11/07/2025 08:30
- 17:30
HALL: Lecture Hall 42
Proponent:
Hasan F.,
Wurts K.
Chair:
Muller W.
Speaker:
Breitfeld G.,
Foster D.,
Hammond J.,
Hasan F.,
Heymann B.,
Jacobs D.,
Johrendt L.,
Prof Dr Ernst-Auga U.,
Raschke C.,
Stenske L.,
Wallenböck U.,
Wurts K.,
Zhang H.
This panel draws inspiration from Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledge to explore its application to the study of religion and its role in social transformation. Understanding religion as a type of situated knowledge is a productive heuristic for examining processes of social transformation. Recognizing religious knowledge as situated makes it possible to include multiple social, disciplinary, and epistemic perspectives. This involves an understanding that it is not only recognized representatives of religious institutions who effectively act as religious agents or produce religious knowledge. When we see religious knowledge as a productive resource for generating understanding, 'religion' recovers its status as a resource for social transformation. Such an approach helps to circumvent overdetermined narratives which would cast 'religion' as an order of 'non-knowledge' over and opposed to secular 'rationality'.
Taking developments from the German-South African International Research Training Group (IRTG) Transformative Religion as its point of departure, this open panel invites papers from across the EAA that examine the different ways religious concepts, discourses, practices, and materialities function as resources for social transformation. Submissions might address how local or indigenous knowledge and practices are recovered to challenge the impositions of colonial religion or how such recoveries drive new and entangled ways of knowing and understanding religion in globalized societies. The intent is to cast a wide net-contributions may be quite differently-situated in their cultural, religious, or geographical focus. The submissions might illuminate how religious transformation is driven by various socio-cultural factors and how such encounters of transformation produce new and entangled ways of knowing and understanding 'religion' in contemporary and globalized societies.
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