The Northwestern Department of Religious Studies graduate students invite young scholars to submit paper proposals for “Sovereignty & Strangeness,” a graduate conference to be held October 19-21, 2018 in Evanston, Illinois. Proposals are due May 6, 2018. You can get more details and view the full CFP at our website.
This conference aims to explore the constitutive relationship between sovereignty and that which is strange, queer, or illegible. How might the language of sovereignty be useful for thinking about power in religious or secular contexts when spiritual communities, charismatic individuals, and state institutions make claim to and perform supreme authority over populations and territories? And how might the language of strangeness help trace the disruptive potential of places, practices, and bodies that exceed the logic of sovereignty? Such questions converge in talking about queer and trans* materialities, racialized cosmologies, gender troubles, cultic communities, and liberation theologies, to name just a few examples. This conference hopes to put two intellectual currents—studies of sovereignty and studies of strangeness—into conversation in ways that open these terms up to new and unexpected meanings.
We are thrilled to have Drs. Ashon Crawley and Melissa M. Wilcox as keynote speakers for this conference.
Please send a 500-word abstract, along with your name, institution, and year of study to NUReligiousStudiesConference@gmail.com by May 6, 2018.
