Wounding, meaning, being: managing experience, knowledge and time in contemporary religiosity - Call for Paper

11th EASA Biennial Conference: Maynooth, Ireland
24-27th August 2010

Call for papers:

Wounding, meaning, being: managing experience, knowledge and time in contemporary religiosity

Convenors
Keith Egan (National University of Ireland)
Ruy Blanes (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon)

Description
This workshop invites scholars to tackle issues of experience, knowledge and time in religious contexts. More specifically, we seek to question how the materiality of temporal orientations (i.e. memory and historicity, but also futurology and prediction) entangles with stances of religious experience such as embodiment, memory and transmission, producing specific (successful, critical or precarious) forms of knowing and being that pertain to both the religious and extra-religious sphere.

More specifically, we are thinking about a range of sacred rhythms that join and demarcate self and world, from textual reading (Engelke) and fixation/innovation, personal biographies, hagiographies and ritual calendar celebrations to prediction, prophecy and soteriology, religious interpretations of 'secular history', etc. We are particularly interested in discussing these sacred rhythms in the context of a dialectic of suffering (as an orientation towards the past) and hope (as a projection into the future) that orients the 'lived texture of everyday life' (Orsi) within processes of religious meaning-making. We seek to explore, then, how selves and world intersect in contemporary religiosity to shape the embodiment, experience, imagination and expression of our shared 'struggle for being' (M. Jackson).

The call for papers is now open and closes on 1st March 2010.
Any questions, contact Ruy (ruy.blanes@gmail.com) or Keith (keithmegan@gmail.com). Paper submission must be online at:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2010/panels.php5?PanelID=576