Religion and Economy Unit
For the pilot June session, this Unit welcomes individual papers or pre-arranged paper and roundtable sessions that connect the group's mission to Jin Y. Park's 2024 Presidential Theme (violence, non-violence, and the margin). While we especially invite proposals on this organizing theme, we also welcome proposals on any other themes that contribute to the Unit’s larger mission and/or push it in new directions.
We strongly encourage the submission of pre-arranged paper and roundtable sessions, including those that can best take advantage of this session's online format. Successful proposals will not only reflect theoretical and methodological rigor and clarity but will also 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.
This Unit sponsors multidisciplinary conversations that explore intersections between religious and economic modes of social life. Religion and Economy cultivates scholarship that asks how economic systems and orientations have developed through fields of thought, practice, and resistance that come into view through attention to the "religious." Encouraging inquiry that cuts across religious traditions, geographic locations, methods, and historical time periods, this Unit's collaborative explorations not only address and explore capitalist and non-capitalist economic systems but also consider how broader systems of "exchange" produce social relations among varied actors—from humans to spirits to material objects. By interrogating the concepts of religion and economy, this Unit also encourages scholars to consider the stakes of other concepts with ongoing currency in the study of religion, including secularism, spirituality, affect, desire, ritual, agency, value, and subject formation.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Kati Curts, Sewanee: The University of the… | kacurts@sewanee.edu | - | View |
| Rebecca Bartel | rbartel@sdsu.edu | - | View |