Law, Religion, and Culture Unit

As always, the Law, Religion, and Culture Unit welcomes proposals for individual papers, papers sessions, and roundtable panel proposals, including author-meets-critics sessions, on any aspect of the cultural, historical, critical, and comparative study of the intersections of law and religion in Asia, Africa, Europe, or the Americas.

• “The child" as a category in religion and law (as a possible joint session with the Childhood Studies and Religion Unit)

This year, our unit particularly invites proposals that address “the child" as a category in religion and law. This topic includes issues such as age of consent for religious identity/practice, the problem of religion in family law, and child welfare in relation to religious communities, especially in the context of legal frameworks such as the U.S. Indian Child Welfare Act (currently under debate in the U.S. Supreme Court). We also welcome paper or panel proposals about the closely related topic of law and education and childhood (e.g., recent U.S. school-board wars over "Critical Race Theory" and other types of claims about parental autonomy and parents' rights).”

Other issues of interest include:

• religion and (or religious) bureaucracy
• religion and intellectual property law
• the entanglement of institutions and legal bodies and the actual bodies of their members (including, in this regard, bodies within the corporate body of the AAR)
• global issues of emergent religions and the law