Call for Proposals

This Group seeks paper proposals from scholars of diverse traditions, religions, and time periods that explore the function of religious space and/or place as a constitutive component of religious systems. We seek papers that employ theoretically or methodologically innovative approaches to understanding the relationships between space and religious meaning. We are particularly interested in papers that deal with the materiality of religious space and built environments or with the physical experience of such. We encourage submissions that take a comparative approach across traditions or time periods or that can be paired with other papers to suggest enlightening comparisons or disjunctures in content, method, or theory. Be advised that for our main session, we will precirculate papers, so papers will be due by October 1, 2012. For a cosponsored session with the Animals and Religion Group, we seek papers that address the constitutive role of space/place in the formation of relationships between religion and animals or in the formation of religious constructions of animals.

Mission

This Group seeks to bring together scholars of diverse traditions, religions, and time periods, and who explore the function of space or place as a constitutive component of religious experience, practice, thought, institutions, and communities. We support scholarship that employs methodologically innovative approaches for understanding the relationships between space and religious meaning within specific traditions, and we encourage comparative work that investigates these topics across traditions and time periods. In particular, we seek to encourage analysis of the structures of power embedded in notions of sacred space and in the social formations mapped onto religious spaces, in how hierarchies are maintained and challenged within religious spaces and places, and in the materiality and physical experience of space. We wish to encourage examination of how contests over physical space and place function over time and how divergent meanings associated with individual places are negotiated, both peaceably and, all too frequently, violently.

Anonymity of Review Process

Proposals are anonymous to Chairs and steering committee members during review, but visible to Chairs prior to final acceptance or rejection.

Questions?

Jeanne Halgren Kilde
University of Minnesota
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Leonard Norman Primiano
Cabrini College
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Method of Submission