-of-life care, treatment refusals, and ritual observance across disparate health care settings — participants will engage religiously diverse case studies and gain hands-on familiarity with free and low-cost teaching materials immediately applicable in undergraduate religious studies courses for pre-health students. 

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. This session will be focused on building the future of religion and public life. It is geared toward discerning the priorities and the stakes of the academic field of religion and public life and imagining its future. Key issues discussed will be new avenues for programming and public-facing research as well as creating an infrastructure for our network to ensure mutual support and sustainability.

The webinar builds on the informational session the committee organized last year on shifts in higher education labor, but this time with a more focused frame: gendered precarity, institutional nonresponse to faculty excellence, and the gap between the actual composition of the faculty workforce and the structures that govern it. To give a sense of direction for the roundtable, here are some possible guiding questions:

• What does contingency currently look like in practical terms across institutions and fields?
• How are gender, caregiving, and livelihood insecurity shaping contingent faculty experience?
• What happens when contingent faculty achieve visible excellence, such as major fellowships or book contracts, but institutions fail to respond appropriately?
• What kinds of institutional responses are most notably absent?
• What can scholarly societies and committees realistically do?

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. 

Join scholars of religion, practitioners and clergy, and activists on the ground to explore the religious response to the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from and beyond Minneapolis. This session will explore resources and advocacy efforts on campuses, neighborhoods, and local community religious organizations. 

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This roundtable is an interdisciplinary discussion of newer developments in the rapidly changing context of North American Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity and the research that investigates these developments. The discussions expand the insights of the Brill Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism (2021) with regional supplements focusing attention on regional, contextual, and racial differentiation in the emerging research on Pentecostalism. Topics include psychological and neurobiological analyses on tongues; the fringes of Pentecostal; Pentecostalism, New Apostolic Reformation, and Christian Nationalism; Pentecostalism, digital religion, and celebrity; and Reggaetón, Pentecostal Rappers, and Bad Bunny.