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.