Religion and Economy Unit

This Unit welcomes individual papers, paper sessions, and roundtable proposals related to the group's mission. We strongly encourage the submission of pre-arranged paper and roundtable sessions, including and especially sessions with innovative formats and modes of presentation that substantively engage audience members. Proposals for individual papers are most likely to be accepted if proposed in relation to one of the themes listed below, due to the higher probability that they might complement other individual submissions.

Successful proposals not only will reflect theoretical and methodological rigor and clarity but also will engage existing scholarship around the study of religion and economy. A successful pre-arranged session also must incorporate gender and racial/ethnic diversity. Diversity of academic rank, theoretical method, and field also are highly encouraged and more likely to be successful.

Potential themes include but are not limited to the themes listed below, which we present in two categories: ideas proposed by participants in the unit and members of the steering committee, as well as ideas generated in dialogue with other program units. We welcome proposals on these themes, but we also invite proposals on any other themes that contribute to the Unit’s work or push it in new directions.

Themes Suggested by Religion and Economy Unit Members/Steering Committee:

• institutional formations and organizational foreclosure in the study of religion and economy
• AI, big data, privacy, and theologies of omniscience
• caste as an analytic for the study of religion
• re-crafting and resisting the self as product amid and against colonial economies and racial capital
• branding and advertising in South Asian religious formations
• mutual aid and alternative ways to organize, share, and remake socio-economic life and religious engagement (ancient and modern)

For Possible Co-Sponsorship:

• The Religion and Economy Unit and Religion and Memory Unit invite paper or panel proposals on the “costs of memory.” Inspired by the metaphor for things that are painful and costly for victims to remember and articulate, we invite proposals studying religion and the capital costs of remembering and the ways that the economies of religion and memory are tied to power. We invite proposals focusing on examples in any time period or geographic location.
• The Religion and Economy Unit and Religion and Disability Studies Unit seek proposals that identify and describe ableist economies and forms of resistance against them. How do religious institutions, practices, and language get used both to support and to undermine such economies? We are especially interested in proposals that take up the notion of attention economies and the ways in which ableist norms define how to "pay" attention, who has a "deficit" of attention, etc.
• The Religion and Economy Unit and Study of Judaism Unit seek proposals that engage religious studies and Jewish economic history in conversation.