Music and Religion Unit
The Music and Religion section is perpetually interested in panels that combine performance and scholarly reflection, and/or book panel discussions that help to advance the field. These ideas can be incorporated into any of the other ideas below.
- “Words of Protest, Words of Peace. Musical agency in Sikh activism and Beyond” to be co-sponsored with the Sikh Studies unit (nirinjan.khalsa@lmu.edu)
- Music as a tool of religious violence and/or music as a tool of religious healing
- Indigenous religious musics from around the World
- Religious Music at the Borderlands and/or Religious Music and Immigration
- Musical representations of religion in children's media (e.g. Disney films)
- Music in American Buddhism (esp. related to Buddhist Churches of America)
- Anniversary-themed presentations surrounding musical works and music scene
We are also soliciting submissions for a session to be offered during the pilot AAR Zoom session in June cosponsored by the Music and Religion and the Contemporary Pagan Studies units:
With the continuing re-alignment of nationalistic and ethnic identities in the globalizing early 21st century, the Contemporary Pagan Studies unit and Music and Religion unit 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. This session is proposed for the pilot AAR Zoom session in June 2024. Accepted proposals should if possible propose tracks for a streaming playlist to be listened and engaged by all panelists before the session.
The discipline of religious studies has expanded beyond linguistic rationality to include the importance of musical phenomena in the development of religious communities and religious consciousness. Meanwhile, theological aesthetics is moving beyond the textual to include music as a resource in its own right for constructive and transformative meaning-making. Music, religiously speaking, is no mere adjunct to the study of sacred space, ritual, visual art, liturgy, or philosophical aesthetics; rather, it is a distinct field in its own right — with its own particular content, methods, and norms. By placing the relationship between music and religion at the center of our endeavor, this Unit seeks to serve scholars who operate out of this ubiquitous, but ironically unrepresented, realm of academic pursuit within the guild.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Alisha L. Jones, Indiana University,… | jonesall@indiana.edu | - | View |
| Joshua Busman | joshua.busman@uncp.edu | - | View |