Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Section
The Interdisciplinary Study of Religions (ISR) section of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) (http://wwwp.oakland.edu/ais/) aims to bring comprehensive, integrated insights from multiple disciplines to the study of religions as complex human phenomena. Insights may be brought to bear on religions or religious phenomena from humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, along with other areas such as arts and professions. Commonly religions are understood to include ideas and behaviors that engage super-human agency through diverse strands of human culture from history to the present-day. In a context of multiple approaches to such complex phenomena, this section seeks to establish and highlight critical interdisciplinary insights that may be overlooked or neglected by single discipline studies of religions.
The ISR section seeks panel, poster, workshop, and/or paper proposals on any interdisciplinary topic related to the study of religions — submitted as a 150-200 word abstract to bennettc@oakland.edu no later than 1 March 2019. A reply regarding acceptance will be returned by 15 March 2019 to allow those that may not be included in the section to re-propose to the AIS conference at-large (not within the section) by the deadline of 1 April 2019. Accepted proposals for the section will be submitted together to conference organizers by 1 April 2019.
Special interest is given to studies that discuss/employ/integrate two or more disciplines from across natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and/or professions. In particular the ISR section of AIS seeks:
- topics that address religions or related phenomena in relation to this year’s conference theme of “Interdisciplinarity in Global Contexts”, specifically one of the subthemes:
- from local to global / ‘glocalization’
- people, concepts, and methods crossing borders
- methodologies of interdisciplinary education and research
- adjusting interdisciplinarity towards future challenges
- problem- or case-based work on religions or religious phenomena that explicitly employs/integrates two or more disciplines
- interdisciplinary methods, concepts, or media as applied to scholarship/research on religions or religious phenomena
- work explicitly engaging consilience and divergence in the study of religions, including mutual consilience and/or divergence between sciences and humanities/arts
- interdisciplinary study of religions and phenomenology
- interdisciplinary study of religions in conversation with immigration and pluralism
- topics that address interdisciplinary study of religions in conversation with the arts & humanities
- topics that address interdisciplinary study of religions in conversation with health & aging