Religioscope > Agenda

Academic conferences on religion in today's world
Colloques et séminaires sur les religions dans le monde contemporain

06-07.02.2012

Paris

Justice, Religion, Réconciliation
Colloque annuel de l'Association française de sciences sociales des religions

Comment le lexique religieux – réconciliation, pardon, aveu, repentir, etc. – fournit-il un cadre pour les situations postérieures à une période de violence ? Comment est-il interprété et mis en pratique par les acteurs concernés ? Quelle force propre peut-on lui prêter pour venir à bout des demandes de justice des « victimes » ? Quelles méthodes peut-on employer pour décrire ces situations souvent très complexes, tant pour la pluralité d’acteurs et d’institutions qu’elles impliquent que pour les jeux d’échelle qu’elles exigent de ceux qui envisagent de les étudier ? Voici les questions très générales abordées par ce colloque à travers des études de cas particuliers relevant de pays (Rwanda, Afrique du Sud, Algérie, Liban, Maroc, Bosnie, Italie…) qui ont été récemment confrontés à différentes formes de violence (raciale, génocidaire, religieuse, mafieuse…). Dans ces différents contextes, les notions de justice, religion et réconciliation et leurs praxis se combinent selon des logiques variables, mais présentant aussi des constantes qu’il s’agira de repérer et des modes de circulation qu’il s’agira de cerner. Leur examen procédera donc, non pas par aire géographique – comme cela a souvent été fait – mais selon des critères de pertinence thématique, de manière à permettre à des chercheurs n’ayant pas l’habitude de se croiser d’engager des discussions communes.

http://www.afsr.cnrs.fr/spip.php%3Farticle95.html

20-22.02.2012

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Religion and Spirituality in Society Conference

The 2012 Religion and Spirituality in Society Conference will address a range of critically important issues and themes relating to the Religion and Spirituality in Society Conference. Plenary speakers include some of the leading thinkers in these areas, as well as numerous paper, colloquium and workshop presentations.

http://religioninsociety.com/conference-2012/

01-02.03.2012

Trondheim, Norway

Religions, Science and Technology in Cultural Contexts: Dynamics of Change

In current public and academic debates, the complex relationships between ‘religion' and ‘science' tend to be reduced into one between monolithic entities. By exploring historical and contemporary interactions between religions, science and technology, a more complex understanding may be reached of the areas and ways in which they overlap, correspond, challenge and conflict with each other.

This conference seeks to explore how religions, science and technology interact and generate change (progressive, reactive, regressive), particularly in relation to such issues as the environment and climate change; the economy; welfare; life expectancy; popular representation; and sexual equality.

Of particular interest are explorations of dynamic relationships between worldviews/cosmologies, socio-cultural practices and technologies; and of ‘the politics of change', i.e. how different actors seek to convince the public of the benefits of their own approaches or of the detriment of ‘the others' approaches.

http://www.ntnu.no/iar/konferanser/relsci

15-17.03.2012

Prague, Czech Republic

Urban Fantasies - Magic and the Supernatural

Bewitched. I Dream of Jeannie. The Exorcist. Charmed. Buffy. Dr. Who. Dracula. Dark Shadows. Twilight and The Twilight Zone.Jimmy Paz.Matthew Swift. Felix Castor. Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton. Harry Dresden. Harry Potter. These are among the more recent characters that fill the shelves of “Urban Fantasy” in local or online bookshops. The novels that constitute the genre are set in cities or gritty inner-cities and contain one or more fantastic elements. Alien races, mythological characters, paranormal beings, and the manipulation of magical forces all appear in these novels. Self-esteem issues and tragic pasts often color or shape the principal characters. Although most often “contemporary,” the tales are sometimes set in the past or future as well. The books and stories demonstrate how magic or the supernatural interact with everyday quotidian life, either changing it forever (as in the *Shadow Saga*) or remaining a hidden force that protects the unknowing residents of the city (as in *The Chamber of Ten*).

This “Urban Fantasy” thread is part of a larger project concerned with Magic and the Supernatural in all its myriad forms. The fascination and appeal of magic and supernatural entities pervades societies and cultures. The continuing appeal of these characters is a testimony to how they shape our daydreams and our nightmares, as well as how we yearn for something that is “more” or “beyond” what we can see-touch-taste-feel. Children still avoid stepping on cracks, lovers pluck petals from a daisy, cards are dealt and tea leaves read.

A belief in magic as a means of influencing the world seems to have been common in all cultures. Some of these beliefs crossed over into nascent religions, influencing rites and religious celebrations. Over time, religiously-based supernatural events (”miracles”) acquired their own flavour, separating themselves from standard magic. Some modern religions such as the Neopaganisms embrace connections to magic, while others retain only echoes of their distant origins.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/magic-and-the-supernatural/details/

13-14.04.2012

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, USA

Laying Up Treasure: Mormons in the Marketplace

Given the recent global economic recession, high unemployment rates, and strident political debates on issues such as deficits, taxation, and economic growth, concerns about money are high on public and personal agendas. From monasticism to communitarianism to prosperity theology, religion has been an important variable in cultural attitudes and ideologies toward participation in the marketplace. Brigham Young, for instance, instructed nineteenth-century Utah Mormons to produce their own food and goods, and not to trade with “gentiles, ” and various towns experimented with the United Order. This separation did not last, however, and throughout the twentieth century, Mormons followed a path of economic integration. With such an example in mind, this conference seeks to explore how Mormons have theorized about and used the goods of this world personally, socially, and theologically across time and in various settings.

http://www.claremontmormonstudies.org/

19-21.04.2012

University of Iaşi, Romania

Religion and Power Relations in Central and Eastern Europe
2012 ISORECEA conference

Religious changes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been studied extensively during the past twenty years from different points of view, such as: the revitalization of religion, new social and political roles of religion, the position of different religions in society, (re)secularization as a part of modernization, and the Europeanization process of former communist societies, religions and values, etc. However, there is a challenge to rethink religious changes in connection with the concept of power, which has been increasingly employed as an explorative concept in the social sciences. The role of religion in individual life or, more importantly, the meaning and use of religion by individuals is difficult to understand without relation to the concept of power. Religion can also inspire social processes, but the modern social arena is crowded with different agents, different positions, interests and strategies of acting, and the different networks inside which they operate. Some fundamental questions are: “What are the positions of different religious communities within modern social arenas?”, “How do various social and political powers (mis)use religions?”, and “How do religions mis(use) their power?”.

The International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association (ISORECEA) is an international scientific association established in December 1995, after a series of conferences organized since 1991 and devoted to the religious change in Central and Eastern Europe. The association focuses on the exchange of academic knowledge on the situation of religion in the Central-Eastern European area.

http://isorecea.net/

24-26.04.2012

Nairobi, Kenya

Religious mobility in East Africa and Latin America

Religious mobility is no longer, had it ever been, a phenomenon unique to “syncretistic” societies. All around the world, believers make adjustments in order to align their universe of meaning with their religious practices. Since the 1970s, religious mobility – transition, coping strategies, religious “collage”, etc – has been a central question in sociological debates. More often than not, these debates concentrate on religious hybridism and syncretism, which is explained in terms of the “privatization”, the “individualization” and the “subjectification” of religion. These arguments consider believers’ mobility to be a response – reaction and adjustment – to religion as it is socially instituted. However, this mobility, more than unbinding believers from their official church affiliations, seems to be constituted by – and in turn, affirm and constitute – a wide range of social bonds. The influence of such wider networks of association is due to the fact that religious practices are by nature embedded within a greater range of social practices, and this larger setting influences the believer’s mobile behaviour. Religious experience – as manifesting in everyday life – thus exceeds the normative framework of institutionalized religion. Therefore, religious experience is not simply an expression of autonomy by the individual believer, but is also the expression of his or her belonging to an embedded network of social ties.

For enquiries, please contact Yvan Droz or Yonatan Gez of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva, at: yvan. droz@graduateinstitute.ch and yonatan. gez@graduateinstitue.ch.

10-12.05.2012

Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Faith and Nursing Symposium
Religion and Ethics in Pluralistic Healthcare Contexts

Several recent social trends have rekindled the recognition of the relevance of religion to ethics and nursing. Global migration has resulted in unprecedented religious diversity. At the same time, alternative spiritualities that emphasize personal quests for meaning are increasingly stressed. These social trends have resulted in what are referred to as a post-secular societies, and present an urgent need to acknowledge and draw upon religion and theology from multiple faith traditions in nursing and healthcare ethics. The inclusion of religious perspectives into ethics is needed “at the bedside”, as well as in health ethics and policy in relation to regional, national and global health, with particular emphasis placed on disadvantaged, disvalued and marginalized populations.

https://www.twu.ca/academics/nursing/faith-and-nursing-symposium2/

12-13.05.2012

Erzincan, Turkey

Reconciliation Culture and Religion
International Symposium

"Reconciliation" is a process in which two participants or two groups of people become friendly again after they have quarreled or have not been contactless of each other. In a sense, the term “reconciliation” is a re-uniting and harmonizing means of two hostiles by inviting them to come together within the context of cooperation, agreement, understanding and respect in order to feed up mutual understanding, to stimulate communication, rehabilitate stereotypes, work on some specific problems concerned, to explore similarities and differences and lastly to facilitate the ways to witness and cooperation between them.

There are some urgent problematic questions in the contexts of the “reconciliation culture and religion”; can “the reconciliation in religion” ever be a culture? What are the dimensions of the reconciliation culture in the analytical and cognitive sense? Is the reconciliation a dialogical language? How the reconciliation culture contribute to the pluralist societies in our time? What religion contribute to the reconciliation culture? What are the natures of the reconciliation culture in other religious traditions? What are the historical experiences of the reconciliation culture in the past? Can the Turkish society open widely to the reconciliation culture in the future? What kind of contributions can the modern mass media or communication means contribute to the reconciliation culture? Is is possible the reconciliations between religion and science or religion-modernity?

http://ilahiyatfak.erzincan.edu.tr/gundem.php?al=50

07-08.06.2012

Tarragona, Spain

New Approaches to the Social and Cultural Analysis of Death
XII Colloquium of the Medical Anthropology Network (REDAM)

The twelfth annual conference of the Medical Anthropology Network (REDAM) will focus on new approaches to the study of death in the social sciences, health sciences, and the humanities. Interest in death, a classic object of study, has waned in recent years, and this interdisciplinary symposium is intended to correct this oversight. Death and funerary ritual continue to generate cultural meanings and social responses ranging from avoidance to commodification.

The recent emergence of postmodern perspectives on death is evidence of the important place it has occupied in social thought over the past century. Today the sanitization of death invites analysis in terms of consumerism and aesthetic considerations. Once an occasion of social unity, death now separates people not only socially, but also culturally and in religious terms. Secularized rituals coexist with renewed interest in religious ceremonies, and institutionalized spaces of death with alternative spaces for the commemoration of the deceased. In multicultural societies, the presence of new rituals and meanings in relation to death raises issues that go beyond legal considerations and the practical management of death. Belonging and identity, for both the deceased and the mourners, are expressed in the last act of life and define the ritual process.

http://antropologia.urv.es/2007/content/view/577/1457/lang,en/

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