Contemporary Pagan Studies Unit

Contemporary Pagan Studies is an interdisciplinary Unit, and we welcome submissions of theoretically and analytically engaged papers and panels relating to modern Paganism, Witchcraft, Magic, and Polytheism, employing scholarly analysis to discuss the topic from any relevant methodology or theoretical orientation.

For a co-sponsored panel with the Religious Conversions unit on the topic of "Alternative Spiritualities and Reframing of Conversion Discourses” we are seeking proposals on how emergent traditions re-frame or re-conceptualize discourse around “conversion.” Inquires and proposals can engage expansion, additive and replacement models, texts, alchemical processes, homemaking, music, materiality, epiphanies or altered states of consciousness, shamanic encounters, or seduction, as examples. The session is interested in new ways of conceptualizing, narrativizing and framing both individual and collective spiritual change.

For a co-sponsored panel with Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit, we welcome descriptive or theoretical approaches to witches and the occult on social media (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and beyond), including how social media is changing ways of making meaning, authority and gender, cultural appropriation, connections to politics, aesthetics, consumerism, and forming community.

For a co-sponsored panel with the Music and Religion unit, we seek proposals for a joint session on musical Paganisms and their relationships to various nationalisms, ethnic identities and/or imagined communities. We encourage proposals that address pre-colonial ideologies and textual traditions, heritage construction, figurations of an "other," appropriations of national iconography and folk song in a variety of cultural contexts. As this session is proposed for the pilot AAR Zoom session in June 2024, accepted proposals should if possible outline tracks for a streaming playlist to be listened and engaged by all panelists before the session, as well as announced to interested attendees before the conference.