Quaker Studies Unit
Quaker Studies is accepting proposals on the following topics:
LGBTIA Quakers; Abolitionist movements, Quakers and their allies; Settlement, colonization, boarding schools, and Quakers; Quakers and the voiceless; and Bayard Rustin in history and memory.
- the religious logics of nonviolent protest in the U.S. and beyond
- relationships between nonviolence and colonialism/dispossession: explorations of the ways in which nonviolent resistance might place actors at an advantage or a disadvantage in relation to regimes that have already dispossessed them of resources and/or rights
- the question of what counts as “violence,” and who decides when this label is used.
For a panel that would be co-sponsored with the Ecclesiological Investigations Unit, we also especially invite papers that consider how particular communities (especially, but my no means exclusively, the historical "peace churches" of Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren) enact their philosophies of nonviolence and principles of peacemaking in situations of violent conflict. In particular, we hope to direct attention to how the varieties of commitments to peace create ecclesiologies that equip individuals and communities for civil resistance, intercommunal solidarity, or martyrdom.
The Quaker Studies Unit seeks to advance critical scholarship on Quakerism and related cultural phenomena. The unit is particularly focused on interdisciplinary analyses of Quakerism in its global contexts and in the breadth of its theological diversity. As the unit understands it, Quaker Studies includes the variety of religious traditions that directly derive from the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), as well as the spiritual and social movements and practices that have influenced--or been influenced by--Quakerism.