CFP: American Academy of Religion, Religion in the American West - Deadline March 1

Call for Papers: American West Imaginaries: Frontiers, the Future, Border Control, and Protests

American Academy of Religion, November 18-21

https://www.aarweb.org/annual-meeting/2017-annual-meeting-nov-18-21

Deadline: March 1, 2017

The frontier, as it is imagined in the American West, has held possibilities for numerous religious people, and has served as inspiration for ideations of a better life. However, the West has also been the site of immense tragedy due to these imaginaries, as the implementation of utopian landscapes rests on exclusion, dispossession, border control, and other acts of systemic and physical violence.

Drawing on this paradoxical relationship between the vision and its realization, we solicit paper and panel proposals on the multiple representations of the American West as the place of the future, both by religious groups and by groups adopting the language of purity and promise. What religious futures have been imagined in the West? How has the American West served as a rhetorical flashpoint for imagining a future predicated on exclusion and violence? What secular futures have the West inspired? How has the reality of the West’s indigenous population challenged the implantation of imagined futures? How have racial, ethnic, gender, and religious identities been co-constituted in the space of imaginaries on the frontier? How have protests shaped the religious landscape of the West?

We are particularly interested in papers exploring minority religious traditions and in papers that examine the role of gender in shaping the rhetorics of the future, connecting with the presidential theme of religion and the most vulnerable.

Please note that the format for the session will feature pre-circulated papers as is the long custom of this unit.

We are also in interested in papers for a co-sponsored session with the New Religious Movements units around the topic of Futures and Frontiers of Religion, considering the questions: what role do violence, exclusion, and/or extremism play in the building of--or failure to build--utopias?

Further questions can be directed to Brandi Denison, co-chair of the Religion in the American West group, b.denison@unf.edu