A Religion Department Graduate Conference with a keynote by Dr. Kathryn Lofton.
Call for Papers
The Religion Graduate Organization and the Department of Religion at Syracuse University announce the 2018 Graduate Student Conference Flourish and Decay: Exploring Religion in Process on Friday, April 13th, 2018.
Flour·ish: [‘flǝriSH] (n., v.) growth and development in a good environment; a gesture or to gesture in such a way that attracts attention.
De·cay: [dǝ͘‘kā] ‘(n., v.) to rot organically or the process of decomposition; to deteriorate; to fall into a state of disrepair. Rotten matter. A gradual decline of quality.
This conference proposes the terms “flourish” and “decay” as entry points through which to further understand how religion emerges and envelops within past, present, and future worlds.
Both flourish and decay can operate as either overarching metaphors of change, transformation, and fluctuation or as literal descriptions of cycles of growth, consumption, and loss. We embrace the capaciousness of these terms and encourage graduate students to think innovatively through them as an opportunity to explore religion in process. We welcome diversity in topics, theoretical approaches, and methodologies from all academic fields and disciplines across a broad range of histories, geographies, and religious traditions.
Keynote: Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
Papers and panels might engage the following (but not limited to) themes of:
- Fame, thriving, and prosperity
- Politics, conflict, and resistance
- Misogynoir, toxic masculinity, gender
- Afrofuturism, critical race theory
- Indigenous futurism, de/colonization practices
- Ruins, cities, empire, and war
- Futurity, millenarianism, apocalypticism and utopianism
- Community, class, geography, place, space
- Pollution in texts, bodies, environments, landscapes
- Disaster, trauma, toxicity, and recovery
- Life, biopolitics, necropolitics, health, governmentality
- Aesthetics, beauty, and the grotesque
- Precarity, neoliberalism, late capitalism, globalism, nationalism
- Environmentalism, the Anthropocene, climate change, waste
- Technology, transhumanism, robotics, and artificial intelligence
- The viral and the virtual, affect theory
- Death, funerary and burial rites
- Temporalities, histories
Please submit a short abstract (350 words for papers; 500 words for panels) and a CV in PDF format to: SUReligionConference@gmail.com by January 20, 2018.
religionconference.syr.edu