Publications

• Call for proposal on ‘Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience’. Abstract deadline 30 June 2020.
• Call for chapters on Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion, Gender and Sexuality. Deadline 30 June 2020.
• Call for submission on ‘The Effects of Pandemics on Religious History‘. Deadline 1 July 2020.
• Call for paper: Embracing religion as counter-conduct: Ethics and “political spirituality” among western youth. Deadline 15 July 2020.
• Call for papers on Religions’ special issue: ‘Religion, Law and Politics‘. Deadline 18 December 2020.
• Call for papers: Special Issue on “Historizing Islamophobia”. Deadline February 2021.

Events:
Centre of Islamic Studies and Civilisation’s Islamic Studies Research Colloquium via Zoom, 26 June 2020 at 3pm-5pm. RSVP by 22 June 2020.

PhD/Job Opportunities:

• PhD student in sociology of religion, diversity, and ethnicity, Switzerland
• PhD position in sociology/gender studies, Switzerland

The Institute for the Social Sciences of Religions (ISSR) at the University of Lausanne is looking for a PhD student in sociology of religion, diversity, and ethnicity.
The selected person will work in a small motivated team on the creation and administration of the second wave of the National Congregation Study Switzerland (NCS II). This is a projet funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on the diversity of local religious groups in Switzerland, across all religions, including both autochthonous and immigration groups. Collaborating partners are based at the University of Basel (CH), University of Strasbourg (F) and Duke University (USA).
Deadline for applications: June 30, 2020

Further details and submission of applications:
https://career5.successfactors.eu/career?career%5fns=job%5flisting&company=universitdP&navBarLevel=JOB%5fSEARCH&rcm%5fsite%5flocale=en%5fUS&career_job_req_id=15843&selected_lang=en_US&jobAlertController_jobAlertId=&jobAlertController_jobAlertName=&_s.crb=QWU6YYahmY1ko%2fLzVUCsAC6tEV4%3d

Only applications through the website will be taken into account. Thank you for your understanding

International and interdisciplinary workshop at Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics”, University of Munster, Germany

Date: October 16th – 17th, 2020

The project team “Religious Fundamentalism” at Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics”, chair of sociology of religion at University of Munster (Germany) organizes a workshop on “Religious Fundamentalism: New Challenges in Theory and Empirics across Religions and Cultures“.

The central aim of this workshop is to create a platform of interaction and dialogue between the project team of the Cluster of Excellence (see below) and external experts in the field of religious fundamentalism. By taking part in presentations and discussions, the participants will not only get a deep insight into research on fundamentalism in various world religions and cultural contexts but will also receive constructive feedback from this team of experts for his/her own studies.

Recent contributions to the field have been challenging common definitions, measurements, as well as explanatory approaches of religious fundamentalism especially against the backdrop of various world religions and of an increasing globalized world. On one hand, this calls into question the relationship between religious traditionalism, fundamentalism, and (acceptance of) violence. On the other hand, research on religious fundamentalism beyond Christianity and Islam as well as beyond the North-American and Western-European context is usually neglected. In this workshop, we want to bring experts together, who contribute to these contemporary issues of fundamentalism research from a theoretical or an empirical perspective.

With this announcement, we want to call for abstracts from scholars, who are highly motivated to present and discuss their scholarly work by participating in a two-day interdisciplinary and international workshop of experts in this field. We are interested in both papers that deal with the phenomenon of fundamentalism on a theoretical level and papers that empirically approach the phenomenon on the basis of (a) selected case(s). Contributions from sociology, psychology, religious studies, political science, theology, or related fields are highly welcome. With this workshop, our objective is to constitute a starting point for future collaborations and dialogue from which the participants can sustainably benefit (e.g., future research projects, publications).

Together with a CV, a convincing abstract of a maximum of 500 words is requested by April 15, 2020 and should be submitted by email to:

• Dr. Sarah Demmrich, project leader of “Religious Fundamentalism“ at Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics“: kabogan@uni-muenster.de

Successful applicants are going to be informed shortly after. All expenses for attendance, travel, and accommodation of accepted participants are going to be covered by the project. For any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the project leader. We are looking forward to your applications.

With our very best regards,
Dr. Sarah Demmrich
Prof. Dr. Detlef Pollack
Dr. Olaf Müller

Call for Proposals

The purpose of the Sociology of Religion program Unit of the American Academy of Religion is to bridge the gap and generate cross-fertilization between the Sociology of Religion and Religious Studies. We are open to papers in all areas and therefore encourage submissions of any topic relevant to the sociology of religion. This year, we are particularly interested in the following topics:

• Topics related to Boston (and the contributions of prominent sociologists in the region)
• Links between capitalism, consumerism, neoliberalism and climate change issues
• Conflicting identities (intersectional identities in conflict)
• Disciplinary boundaries between sociology of religion and religious studies
• Sociology of knowledge – especially an exploration of the relationship between religion and STEM
• In anticipation of the 2020 US Election, we are interested in panels that are NOT about Trump and do not perpetrate a narrative of American exceptionalism (i.e. panels that explore religion alongside politics, elections, national identity, race, and populism in a global context)

We are also in the process of planning sessions on the following topics:
• Revisiting Religion and the Public Sphere (prearranged session on Habermas’ new work)
• Co-sponsored with the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Program Unit: Putting the social back into the sociology of religion (and religious studies in general): a round table with Veronique Altglas (invited panel discussion)

Publication:
The Sociology of Religion Group of AAR regularly co-sponsors panels with the peer-reviewed print and online journal Critical Research on Religion (CRR) (http://crr.sagepub.com). Published by SAGE Publications, the journal is ranked as first tier by Scopus and has over 10,000 subscriptions worldwide. Presenters of promising papers in SOR panels will be invited to turn their papers into articles and submit them for peer review to CRR.

Guidelines for Submitting Proposals

• Step 1: Find a topic in the general Call for Proposals or Call of a specific Program Unit that interests you.

• Step 2: Determine which type of proposal you wish to submit.

• Paper proposal — A paper written by you (and possibly a coauthor) that you will present in response to a theme within a Program Unit’s Call.
• Papers session proposal — A proposal of a complete session of different papers on a theme, complete with its own description, abstract, a presider, paper presentations, and (optionally) a respondent. Presenters in a papers session must submit their proposals to the papers session organizer, who in turn is responsible for inputting them into the Program Administration Proposal, Evaluation, Review, and Submission (PAPERS) System .
• Roundtable session proposal — A proposal of a complete session, including a presider, list of panelists, and (optionally) a respondent; all of whom will speak (ex tempore) on a common theme.

• Step 3: Write your 7,500 character (including spaces) proposal and 1200-character (including spaces) abstract. Paper sessions require a separate7,500 character proposal and 1200-character abstract for each paper in the session. The abstracts will be listed in the Online Program Book.

• Step 4: Submit your proposal via the method requested by the Program Unit no later than Monday, March 2. Most Program Units have elected to use the online PAPERS system only. Carefully note any audiovisual equipment you require before you submit your proposal.

• PAPERS: Submit your 7,500 character (including spaces) proposal and 1200-character (including spaces) abstract via the Program Administration Proposal, Evaluation, Review, and Submission (PAPERS) system. NB: Do not place your name or other identifying remarks in the body of the proposal field or abstract field in PAPERS; this may endanger the anonymous review process of the Unit and acceptance of your proposal may be jeopardized. Your name and contact information is sent automatically with the proposal. For help using the PAPERS system, please consult the PAPERS User Manual or if you still require assistance, email support@aarweb.org.
• E-mail: Submit your 7,500 character (including spaces) proposal and 1200-character (including spaces) abstract within the BODY of ONE single e-mail to the contacts listed in the Program Unit’s call (usually the Chairs). Attach the Participant Form for E-mail Submission. Please be sure you use the exact same title on the Participant Form for E-mail Submission as you do on the e-mailed proposal. Proposals received without the participant forms will be disqualified. Participant forms received without proposals or abstracts will also be disqualified. If you are requested by the Program Unit to submit a copy to both co-Chairs or Steering Committee members, follow the instructions listed. If no one person is specified, send your complete proposal to either one of the co-Chairs.
• E-mail with Attachments: Submit your 7,500 character (including spaces) proposal and 1200-character (including spaces) abstract, and Participant Form as attachments in one single e-mail to the contacts listed in the Program Unit’s call (usually the Chairs). Attach the Participant Form for E-mail Submission. Be sure you use the exact same title on the Participant Form for E-mail Submission as you do on the attached proposal you e-mail. Proposals received without the participant forms will be disqualified. Participant forms received without proposals or abstracts will also be disqualified.

• Step 5: Notification of your proposal’s acceptance status for the Annual Meeting program will be sent by April 1, 2020.

https://papers.aarweb.org/pu/sociology-religion-unit

https://papers.aarweb.org/content/general-call-proposals-instructions

Religion and Gender Journal

The journal Religion and Gender invites article proposals for a special issue on Religion, Gender and Violence. The relationship between religion and violence is highly contested and has come under considerable scrutiny by scholars of religion.  Less understood is the relationship between gender, religion and violence and this special issue aims to contribute to understandings of the ways in which religion intersects with institutional, familial and public gendered violence as explored through current research via an interdisciplinary lens.
With the current roll out of public inquiries into institutional child sexual abuse across Ireland, England and Wales, Scotland, Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it is clear that at a global level, it is religious organizations that have had the most widespread and highest levels of abuse against children with characteristically poor institutional responses to victims and their families. Public inquires have clearly established that religious organizations made strategic decisions to limit reputational damage at the cost of child safety and the implications of this for religious institutions is yet to be fully understood.

Violence against women and children in domestic settings where religion is a significant factor has also been the subject of ongoing and recent research indicating that there are specific issues at play for women and children in experiencing and reporting abuse and how it is managed by faith traditions. In important public debates on the status of gender diversity and difference, for example the marriage equality issue, there have been forceful responses to vulnerable cohorts from religious leaders, in social media and religious publications.
At the same time, there has been an important counter discourse articulated by religious groups around building religious and social capital that contributes to a pluralist understanding of the value of multi-religious societies and gender diversity. These discourses, most often articulated by more liberal religious groups but also increasingly by mainstream faith traditions, utilize the language of social justice and theological interpretation to construct narratives of gender inclusion and equity. This brings faith traditions into conflict within themselves over the framing of gender relations for the new century.

For this special issue, we invite manuscripts that address this convergence from a variety of perspectives on the function and meaning of gender, religion and violence and its counter-discourses.

The editors are particularly interested in receiving manuscripts that showcase empirical research that address, but are not limited to, the following areas and/or questions:

• What role does gendered violence play in mainstream religious groups re maintenance of the faith tradition?
• How are the impacts and experiences of gendered violence managed by religious organisations with regard to pastoral care and processes of remediation?
• Who are the victims of gendered violence in religious organisations?
• In what ways can feminist theory and theology contribute to and expand understandings of religion, gender and violence?
• What role does non-religion and/or secularity play in relation to responding to and managing the disclosure of violence in religious organisations.
• How well do public inquiries address gendered religious violence and what are the impacts on religious organisations with respect to particular case studies?

Submissions should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length (including abstract, footnotes and references). See Brill’s page for further information on submitting an article https://brill.com/view/journals/rag/rag-overview.xml .

Affiliation and email address should be supplied in the first submission. In order to guarantee a blind review process, all submissions should be anonymized with the name of and references to the author removed from the text. We are happy to receive inquiries about prospective submissions.

Please send all queries to the special issues editors:

• Kathleen McPhillips, University of Newcastle, Australia  Email: Kathleen.mcphillips@newcastle.edu.au
• Sarah-Jane Page, Aston University, Birmingham, UK Email: s.page1@aston.ac.uk

SUBMISSION DATES
15 January 2020: Abstract Submission
15 August 2020: Full manuscript submission

THEME: “Celebrating SocRel at 45: Beyond Binaries in the Sociology of Religion”

The conference will be held at the University of York, 14-16 July 2020.

Keynote Speakers

• Dr Sarah Jane Page (Aston University)
• Professor Sam Perry (University of Oklahoma)

Special 45^th Anniversary Panel

• Professor Eileen Barker (London School of Economics)
• Professor Jim Beckford (Warwick University)
• Professor Grace Davie (Exeter University)
• Professor Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University)

Sociological writing about religion is replete with binaries: secular/post-secular, sacred/profane, religion/non-religion, western/non-western, spiritual/religious, theistic/non-theistic, cognitive/corporeal and private/public, to name just a few. Theories that consider the relationship between these seemingly opposing concepts have shaped the evolution of the discipline, reflected changing social realities, and supported the production of new knowledge.

Although many of these binaries have become highly fashionable within the contemporary study of religion, does the use of these types of analytical frames limit our capacity for critical sociological engagement? Do our understanding of the lived realities for individuals across different communities support or reject the use of binary concepts? In this conference that celebrates 45 years of SocRel, we invite you to consider the possibilities for the sociology of religion ‘beyond binaries’. We encourage you to think about the relationships that you make in your own research with these, and other, binary frames, and the ways in which you find them both useful and limiting to think with.

Use this link to submit abstracts:  http://bit.ly/32ZoFdk

Further details regarding registration will be uploaded in due course.  Should you have any questions or queries, then please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Dr Rachael Shillitoe
Research Associate
Conference and Events Officer for the British Sociological Association, Sociology of Religion Group (SocRel)
School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT

Venue: University of Copenhagen, South Campus
Karen Blixens Plads 8, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark

For this workshop we address the changing politics of mosque building, the different kinds of conflict surrounding the building of a mosque and the symbolic appropriation of territory by the mosque.

The building of a mosque can be seen as a social transformative interaction and accounts for the many stakeholders involved in the construction of mosques (e.g., Muslim organizations, international donors, local politicians, anti-Islam groups and other critics). As such, the mosques and the politics of construction can be seen as microcosms of the discourse on Muslims in a country.

Concerns with security, extremism and visibility of Muslim institutions in the Nordic and Western European countries are causing “existential” difficulties for mosques. The state criticizes mosques and change the politics of religion with reference to incidents in mosques as in Denmark in 2016-18.

This seminar will examine the power strategies used by national and local politicians, examining national legislation and municipal planning on mosques, and will investigate a number of concrete cases of contested mosque building. The operable questions are:

• What are the political power dynamics at play in mosque building?
• Do the mosques challenge the existing models of state-religion-relations?
• How may mosques present and organize themselves to defuse these tensions of power?

Paper abstracts of 300 words and a short CV to be submitted to Niels Valdemar Vinding, lbm993@hum.ku.dk, on November 15th 2019 at the latest. Read more on: https://mosques.ku.dk/nordic-mosques/

Thursday 21 and Friday 22 November 2019. Led by:

• Jean-François Laniel
• Jean-Philippe Perreault

ACSRM NEWSLETTER

Number 17 | September 2019

The September 2019 newsletter reinforces the call for proposals for Round Table and Working Groups proposals for XX Days on Religious Alternatives in Latin America. It is also possible to register for the event and make the payment in cash  https://www.jornadasacsrm2020.sinteseeventos.com.br/site/capa
We invite everyone to visit the ACSRM website. To subscribe to this newsletter, simply sign up at the location indicated on our site. http://www.acsrm.org/ In
this newsletter we highlight some editorial news and event calls. Follow more news through ourFacebook page

. News from ACSRM

Lanzamiento de las

XX Days of the ACSRM 2020 # Days2020

Visit the website of the Conference on Religious Alternatives in Latin America –  https://www.jornadasacsrm2020.sinteseeventos.com.br/site/capa
This edition marks a new stage for the Mercosur Association of Social Scientists of Religion. Twenty-eight years after the first meeting, we will celebrate the twentieth at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. It will be a moment of reflection on these almost three decades of intense dialogue and also of prospecting debates for the future of the social science field of religion in Latin America.
Journeys 2020 is being prepared since the beginning of this year to be a time for fruitful academic meetings. Aiming at a more dynamic format, capable of instigating dialogue between researchers from different countries, we open the submission of proposals for round tables and working groups. We invite all academic community to participate in this event.
IMPORTANT: The deadline for submission of working group proposals in the Days has been extended to 16/09.
We look forward to meeting you in São Paulo,
Rodrigo Toniol
President of ACSRM

Albanian Sociological Association, ALBSA – Albanian Institute of Sociology, AIS
(14^th Annual International Conference)

Place and Time:

• University Aleksander Moisiu of Durres, Albania 
• 15-16 November 2019

Deadlines:

• Deadline for Abstracts submission: 10 Octobre 2019; 24.00 GMT
• Deadline for Main, Special, and Joint Sessions: 30 September 2019; 24.00 GMT

How to present a paper?

1. Surf to conference Call for Papers at https://www.sociology.al/en/conferences/call-papers
2. Choose the Session (Thematic Sections: ST01 – ST15) to which you wish to participate;
3. Fill out the Abstract Submission Form and submit to the Conference Secretary. Please don’t submit more than two abstracts for the entire conference. In case when two abstracts are submitted those must not refer to a single Thematic Section;
4. Wait for the confirmation of abstract receipt; those who do not receive confirmation within 10 days should contact the secretary of the conference;
5. Wait for the Acceptance Letter;
6. Contact with Secretary of the conference for the registration procedures;
7. Take the confirmation of the registration.

How to Submit Abstracts Online

• Go to: www.sociology.al
• Click: Conferences – Call for papers – Online abstracts submission”
• Select a Thematic Session
• Fill out the Paper Proposal Form/Abstract Submission Form & Submit

Secretary of the conference:

• Enkelejda CENAJ, Department of Sociology, FE-UAMD
• Matilda LIKAJ, Department of Sociology, FE-UAMD
• Elda KUTROLLI, Albanian Institute of Sociology (AIS)

E-mail: durres.conf2019@gmail.com
E-mail: conference@sociology.al