Space, Place, and Religion Unit

We welcome individual papers, papers sessions, and roundtable proposals for topics exploring space and place as they relate to religion. We are always interested in papers and sessions that employ theoretically or methodologically self-conscious and innovative approaches to understanding space and place as they relate to, condition, and constitute aspects of religious life including belief, ritual, meaning, aesthetics, and experience. We welcome ethnographically-informed studies of sites and historically-informed studies of texts that shed light on the role of space and place in religious traditions. Space, Place, and Religion dedicates one of its sessions to religious spaces in Asia. Our Unit is committed to diversity and inclusivity; pre-arranged panels and sessions should reflect gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as well as the diversity of field, method, and scholarly rank.

In addition, this year we are particularly interested in the following topics:

Innovative and Creative Approaches to Teaching and Learning about Religious Space and Place

We are hoping for this panel to be divided into two sessions: one in June (on line) and one in November (in person). Though the sessions will stand alone, we intend them to be in conversation with one another, and to that end, we’ll ask for papers to be pre-circulated in order to provide opportunities for dialogue between the two. The sessions will address innovative ways of teaching space, place and religion, whether face to face or in virtual environments. We encourage submissions on innovative teaching methods and technologies (virtual/augmented reality, other immersive environments, artificial intelligence, game-based learning, GIS and mapping technologies, to name a few examples) and especially ones that can be creatively presented in both the online and in person format.  

Imagined Religious Space(s) and Place(s)

This session will explore the imagined space(s), place(s), and geographies religious practices and practitioners construct. Contributions might examine Vedic sacrificial space, the space of meditative practices and seances, or what Judith Weisenfeld calls “shadow maps,” produced by Black and other historically subjugated people to both navigate violent landscapes and to chart imaginative spatial worlds.

Marginal Geographies in Space Place and Religion

Marginal geographies blur the usual moral demarcation between the licit and the illicit. The margins afford space where the underserved and neglected must muster material, social, and spiritual resources to get things done. We are especially interested in papers that explore the violence of economic development by centering the voices on the margins of development projects. We are also interested in papers that explore the blurring of the boundaries between the licit and illicit, shedding new light on the ways legal structures, social forms, and spatial practices render morality or legality available to some but not others. This could include analyses of criminalized people and places, and the marginalized geographies they create, including (but not limited to) unhoused persons, participants in informal or extralegal economies, and migrant workers.

Marginal Spaces and Marginal Beings in Tibet and the Himalayas- Co-sponsored Panel with Tibet and Himalayan Religions Unit

Panel Organizer - Brandon Dotson (dotson.brandon@gmail.com)

Tibet has long conceived of itself as a frontier or a borderland of unruly human and non-human beings in need of taming, mostly by Indian Buddhism. Now absent from most maps, and facing the erasure of even the name "Tibet," per PRC mandate, Tibetan language and culture occupies an increasingly marginalized space. To put this contemporary space of the margin - and its dynamics of violence and non-violence - into perspective, this panel invites contributions that concern marginal spaces and marginal beings in Tibet and the Himalayas. Contributions might examine marginal figures such as butchers and morticians, zombies, wildmen, and revenants; interpersonal relations with beings such as sinpos, lumos, and dakinis; utopias ("non-places") such as hidden lands (beyul) and paradises; or liminal spaces of pilgrimage, crossroads, and rivers.

Theorizing Space and Place in Religion: Foucault’s Heterotopias- Co-sponsored Panel with Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Unit

Panel Organizer- Brooke Schedneck (schedneckb@rhodes.edu)

Michel Foucault labeled counter-spaces that influence, contest, mirror, and invert as heterotopias, in contrast to utopias. Even though such places exist in reality, they are at the same time other and outside of mainstream society. Such spaces naturally align with religious practices such as asceticism, mysticism, and eschatology, which all contest authority and orthodoxy, in sacred places such as deserts and mountains. We are seeking contributions on such heterotopias and reflections on its meaning for this panel.

Sustaining Environmental Change for possible Co-sponsored Session with African Diaspora Unit

Currently, the earth is in radical transition, resisting and responding to human impact in a myriad of tumultuous ways. This session will explore how we can make sense of climate change, survival of ourselves and the planet, and environmental justice in relation to African/Diaspora cosmology and cultural and spiritual beliefs and ceremonial practices. Contributions might explore, for example, Yoruba indigenous culture’s cosmological care for the ecology, the concept of Àṣẹ, which champions the power of rocks, trees, wind, thunder, waterfalls, and lightning as things, or how orixá constitute the indigenous ecologies that can support our lives and culture.

Buddhism outside Asia and the transnational (with a possible co-sponsorship with the Space, Place, and Religion Unit)