Class, Religion, and Theology Unit

Proposals in response to the calls below should clearly indicate how consideration of class inequalities and dynamics shapes the paper's analysis or conclusions and/or how the paper foregrounds issues of class, labor, or workers (while recognizing their intersections with other dimensions of inequality).

General Call: We invite paper or panel proposals that explore the role of class, labor, and/or worker issues in religious communities and traditions or the significance of class, labor, and worker issues in the study of religion and theology or address major questions in the study of class, labor, or workers.

Special Emphases This Year: While open to any proposals relevant to the general call, this year we especially welcome paper or panel proposals addressing the following:

Relationships between structures violence & capital/profit;  Forces that obstruct or undermine class solidarity, solidarity among workers, solidarity between working-class and middle-class people;  Impact of new technologies on workers, class inequality, and/or capitalism;  Capitalism as a religion;  Class and labor within global structures of capitalism;  Cooperative economy or cooperative movements (both religiously and non-religiously affiliated);  How capitalism/worker exploitation and White supremacy/anti-Blackness reinforce and sustain each other. 

Co-Sponsored Session with the Women and Religion unit, Body and Religion unit, and Class, Religion, and Theology unit: We invite proposals addressing reproductive labor broadly defined (including the many labors of social reproduction, such as caring labor and emotional labor). We are particularly interested in understanding such labors as embodied practices/experiences within gendered, classed, and racialized structures of inequality and religious traditions. We are open to individual paper proposals, panel/roundtable proposals, or innovative interactive formats.

Co-Sponsored Session with the Religion and Ecology unit and Class, Religion, and Theology unit: We invite papers addressing the following themes: solidarity between labor (productive and reproductive) and the environment; the inclusion of nature as subaltern class; the exploitation of the labor of our nonhuman kin, ecology as a site of solidarity.

Co-Sponsored Session with the Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee (ALCF) and Class, Religion, and Theology unit: We invite papers on any aspects of academic labor, particularly wishing to foreground the experiences of contingent faculty members. Proposals could, for example, consider structures of power and privilege within the academy (and models for holding both); interactions of gender, race, and/or disability with class inequalities within academic labor; or models of building effective solidarity among academic workers.