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You are invited to submit a 250-word abstract proposal to a panel concerned with material culture, ethnicity, and race relations in American Eastern Christianity for the North American Religions section of the American Academy of Religion (November 23-26, 2013 in Baltimore, MD). With your submission, please include your name, preferred e-mail address, institution, rank/seniority, and your department and field of research. Notifications of acceptance will be made by February 15, 2013. Abstracts must be submitted electronically as an e-mail attachment to: Sarah A. Riccardi at Sarah110487@live.missouristate.edu
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Deadline for abstract: February 12, 2013
PANEL ABSTRACT
National, racial, ethnic, and social identities have complex connections to and relationships with religion and spirituality, particularly through the material trappings and sensory cultures of churches and institutions. This panel explores how the sensory cultures of American Eastern Christianity (Orthodox and Catholic) construct, enforce, reinforce, and fracture the cultural poetics of identity, calling attention to discourses on race, ethnicity, and nationalism occurring within and between the various archdioceses that make up American Eastern Christianity. In the vein of theoretical ethnography, the papers presented in this panel combine on-the-ground observations and one-on-one interviews with theories of race, ethnicity, and identity. While scholars of North American religion have begun attending to vernacular practices, sensory cultures, and discourses on race and ethnicity in a variety of Christian traditions, studies of race and ethnicity in American Eastern Christianity have been overlooked in favor of institutional Church practices, histories, and accounts. Yet, archival research and ethnographic, on-the-ground conversations and interactions with the laity offer insights into the complexities of identity in the various constituencies of American Eastern Christianity. This panel helps address a void in studies of race and ethnicity in American Orthodoxy, while adding to the corpus of literature on material studies, conversion identity, and nationalism within contemporary American churches. The questions raised in the papers should have larger implications in terms of American Christianities, ethnic immigration and assimilation, religious pluralism, conversion, and attitudes and discourses on race and ethnicity in relation to group culture and identity. Therefore, we invite paper proposals on issues of race, ethnicity, and identity in relation to material and sensory cultures within the context of the American Eastern Christian experience. Studies involving ethnographic methods for a significant portion of the work are highly preferred.
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