Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The analysis of digital capitalism has explored how capitalist apps and platforms exploit gig workers, including through poor working conditions, low pay, continuous surveillance, and the lack of benefits. However, the ecological impact is yet to be explored. This paper explores how food delivery apps not only contribute to the exploitation of workers but also to ecological destruction through increased CO2 emissions, packaging waste, food waste, and other impacts.  The paper argues that the exploitation of digital labor and ecological destruction are interconnected as platform owners profit massively. Therefore, deep solidarity is necessary to advocate for a just economy. The first part of the paper explores the interconnected impacts of food delivery apps from labor and ecological perspectives. The second part demonstrates how deep solidarity among delivery drivers, restaurants, and consumers can be imagined as they comprise the majority of people living in the Capitalocene of platform capitalism.  

Tourism in Bali has become a destructive force that disturbs living harmony in the local context, in terms of Balinese people, culture, and nature, for capital accumulation. In contrast to this, Bali has the concept of "Tri Hita Karana," which views all beings as subjects for mutual respect. However, the state has been treating Bali’s cultural harmony as reproductive labor that exists behind them, naturalizing it as “domestic labor”. I want to highlight these tourism aspects and tendencies to create an ontological resistance that shapes Bali tourism's existence as an essential subject with complete agency. I argue that the concealment of domestic labor creates the atmosphere that produces and sustains the assumption of a global commodity, ‘paradise’. The recognition of living culture as economic value, in which culture exists as a primary source, is substantial in determining the value of socio-ecological religious existence in tourism.

This paper examines how late Kubravī hagiography in Central Asia imagined the future of saintly authority during political upheaval. It analyzes the Majmaʿ al-faẓāʾil, a hagiography completed in 1606 by Mīr Ḥusayn in honor of his father and master, Pāyanda Sāktarigī (d. 1601). The work survives in a single manuscript preserved at the al-Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent and provides rare insight into the later history of the Kubraviyya in Central Asia. The text constructs a vision of continuing saintly authority through lineage, visionary experience, and prophetic foresight. By situating sainthood within cycles of sacred time and political upheaval, it embeds the present within an ongoing genealogy linking past masters, living disciples, and future saints, highlighting the importance of Central Asian materials for rethinking sacred temporality in Islamic mysticism.

This paper examines Molla ʿAbdullāh Ilāhī’s (d. 1491) commentary on the Wāridāt of Bedreddin of Simavna (d. 1420), a Sufi jurist and rebel accused of heterodoxy. Focusing on waḥdat al-wujūd (Unity of Being), this study argues that while both reflect a shared mystical monism, Ilāhī places primacy on the "Muhammadan Truth" (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya) and rejects Bedreddin’s skepticism regarding the afterlife by grounding his analysis in the Qur’an and Sunna. In keeping with the 2026 AAR theme “Future/s,” Ilāhī’s commentary represents a pivotal reshaping of a heterodox text to conform to the Naqshbandi Order’s Orthodox Sunnism. A student of ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār, Ilāhī became a foundational figure in spreading this order upon returning to his—and Bedreddin’s—home region of Rumelia. By analyzing the Kashf al-Wāridāt, this paper reveals how mystical monism was strategically reframed to suit an emerging Sunni orthodoxy that dominated the future of Ottoman Sufism.

While recent decades have shown a steady academic interest in the Bā ʿAlawī sāda and their large diasporic communities across the Indian Ocean region, the premodern origins of their Sufi tradition in Hadhramaut remains poorly understood, with lingering concerns surrounding the reliability of available primary sources on their formative history in the valley. By closely re-examining the available primary sources from the 15th and 16th centuries (historical chronicles; biographical literature; Sufi intellectual works), this paper argues against the predominant academic narrative that far from reflecting a provincialist phenomenon, as the product of an intellectual and cultural backwater, the Bā ʿAlawī scholarly tradition, and Hadhrami Sufism more broadly, remained historically well-integrated within the wider intellectual and spiritual currents of western Yemen and the Hejaz, exhibiting a sophisticated intellectual engagement with the wider legacy of philosophical Sufism, including the thought and doctrine of its foremost classical authority, Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī. 

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) stands as a theological architect of both Ismaili and Twelver Shiism, the reviver of Avicennian philosophical thought, and the founder of his own political and ethical school. While many works have been published on his role in Shiite theology and Avicennian thought, little has been produced on the influence of his political thought. Furthermore, little has been done on the role of Plato’s Republic on Ṭūsī’s political thought. The last study conducted on Ṭūsī’s political thought was G.M. Wickens' translation of Ṭūsī’s Nasirean Ethics (Ar. Akhlaq-e-Nasirī) published in 1964. However, since this translation, new studies on Ṭūsī’s political thought have seldom been produced.  This paper examines Ṭūsī’s political thought from the perspective of Plato’s Republic and commentaries on it that entered into the Islamic world.

This paper examines the life, death, and evolving cultural afterlife of “Aunt” Julia Brown, a Louisiana midwife, healer, and formerly enslaved woman whose memory has become central to one of the region’s most enduring Voodoo legends. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and local folklore, the study reconstructs Brown’s historical presence in the St. John the Baptist Parish community while tracing how her death in 1915 became linked to narratives of supernatural power and a devastating hurricane. The paper explores the transformation of Brown from a community caregiver into a touristic symbol of “Voodoo” haunting, revealing how racialized and gendered mythmaking shapes public memory of Black religious women. By analyzing her legend’s circulation in ghost tours, online storytelling, and paranormal media, this research highlights the tension between historical recovery and commercialized folklore, and considers how Brown’s story illuminates broader patterns in African American religious history, memory, and cultural commodification.

This paper explores how African diasporic futurist artists, such as Geraldo Oliveira and Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba, are using AI and generative technologies to transform colonial archives. In their work, bodies are isolated from ethnographic photographs, algorithmically recombined, and embedded within cosmic, speculative landscapes. These technological interventions disrupt linear, documentary notions of time, making the archive a living field where past, present, and future co-constitute one another. Moreover, by centering African ritual temporalities—rooted in event-driven, cyclical, and relational understandings of time—their art mirrors the recursive logic of algorithmic systems. In doing so, their work critiques colonial frameworks that imposed linear, hierarchical temporalities and reveals how African conceptions of time provide a vital lens for reconfiguring archives and digital systems, fostering a more expansive, interconnected, and relational experience of temporality.

The dialogue between ethnography and theology has created fruitful ground to consider both the particular theological framings of people’s lives, and the ways that people’s politics, socialities, and relationships build theological worlds and ecclesial institutions. To continue expanding the boundaries of these conversations generally, and apply them to Orthodox Christianity more specifically, academics should take stock of the epistemological assumptions that each discipline smuggles into their analysis. This paper argues that the dominant ethnographic gaze of our contemporary moment – a gaze which often takes a deliberately and admirably engaged stance against inequalities – runs the risk of equating all inequality with injustice and thus misses the theological and liberatory nuances of Orthodox Christian hierarchy. The author suggests that to escape this reductive analysis, the integration of anthropological principles into Orthodox ecclesiologies must veer away from a discourse of reproach and towards a creative reinterpretation of the possibilities of non-egalitarian church structures. 

The puzzle of the relation between theology and culture is one of the defining theological problems of modernity, which has been transformed in recent decades through serious engagement with sociological and anthropological modes of inquiry. This paper takes up one trajectory of such engagement—that of Protestant theologians’ turn to ethnographic methods over the last thirty years—and places it into conversation with the needs of contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology. Does Orthodox Christianity have an internal framework within which such a deployment of ethnographic methods can produce valid theological insights? The fruitfulness of “lived theology” in an Orthodox key will be demonstrated through examples from recent ethnographic research in Cyprus, where hagiographical media provide means of self-understanding, narrative interpretation of the chaos of the world, and religiously coded resistance to exploitation and domination.

This paper examines how ethnographic identity shapes and challenges Orthodox ecclesiology in diaspora parish contexts. While Orthodox communities outside traditionally Orthodox countries often function as sites of cultural preservation and collective memory, such ethnographic cohesion can both sustain belonging and obscure the Church’s catholic and ecumenical vocation. Drawing on five years of pastoral service in multicultural parishes in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the study integrates theological reflection with qualitative, practice-based observation to treat the parish as a locus of lived theology. In dialogue with historical and contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology, it analyzes the practical difficulties, risks, and possibilities that emerge when diverse languages and cultures converge within one community. The paper argues that empirical attention to ecclesial practices can illuminate how multicultural parishes, rather than compromising tradition, may become privileged spaces for manifesting the Church’s unity and missionary character.
 

The paper proposes an ethnographic-theological approach to Orthodox ecclesiology, grounded in the Greek-speaking Orthodox presence in Belgium as a focused diaspora case study. Rather than treating ecclesiology solely as doctrinal articulation, it examines how ecclesial identity is embodied, negotiated, and interpreted within migratory, multilingual, and digitally mediated parish contexts.

Drawing on qualitative observation and “thick description” of liturgical practice, catechesis, parish leadership, and communal interaction, the study explores how migration reshapes perceptions of authority, how intergenerational dynamics affect the reception of tradition, and how digital mediation reconfigures participation and belonging.

Engaging debates in ethnographic theology, the paper argues that empirical attentiveness does not replace normative ecclesiology but complicates abstract accounts of it. By holding together descriptive inquiry and theological claims about communion, the study highlights both the generative potential and epistemological risks of the ethnographic turn in contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology.

What does it take for a vernacular Christianity to remain relevant into the 21st century? What is at stake when local religious practices and materialities, seen as vital manifestations of cultural memory, undergo “heritagization” and commodification for the cultural tourism circuit? This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research. I examine vernacular Catholicism and tensions surrounding religious futures in and around Chimayó, a Hispano community in northern New Mexico. This region is awash in the materialities of vernacular Catholicism – carved saints, colonial-era altar screens, ex-votos, and roadside shrines. Material religion is engaged as an anchor for Nuevomexicano identity and supports a flagging economy, yet local people also contest its commodification for cultural outsiders. I argue that the navigation of the line between embracing and resisting heritagization can produce ambivalence but also potentiates a nuanced, active engagement of vernacular religion as a culturally-grounded resource for contemporary and future generations.

This paper examines how Korean immigrant lay believers in diaspora Presbyterian churches destabilize and reinterpret core Christian concepts through dialogical Bible study. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a congregational Bible study group in the United States, it analyzes how participants negotiate the meanings of theological language in relation to their everyday contexts and practical needs. Concepts such as God, blessing, the gospel, faith, sin, and obedience are collectively reworked through dialogue. I describe this process as “dialogical blessing,” in which religious meanings emerge through communal interaction. The study highlights how linguistic practices reshape authority, identity, and belonging in contemporary diaspora Christian communities.

The Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition has long been associated with emphases on conservatism of its liturgical forms, and musical settings are typically no exception. However, the recent growth of Orthodox Christianity in the United States, particularly from converts of Evangelical backgrounds, has begun to challenge the primacy of Orthodox Christian music’s predominantly Russian and Greek origins. This paper will examine recent developments in Orthodox Christian liturgical music in the United States, particularly the emergence of what is sometimes referred to as an “Appalachian” or “American” Orthodox style that melds the textual and liturgical roots of with American folk music by analyzing the role of textual primacy (Seeger 1986) in three English-language hymns that typify various stages of an emergent American Orthodox musical genre. Ultimately, the musical identity that is produced maintains Orthodox Christianity’s distinctiveness from other Christian musical traditions while also satisfying nostalgic desires for authenticity in religious music.