Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar
We invite papers for the Online session of the AAR in June on the theme of "Foucault And ..." Specifically, we are in focused engagements with Foucault and either specific religious traditions and subtraditions, or central themes in the study of religion. This may include, for example, "Foucault and Islam," "Foucault and the Reformation," "Foucault and Evengelicalism," "Foucault and the Politics of Religion," and so on. It may also include examples like "Foucault and Religious Experience," "Foucault and Functionalism in the Study of Religion," or other methodological themes. Proposals may be constructive, bringing Foucault to bear on given traditions, or challenging and expanding Foucault's resources by approaching his work from the perspective of given traditions. They may also be exegetical, engaging, for example, Foucault's very brief comments on events like the reformation, or his short engagements with Buddhism, and so on. Other proposals may bring Foucault and religion to bear on other themes, such as sexual politics.
This session is intended as a very tentative plenary or testing ground for the possibility of gathering materials for a reader in Foucault and Religious Studies. We seek short, clear, and focused papers that say something new about Foucault and raise productive questions.
The Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar is dedicated to collaborative research in a public setting, gathering scholars of religion whose research engages theoretical and historical approaches to the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's work has been transformative for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences over the last fifty years. We aim to continue Foucault’s tradition of public intellectual discourse in a way that illuminates the importance of the study of religion for understanding and critiquing his work on questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We hope to convene scholars of various religious practices and traditions to expand Foucault’s critical approach and enliven the contributions of this research for the public domain.
We understand this work to be ongoing, developing the complex questions that emerge from Foucault’s analytics of power, knowledge, and subjectivity central to many disciplines. The 2018 posthumous publication of his History of Sexuality volume on early Christian sexual ethics (Confessions of the Flesh) foregrounds the need for such critical and constructive engagement by scholars with expertise across religious traditions and methodologies. We hope to bring together scholars within the AAR and SBL—particularly those in philosophy of religion, queer theory, black studies, feminist theory, religion and literature, diasporic studies, affect studies, African American religion, religion and ecology, and the histories of differing religious traditions (ancient and early modern)—in order to pursue work that is historically and theoretically rigorous, reflecting Foucault’s own interdisciplinarity and the relevance his work has had across fields.