Thursday 4^th July – Saturday 6^th July 2019

Edgbaston Park Hotel, Birmingham, UK.

Please note: support for attendance is available.

Organised by the Science and Belief in Society Research Group at the University of Birmingham, UK this is the first conference launching the new, International Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society.

In the last decade there has been significant growth in social scientific scholarship on science and religion, complementing the more established historical research into the subject. Greater attention is being paid to the varied ways in which perceptions of science are influenced by religious and non-religious belief, identity, community and conflict in different geographical, cultural and historical contexts. The purpose of this international conference is to bring together researchers with backgrounds in sociology, science and technology studies, psychology, political science, history, social anthropology, and related humanities or social science disciplines to discuss perspectives on the overarching topic of science and belief in society.

Abstracts are invited for the conference relating to the following themes:

• · The social scientific and historical study of the relationship between science and religious and/or non-religious belief and identity;
• · Public perceptions of the relationship between science, religion and non-religion and their respective roles in society;
• · National and international comparative perspectives on the study of science, religion and belief in society;
• · Past and present media or popular representations of science, religion and belief in society;
• · The past or present roles of science, rationalism, religion and belief in national, social or cultural identity and related geopolitical narratives;
• · Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of science, religion and non-religion in society;
• · Methodological approaches to, and issues in, the study of science, religion and belief in society;
• · Avenues for future research and developments within the social scientific and historical study of science, religion and belief in society;
• · Public policy research relating to any aspect of public policy that intersects with issues connected to science, religion and belief in society. Including studies on theimpact of publics’ views on science and religion on policy making, and provision for religious, spiritual or non-religious communities across a range of geographies and issues (e.g. healthcare provision, educational policy, science policy, environmental policy or development);
• · International studies of religious or spiritual communities’ perspectives on the intersection, and possible relationships, between science and religion over time.

We are interested in papers that relate to any aspect of STEMM in society (science, technology, engineering, medicine, and mathematics) and that discuss any religious, spiritual or non-religious tradition, position or worldview, including unbelief.

Keynote papers will be given by historian Professor Peter Harrison, Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland (Australia), and psychologist Professor Cristine Legare, associate professor of psychology and the director of the Evolution, Variation, and Ontogeny of Learning Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin (USA).

Individual paper submissions:

To submit a paper proposal, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, alongside a biographical note of no more than 200 words including name, institutional affiliation, email address and if possible a web-link to your institutional bio page.

Biographies of successful applicants will be added to the International Network’s Research Directory when our new website launches in the spring. Please indicate on your application if you would like to opt out of being added to the Research Directory.

Panel session proposals:

We will also be accepting a limited number of panel proposals with a maximum of four speakers. To submit a panel proposal, please send a session summary of no more than 250 words alongside abstracts of no more than 300 words for each paper and biographical notes of no more than 200 words for each contributor (please include institutional affiliation(s), e-mail contact details, and other info as above).

Individual or panel session submissions may cross over several of the themes listed above, and those intending to submit papers are encouraged to consider the relevance of their work to other academic disciplines.

Please send all individual paper and session proposals to Dr Harris Wiseman (h.wiseman@bham.ac.uk) for the attention of the conference organisers, Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker (University of Birmingham), and Dr Alexander Hall (University of Birmingham).

All abstracts must be submitted by 1^st March 2019.

Conference Costs and Bursaries:

Please note that for all successful applicants, accommodation and registration costs will be covered by the International Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society as part of a 1 year grant from the Templeton Religion Trust.

In addition to this, a limited number of bursaries are available to support those who may not have institutional support to attend international conferences, including but not limited to: postgraduate, early career, retired, or low income or unwaged.  To request this additional support please e-mail Dr Harris Wiseman at h.wiseman@bham.ac.uk, including your contact details, a short biography (including a clear statement regarding your career stage), your abstract and a statement of interest to be considered for one of the bursaries. We also have a range of other bursaries for covering other needs (e.g. support with day care costs). The deadline for submission of bursary applications is 1^st March 2019.

Please note that we will be running a fully funded early career workshop in the days prior to this conference, but this will be announced and advertised via a separate call.

Key Dates:

• Abstract submission: Open now
• Deadline for abstracts and conference bursary applications: 1^st March 2019
• Decision notification: 15^th March 2019
• Registration opens: 15^th March 2019
• Registration deadline for presenters: 29^th March 2019

9-11 July 2019, Cardiff University

Charles Hirschkind (University of California-Berkeley)

Mia Lövheim (Uppsala University)

Jolyon Mitchell (University of Edinburgh)

As scholars of religion, we are all tasked with communicating religion in one way or another – to students, to the public, and to our research community. Moreover, what we study is itself a message: participants in our studies and creators of the documents we analyse are communicating religion, and what we receive as data is what Giddens referred to as the ‘double hermeneutic,’ or ideas and experiences that have already been mediated. What is the religion communicated to us? How do we communicate religion, and what is it that we communicate when we’re doing it?

Our focus is on “communicating” as a verb-like gerund rather than “communication” as a static, abstract noun. Scholars from different strands of the sociology of religion can imagine their work in it, and our topic engages the interests of colleagues in journalism, media and cultural studies; geography; music; English, communications and philosophy; social psychology; and law and politics.

The substance of communication can include evangelistic and apologistic discourse, education, media, and public policy interventions. We welcome diverse methodological approaches, including multi-modal and multi-sensory approaches to communicating religion. We understand communicating in multiple contexts, including academia, politics, education, social media and mass media. We imagine multiple frameworks that contour how we imagine communicating religion, encompassing the secular and the digital, the individual and the collective, the implicit and the explicit, the theoretical and the empirical.

To deliver a paper, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, alongside a biographical note of no more than 50 words. We will also be accepting a limited number of panel proposals. To deliver a panel, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words alongside a biographical note of no more than 50 words for each contributor.

Please submit your abstracts online, before midnight Friday 1 February 2019, at:

https://portal.britsoc.co.uk/public/abstract/Abstracts.aspx

9-11 July 2019, Cardiff University

Charles Hirschkind (University of California-Berkeley)

Mia Lövheim (Uppsala University)

Jolyon Mitchell (University of Edinburgh)

As scholars of religion, we are all tasked with communicating religion in one way or another – to students, to the public, and to our research community. Moreover, what we study is itself a message: participants in our studies and creators of the documents we analyse are communicating religion, and what we receive as data is what Giddens referred to as the ‘double hermeneutic,’ or ideas and experiences that have already been mediated. What is the religion communicated to us? How do we communicate religion, and what is it that we communicate when we’re doing it?

Our focus is on “communicating” as a verb-like gerund rather than “communication” as a static, abstract noun. Scholars from different strands of the sociology of religion can imagine their work in it, and our topic engages the interests of colleagues in journalism, media and cultural studies; geography; music; English, communications and philosophy; social psychology; and law and politics.

The substance of communication can include evangelistic and apologistic discourse, education, media, and public policy interventions. We welcome diverse methodological approaches, including multi-modal and multi-sensory approaches to communicating religion. We understand communicating in multiple contexts, including academia, politics, education, social media and mass media. We imagine multiple frameworks that contour how we imagine communicating religion, encompassing the secular and the digital, the individual and the collective, the implicit and the explicit, the theoretical and the empirical.

To deliver a paper, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, alongside a biographical note of no more than 50 words. We will also be accepting a limited number of panel proposals. To deliver a panel, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words alongside a biographical note of no more than 50 words for each contributor.

Please submit your abstracts online, before midnight Friday 1 February 2019, at:

https://portal.britsoc.co.uk/public/abstract/Abstracts.aspx

*The deadline for abstracts (individual papers and panels) has been extended until 6 January 2019*

15 April – 16 April 2019 (Arrival and Registration from 14 April)
University of Nottingham

Following BRAIS’s successful conferences in Edinburgh (2014), London (2015 and 2016), Chester (2017) and Exeter (2018), the organisers invite proposals for whole panels or individual papers for the Sixth Annual Conference of BRAIS. Islamic Studies is broadly understood to include all disciplinary approaches to the study of Islam and Muslim societies (majority and minority), modern and premodern.

Plenary sessions at the conference

• – Maribel Fierro (CSIC, Madrid) on ‘Rulers as Authors in the Medieval Islamic West’
• – Khaled Fahmy (University of Cambridge) on ‘Implementing Shari’a in Modern Egypt: A Medical Perspective’
• – Alison Scott-Baumann (SOAS, London) and the ‘Re/presenting Islam on Campus’ team

Abstract Deadline: Sunday 6 January 2019

For details on how to submit an abstract, see here <http://www.brais.ac.uk/conferences/brais-2019-call-for-papers>

Our Program Committee is hard at work planning for our 2019 meeting in New York, “Engaging Religion in a Contested Age.” You can look forward to two engaging joint ASA/ASR sessions, an insightful Presidential Address by our President, Paula D. Nesbitt, a thought-provoking Furfey Lecture, and plenty of socializing opportunities during our three evening receptions. In fact, our welcome reception on August 11 will be a joint reception with the ASA Religion Section.

Our meeting will be held at the Park Central New York Hotel located at 870 Seventh St., just a few steps from the ASA hotel. Stay turned for hotel reservation information so you can get the discounted ASR price on a room. Rooms with king beds will be $185/night, and rooms with two double beds will be $205/night.

INTERESTED IN SUBMITTING A COMPLETED SESSION PROPOSAL OR PAPER ABSTRACT?

Complete session proposals are due by March 31, and paper abstracts are due by April 30. All submissions will be accepted through the Member Portal on the ASR website. Stay tuned for additional information regarding when the submission process opens. If you have any questions about the program content of our meeting, please contact our 2019 Program Chair, Holly Folk, at holly.folk@wwu.edu.

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE ANNUAL MEETING IS AVAILABLE

Please visit the Grants & Awards page on the ASR website for information on the Gallagher Travel Grants along with other grant and award opportunities.

www.sociologyofreligion.com

17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) ’Religion – continuations and disruptions’

25-29 June 2019 in Tartu, Estonia
https://easr2019.org/

Religions are works in progress. New ideas, doctrines and practices have appeared time and again and often spread across cultural and confessional boundaries. Some of the changes have been intentional, introduced by powerful individuals and institutions, others have emerged more spontaneously as vernacular reactions to innovations imposed from ?above?. Some elements in religions have persisted for centuries, some have disappeared and some reappeared in completely new forms or acquired new meanings. Similar processes can be observed around us in contemporary societies as well.

Yet, oftentimes scholars of religion have struggled with studying such constantly changing and transforming phenomena. This leads us to ask how many disruptions or interruptions can a tradition adapt or even embrace, while still maintaining its identity. At the same time studying change (or the lack thereof) arises several conceptual and methodological problems. First of all, how does one conceptualize change without implying a static research object? This is also a problem of evaluation and rhetorical power ? who has the authority to claim that something is extinct or that a new tradition has been established? What is the scholar?s responsibility for the field of studies? When and to what extent do scholars have to take into account the views of insiders in reflecting upon religious traditions or in drawing boundaries between them?

Aside from ?conventional? religion and religiosity, considering various ?spiritualities? and the rise of the numbers of people with no clear religious affiliation, how does one study a phenomenon which has lost its visibility or moved into the private sphere?  Or how does one make sense of the continuities and disruptions in a world where more and more people simultaneously participate in several traditions, either religious or secular?

The conference will focus on these and related questions, examining religious traditions worldwide. In addition, it calls for reflecting upon continuities and disruptions in the history of religious studies. Our conceptual tools, theoretical frameworks, methodologies and even the category of religion have been changing. Is it necessary to strive for unity in the discipline or rather celebrate the pluralism in the study of religions? And how to depict change, so that the complicated dynamic of religious transformation is also reflected through the conceptual tools we use?

Papers may include (but not be limited to) following topics:

• – conceptual and theoretical reflections on terms and models
• – methodological challenges in the study of ?invisible? religion and nonreligion
• – transformation and persistence in and of religious education
• – social, political and gendered aspects of religious change
• – tradition and creativity in vernacular religions
• – discursive and ritual practices: continuity, change, disruption
• – encounters and interactions between religious communities
• – entanglements of media, digital world and religiosity
• – inspirations, actions and reactions between religion and migration
• – psychological, ecological and cognitive aspects of religious change and continuity
• – agents and victims of change and disruption
• – religious liminality and residuality
• – materiality of religion

Important dates

• Call for session proposals: 15th of September 2018 – 31st of October 2018
• Notification of acceptance of panels on the 10th of November 2018
• Call for individual papers: 15th of November 2018 – 15th of December 2018
• Notification of acceptance: 15th of January 2019

Registration:

• Early bird registration 1st of February – 31st of March 2019
• Standard registration  1st of April – 31st of May 2019

En nombre de la Asociación Castellano-Manchega de Sociología, parte nuclear de la Federación Española de Sociología (FES), y desde el año 2014 miembro institucional de la Asociación Internacional de Sociología (ISA), se recuerda que el XXIII CONGRESO DE SOCIOLOGÍA EN CASTILLA-LA MANCHA. CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL, tiene como fecha límite para la presentación de propuestas de ponencia, dos (2) máximo, hasta el día 15 de septiembre de 2018, por lo que se anima a todos a su participación y presentación de trabajos de investigación y estudios en los que la sociología y la ciencia política, tengan una parte central e interdisciplinar dentro del amplio espectro de las disciplinas de las ciencias sociales, así como la transversalidad con otras ciencias, que aunque poco relacionadas entre sí, favorecen y enriquecen el desarrollo de los diferentes temas de estudio a tratar durante el congreso.

Durante veintidós (22) años, se ha celebrado este congreso, creciendo año tras año en participantes y en mesas de trabajo, en este entorno atractivo y natural de la Mancha, donde Don Quijote, nos ha situado internacionalmente dando a conocer esta maravillosa tierra. Ahora este congreso cumple veintitrés (23) años, su título es “INSEGURIDADES Y DESIGUALDADES EN SOCIEDADES COMPLEJAS” y se celebra en una de las ciudades más emblemáticas de esta tierra, Valdepeñas, rodeada del Campo de Montiel, Campo de Calatrava y Sierra Morena, aprovechando ahora para agradecer a su Alcalde D. Jesús Martín y Tte. Alcalde D. Manuel López, su colaboración y compromiso con la cultura, la educación y para con esta asociación, favoreciendo con su apoyo este encuentro de profesionales, de intercambio de experiencias y vivencias, que potencian los estudios y la investigación.
Se anima a todos a la participación activa, dando las gracias al Comité de Organización por su apoyo y dedicación, cuyo trabajo voluntario, solidario y desinteresado, permite que las cuotas del congreso sean lo más económicas posibles.

Para cualquier consulta o cuestión estamos a vuestra disposición en congreso@acms.es, y en la web del congreso: www.congresoacms.com

Miguel Clemente Díaz y José Miguel Moreno Carrillo, Dirección Congreso

Australian Association for the Study of Religion and the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religion

November 29, 2018 – November 30, 2018
at: University of Auckland – visit site: http://www.nzasr.ac.nz/conference/index.php/annual/2018

Theme:  Ngā Wāhi Tapu/Sacred Place: Continuity and Change

Due date for proposals: July 15, 2018

The third Joint Conference of the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religions (NZASR) and the Australian Association for the Study of Religions (AASR) will be hosted by the University of Auckland 29-30 November 2018. The plenary sessions of the conference this year will be held in the Waipapa Marae and the Maclaurin Chapel, two sacred sites on the University of Auckland campus, which reveal both continuity and change in this particular context.

The study of sacred place has been receiving renewed attention in the interdisciplinary study of religion. It includes a consideration of familiar institutions—temples, shrines, and churches—but also extends to less visible sites that ground everyday life in ritual practices in the home or in public spaces that are outside the boundaries of “official” religion. In spite of the evidence for secularization, the renewal and revitalization of sacred places is occurring in contemporary societies and transforming many urban areas such as Auckland, Sydney, and Melbourne. This is due in part to recent patterns of immigration and the growth in religious diversity with the arrival of new religious traditions and the flourishing of diaspora communities. The movement of peoples and the increase in interreligious encounters is creating a dynamic situation of mutual transformation and contributing to both de/re-territorialization of religion as some sacred sites are appropriated by new actors and groups representing alternatives to established religious institutions.

Paper and panel proposals are invited to address a number of questions and issues surrounding the conference theme. How do demographic trends—both domestic and international migration—impact the religious landscape? How is sacred place being represented materially in new ways? What consequences do these new expressions of the sacred have for shaping human values and civil society? How is gender and sexuality regulated in these places? What role do governments play in the protection of traditional sacred sites and in the construction of new ones? Papers addressing these concerns and their relevance for the academic study of religion in the Antipodes are particularly welcome. In addition to proposals related to the conference theme, we also invite submissions on the full range of topics and issues that reflect the diverse fields of specialization, disciplinary approaches, and research interests of our members.

The programme this year will include several keynotes and plenary sessions. Associate Professor Cristina Rocha (Western Sydney University) will give the AASR Presidential Address and Associate Professor Jay Johnston will give the Penny Magee lecture. The NZASR keynote and plenary session will be announced shortly.

Guidelines for Paper and Panel Proposals:

• Paper proposals should be submitted online at the link below and include the following information: Title, Author, Abstract (maximum 200 words), and University affiliation.
• For panel proposals, the convener should submit one document that includes the abstracts and author information of each presenter, here: http://www.nzasr.ac.nz/conference/index.php/annual/2018/schedConf/cfp

Bursaries:

The AASR will be offering 6 bursaries of AUD $500 each for postgraduate students to attend the Auckland conference. We invite students to submit abstracts and their CVs by 30 of August in order to apply for these bursaries. Please email A/Professor Cristina Rocha (Western Sydney University / President, AASR): C.Rocha@westernsydney.edu.au

Key information and dates to remember:

• Deadline for paper proposals: April 4, 2018 – July 15, 2018.
• An early-bird registration rate (NZ$250) is available to members who register on or before 30 September 2018.
• An early-bird registration rate (NZ$125) is available to students or other unwaged attendees who register on or before 30 September 2018.
• The NZASR site will be updated in July with a link to the University of Auckland’s Events Centre, which will manage conference registration and payment, and provide information on accommodations, including both nearby hotels and on-campus options.
• Principal Conference Contact: Professor Mark Mullins (University of Auckland): m.mullins@auckland.ac.nz