Religion and Cities Print

Call for Proposals

This Group is offering two sessions this year:

  • National politics and public policies become uniquely legible in the economic, physical, and social dynamics of cities. Cities, from Cairo to Chicago, are also places where political agency emerges in the form of community organizing, policy advocacy campaigns, electoral battles, and mass uprisings. Religious ideas, identities, and institutions play pivotal roles in the translation of politics and policy into lived urban experience; likewise, religious formations deeply influence all kinds of urban political agency. Yet, scholarship has only begun to track the ways that religious agency shapes, and is shaped by, the broader patterns of civic and political activity in cities. This session invites papers exploring the role of religion in the making of urban political and policy processes. General topics include, but are by no means limited to, the demarcation of urban political spaces, the intersection of religious identities with racial/ethnic groups, class, and other urbanized political identities, the place of religion in the politics of migration to and from cities, and the influence of urban religion on national political transformations
  • For a cosponsored session with the Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion Group, we are interested in papers that consider the ways in which the practice and performance of hip-hop in urban centers provide opportunities to remake (or rethink) religion and/in cities in terms of space and social geography and offers critical engagement with both religion and urban realities

Mission

This Group is focused on scholarship that explores the dynamics of religion in urban contexts. We draw largely, though not exclusively, from social research in looking at the ways in which the cultures, economies, space, and politics both shape and are shaped by the presence of an increasing diversity of faith traditions in cities.

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?

Katie Day
Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
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Helene Slessarev-Jamir
Claremont School of Theology
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Method of Submission