The CenSAMM Annual Conference 2023 will take place 11-13 Sep 2023 at Clare College Cambridge in partnership with the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR). The theme will be "Environmental Endings and Religious Futures". A full call for papers will be published here and on the BASR website in due course.
Religions have long offered frameworks of meaning for concepts of world ending. Amid the contemporary social and political importance of climate change and fears about environmental degradation, ideas of world ending and widespread cataclysm have become pressing in both religious and secular contexts. Equally, as apocalyptic discourses proliferate, so too do human imaginations of the future, with optimistic and pessimistic narratives of the post-apocalyptic world jostling for attention. Reflecting on these overlapping strands, the theme of this year’s annual conference is “Environmental Endings and Religious Futures.”
Held in collaboration with the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM), BASR 2023 invites submissions reflecting on how religion interacts with narratives of environmental decline, catastrophe, hope, and renewal. We also invite submissions reflecting on the connections and tensions between religious practice, environmental activism, and climate justice (as well as passivity and injustice). In addition, we welcome critical and methodological studies of the ways Religious Studies scholars might seek to understand and evaluate the complex ways that religious beliefs and practices interact with contemporary concerns about imminent environmental cataclysm.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Method and theory in the study of contemporary apocalyptic discourse
- Ethnography as an approach to environmental movements and religious movements
- Religious themes in the politics of environmentalism
- Quietism and passivism in the face of the Apocalypse
- Rethinking ritual in the context of climate change
- Religion, climate crisis, and hope: human imaginations of good and bad endings
- Religion, environment, and gender
- A human-led apocalypse? Religion during the Anthropocene
- Stewardship, extractivism, and the spirit of capitalism
- Religion, environment, racism, and privilege
- Religion, climate activism, and climate change denial
- Environmental endings and indigenous religion
- Lived religion in a dying environment
- Environmental healing and alternative religious futures
- Religion and environmental policy
- Understanding “renewal”: millennial, environmental, technological
- Responses to the climate crisis within New Religious Movements
- Religion and climate injustice in the Global South
As usual, papers unrelated to the conference theme that are related to the discipline of religious studies will also be considered.
A call for papers with details for submission will be issued in due course.
