03/07/2026 09:00
- 12:20
HALL: Pola - A107
Chair:
Drzewiecka E.,
Lubanska M.
Contact:
Lubanska M.
This panel examines religious temporalities, particularly the concept of kairos, and their role in shaping reflection and responses to the problem of social inequality. Our point of reference is the experience of kairos as a special time, a critical moment of reflection or change. Rather than approaching inequality solely as structural or juridical, it foregrounds temporal frameworks that shape how social difference may be experienced and interpreted. Contributions draw on perspectives from various academic disciplines, showing how temporal frameworks can reframe, bracket, or otherwise alter the experience of social hierarchies without necessarily overturning them. By attending to religious time as a critical lens, the panel highlights the interplay between temporality, agency, and social difference.
We consider kairos in both descriptive and prescriptive terms: descriptively, as a critical moment retrospectively identified as a turning point, and prescriptively, as a call to action oriented toward possible futures. We explore religious temporal framings that mobilize such kairotic moments in relation to inequality and exclusion, including their entanglement with eschatological, apologetic, and normative traditions, as well as with religious vocabularies that are articulated, silenced, or imposed.
Submissions that investigate religious temporalities as offering forms of agency under conditions of constraint are particularly welcome. Papers may explore historical, philosophical, or ethnographic cases, highlighting modes of inhabiting social roles without being fully defined by structural positions, and are encouraged to consider implications beyond explicitly theological contexts.
