NAASR CFP 2025
Interlocutions II: The Extra/Ordinary
“There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness.” (Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, 1998)
“Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.” (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011)
Last year’s NAASR program brought discourses in other academic fields to bear on the study of religion, examining new directions for our field moving forward. The 2025 meeting will advance this interdisciplinary endeavor more specifically by hosting discussions aimed at exploring how, in our scholarly methodologies and vocabularies—whether in our field or in others—we draw distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Scholars in religious studies have staked out a particular corner of the broad humanistic charge to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” sometimes separating out an aspect of the mundane and presenting it as exceptional, and sometimes taking what others consider exceptional and demonstrating how it is, in fact, exceedingly mundane. Such scholarly moves reflect the deepest currents of our methodological agendas, including the critiques our field has offered of the arbitrary lines separating the sacred from the profane, the “savage” from the “civilized,” and the normal from the pathological.
Priority will be given to papers that depart from well-trod avenues of inquiry; rather than revisit, e.g., the sacred/profane or religious/secular dichotomies (on which there is already a massive literature), we hope to see interventions that draw attention to less-studied forms of exceptionalizing or reducing, including (but not limited to) narratives of crisis, normalization, exception, societal structuration, and the everyday. What forms of methodological exceptionalizing or reducing seem necessary for you to accomplish your work? How can the field move forward with a more nuanced understanding of the stakes of distinguishing the ordinary and the extraordinary? We especially seek examples of how scholars treat social phenomena as exceptional or ordinary and how/why these distinctions emerge in our data, our methodologies, and our theoretical frameworks. These examples can come from within religious studies or from outside the field. Presentations may focus on how religious studies scholarship might be recast with the assistance of work outside the field, or they may draw attention to how the categories in religious studies can help recast the categories elsewhere.
In making this call, NAASR takes inspiration from the challenge implicit in Bourdieu’s claim that “There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness,” and in Lauren Berlant’s treatment of “crisis” not as an exceptional event but a process that produces and shifts the boundaries of what counts as ordinary. Such an emphasis necessarily alters the way we might think of a wide range of discourses, from a “crisis of faith” to the “crisis” in the humanities, and beyond.
The 2025 program will retain last year’s conversational, roundtable format. To that end, individual submissions for individual presentations should consist simply of a brief (500-word max) abstract identifying a particular scholarly treatment of something as extraordinary/special or ordinary/mundane, exploring its methodological investments and implications. Include your name, institution, and email address on your submission.
In lieu of submitting full papers in advance of the meeting, participants will submit an outline of key ideas (and a brief annotated bibliography, if relevant) in early October 2025. Ultimately, the aim is to publish these sessions as an edited volume within the NAASR Working Papers series with Equinox. Therefore, by submitting a proposal for the annual meeting, you are agreeing to contribute a version of your remarks as a chapter in said volume. While the program will emphasize a conversational format with only informal notes due in advance, full-length essays (roughly 3,000-4,000 words) will be due by January 31, 2026.
Proposals are due by March 31 at 5pm EST via an email to Merinda Simmons with the subject line “NAASR 2025 Proposal.”
Direct any questions about this process to Merinda as well.
Method and Theory: CFP
CALL FOR PAPERS – FEBRUARY 2025 – METHOD AND THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION
The editors of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (MTSR) would like to announce calls for
papers on four special topics: 1) On Money, 2) The Meat Paradox, 3) Decolonizing the Study of Religion,
and 4) Global Connected Histories for the Study of Religion. See below for brief descriptions; the full call
is attached. Feel free to distribute this call widely and share with anyone who may be interested.
MTSR is the journal of the North American Association of the Study of Religion and encourages new
submissions that broaden methodological and theoretical horizons in the academic study of religion. Click here to submit an article on any topic relevant to the journal. If you are submitting in response to this CfP, please select the article type “Call for Papers” and be sure that your abstract and cover letter mention the relevant call (e.g. “Decolonizing the Study of Religion”).
1. On Money
This CfP invites scholars of religion to approach money by critically examining the construction of its
apparent normality, and the process by which money as a technological fiction is transformed into
something “real.” Without reducing “money” to “religion,” it aims to deconstruct the ordinariness of money. How can method and theory in the study of religion bring new insights into the mythologization of moneyand the mythic entity called money?
2. The Meat Paradox
Human relationships with meat have always been paradoxical. While some see meat consumption as
necessary, others consider it to be murder. Many societies (past and present) have handled this paradox
through ceremonies expressing gratitude and respect for the animal. Moderns more often resolve it
through concealment and desensitization. Existing studies on meat in religious studies tend to focus on
ancient sacrificial rituals. This CfP asks scholars of religion instead to consider modern industrial systems
of meat production and meat consumption. The goal here is not to discuss the ostensibly “religious”
aspect of meat production, or the lack thereof. Rather, how might the tools of religious studies shed new
light on such topics as animal-human relations, concealment of violence, mechanization of killing,
production of indifference through divisions of labor, and more?
3. Decolonizing the Study of Religion
MTSR seeks papers that will contribute to a more robust theorization of decolonization in the study of
religion. Scholars working in this area have argued that decolonizing religious studies must include
questioning assumptions about what counts as legitimate scholarship in the field and who has the right to determine its contours (Avalos 2024; Nye 2024). Colonial modernity arguably produced the entire field of religious studies and the very concept of “religion” itself. If so, what kinds of transformation should be carried out in the name of decolonizing the field? What does decolonizing religious studies mean for method and theory in the field? Where and how could the study of religion be reconstructed after its colonial structures have been dismantled?
4. Global Connected Histories for the Study of Religion
This CfP aims to deepen recent critiques of the world religions paradigm and the idea of European
Enlightenment. The dominant discourse of modernity assumes its origin in the European Enlightenment
and its eventual triumph over “religion.” More critical narratives have described how ostensibly “secular”
modern thinking colonized indigenous ways of life in many parts of the world. Recent work in archaeology and intellectual history, however, suggests an ancient history of mutual influence across continents and deep historical connections among the traditions commonly known as “world religions.” At the same time, new scholarship shows how Africans, Native Americans, and enslaved people in the Americas played key roles in the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment, including the emergence of secular epistemes.
MTSR invites papers that consider the implications of connected histories of “world religions,” and/or non-European origins of the European Enlightenment, for method and theory in the study of religion.
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