30/06/2026 14:30 - 17:30

HALL: Parenzo - A15

Contact: Wiesgickl S.

Chair: Lunkwitz D., Sinn S., Wiesgickl S.

In recent years, global religious history has established itself as a thought-provoking paradigm for examining global entanglements and discourses within religious history. Known for considering the contributions of local communities in challenging Western academic discourse and knowledge systems, it aims at rewriting global discourses. However, its expansion into the fields of ecology and religion is still in its infancy.


New publications point to epistemic injustices and exclusions produced by inequalities inscribed in discourse. They tend to overcome concepts such as traditional ecological knowledge or essentializations that postulate an unquestioned closeness of Indigenous groups to nature. Instead, local concepts should be used to overcome dichotomies and inequalities and promote ideas that advance multi-perspective and planetary views, giving voice to a multitude of beings.


This panel will explore questions relating to the ontological turn, decolonial epistemologies, and indigenous knowledge systems with reference to ecological and economic issues. We welcome papers that explore the topic from a historical, systematic, or empirical perspective. We particularly welcome papers that bridge the gap between anthropological and social science theories and religious studies. We are interested in questions relating to different conceptions of ecology and economy, diverse cosmologies, and theories of the non-human beyond Western epistemes and approaches.


In this way, we address the issue of inequality in two ways: firstly, in the context of local and global ecological entanglements, and secondly, from a decolonial perspective that questions the role religions play in the production and overcoming of dichotomies surrounding "nature," "culture," "economy," and "ecology."