Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Unit

Children, Youth, and Competing Religious Future

CARV invites papers on the ideological, rhetorical, ritual, and/or pragmatic roles of children and youth in emerging religious nationalisms, particularly in light of migration, ecological collapse, and climate skepticism. It also encourages papers that explore the roles of LGBTQIA2S+ individuals and movements, particularly those that center children and youth, in determining (and resisting) the boundaries of the “nation” in discourses and practices of religious nationalisms.

Centering Religious Marginalization: Displaced Peoples and their Allies

In response to this year’s Presidential Theme, CARV invites proposals that explore religion at the margins and with regards to the marginalized: refugees, displaced persons, children, other-than-human beings, disabled persons, sexual minorities, and/or others who face exclusion or violence at the margins. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• How do boundaries and borders—conceptual, political, geographic, spatial, and natural—reinforce or mitigate processes of violence, exclusion, or marginalization? What role does spirituality play in shaping, policing, or breaking these divisions?
• How do the politics surrounding social, political, economic, religious, or educational institutions—currently and/or in historical perspective—illustrate questions of marginalization? Does religion play a unique role in this political processing? How might such analysis provide more nuanced insight into institutional futures?
• What methods or theories can acknowledge and possibly mitigate the marginalization of displaced people and/or nonhuman beings in studies of religion?

Teaching Religion / Teaching Violence in the Global Ecumene: Radical[izing?] Religious Subjectivity in the Classroom

How does religion play host to violence, dispossession and erasure in the classroom, whether by directly enacting them or by informing youth with habits of mind that sanction such destruction and discrimination? In what contexts do religion and education map onto charges of, or anxieties about, “extremism”? In what ways can the study of religion and violence in educational settings shed light on religious communities’ shifting boundaries and/or changing understandings of religion? What opportunities does this approach offer to better understanding the multiplicity and relationality of religious groups or movements that are often thought to be distinct or separate? With these questions in mind, CARV invites papers that explore the ways in which educational goals and/or settings stage the naturalization of selfhood, bodies, places, social imaginaries and teleologies in ways that recruit religion toward violent and often political ends. Issues of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Violence as education regarding religious ways of being / acting, especially those that venture beyond the traditional bounds of religious identity.
• Configurations of “nation” and citizenship that employ discriminatory violence in institutions of religious learning.
• Charges of, or anxieties about, “extremism” and “wokeism” in the context of religion and education.
• Homeschooling as an (ironic?) effort to combat or preempt violence, and to safeguard the religious ideals of youth.
• The work of Michael Faris and the evangelical Home School Legal Defense Association in preventing legal safeguards and educational regulations designed to protect children educated outside of traditional schools.
• Competing claims by parents and educators on the minds and bodies of young persons, and the stakes for the “victory” of either side.
• The rise of individual activists and non-state organizations like Moms for Liberty, which seek (among other things) to ban books they perceive as dangerous to children’s moral and religious formation.
• The cooperation of religious and state organizations in enacting violence on Indigenous Peoples through boarding schools.
• Indigenous communities’ strategies of resistance to settler colonial (extractivist) educational regimes that undermine traditional ecological knowledge/s.
• Meaningful ways that scholars of religion might seek to address problems and injustices that arise when religion is weaponized by authors, parents, pundits, state authorities, non-governmental organizations, and other educators, for the purposes of creating, amplifying, and/or enforcing the marginalization of others.