Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit
- Global and Comparative Indigenous Transborder Nations
Given the location near the international border for our upcoming meeting in San Antonio, we invite papers for a session highlighting transborder indigeneity across geographical regions in both the past and the present.
- Circumpolar Indigenous Peoples and Religious Traditions
We invite papers focused on circumpolar Indigenous perspectives, globally, and across a variety of scales and disciplinary perspectives. Possible co-sponsorship with the Space, Place, and Religion Unit.
Proposals exploring Indigenous Spirit medicine and their appropriation in Western psychedelic research and praxis. We welcome proposals addressing concerns such as patent registration, research methodologies, and ethical approaches to Indigenous traditional medicine. For possible co-sponsorship with the Contemplative Studies Unit and the Cognitive Science of Religion Unit.
- New Directions in Indigenous Religious Traditions
We invite provocative and cutting-edge scholarship from anywhere in this subfield, including, but not limited to, theoretical, methodological, and conceptual innovations in the study of Indigenous religious traditions and reflective studies on disciplinary histories.
a panel on pedagogy and the newly published volume, Indigenous Religious Traditions in 5 Minutes.
We seek proposals that address the genocidal aspects of European colonialism by historically linking or comparing the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, US Slavery, and the Holocaust. This approach may include an explicit assessment of or engagement with Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes—which he describes as tracing the origins of white supremacy through historically linking the genocide of Native Americans, US Slavery, and the Holocaust—or any comparative historical or conceptual analysis between any of these two atrocities. A comparison that includes a case of a genocide of Indigenous Peoples is of particular interest.
The Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit welcomes any theoretical, methodological, and conceptual proposals in the study of Indigenous religious traditions the world over. We are concerned with the interface of Indigenous religious traditions and modernity, colonial and postcolonial conditions, and local and global forces that shape the practice of Indigenous traditions and their categorizations. Though particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Indigenous religions, we are primarily grounded in the “history of religions” approach as it concerns the analysis of Indigenous traditions. We also emphasize Indigenous Methodologies among other Humanities and Social Sciences approaches. We strive for increasingly global perspectives with representation of Indigenous Peoples and traditions from all continents. Similarly, we aspire to include other, more-innovative and less conventional modes of scholarship enhancing our inclusion of creative, embodied, virtual, digital, and public-facing work.