The Call for Papers for the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion – Southeast Region is CLOSED. If you submitted a proposal, you should hear from the unit chairs shortly. Please direct all questions about your proposal to the unit chairs. 2024 CFP AARSE
Conference Theme: “Tensions”
Towering live oaks draped with Spanish moss line the colorful streets of Charleston, South Carolina, making it a booming tourist destination celebrated for its rich food, art, and architecture. But within this lowcountry mecca sits a dark past and complicated present: Charleston stands as the US hub for the transatlantic slave trade, a history too often erased in carriage and plantation tours. It is place of profound tension and contradiction.
Like Charleston, the places, the traditions, and the peoples that we study – even our discipline itself – are subject to perennially opposing forces. Pulled between the local and the global, romantic visions and untidy realities, resistance and acquiescence, the material and the spiritual, public and private, and the secular and profane, we and our research subjects live in a constant state of tension.
As we invite you to join us in Charleston for the 2024 meeting, we invite you to consider the theme of tension as it relates to your areas of study. What are the sources of tension for us or our research subjects? In what ways is the tension productive? How do we and/or our research subjects navigate these tensions with or despite religion? We encourage multidisciplinary proposals, as well as proposals from underrepresented scholars and graduate students.