Dr Kelly J. Baker and Dr David Dault will lead an interactive keynote:
Public Scholarship As Translation
Implicit Religion US 2023: Integrating Foci
We have eight spaces available for the Implicit Religion US conference, for audience participation only.
Registration closes on 30 May 2023, Midnight PST US.
If you would like to attend please use the 'Contact Us' form on the home page.
The conference is online and free of charge on 31st May 10 - 6pm CST, including the keynote delivered by Dr Kelly J. Baker and Dr David Dault focused on public scholarship. The audience spaces are available to students, early career scholars, independent scholars, and marginalised scholars only.
Implicit Religion was developed as a set of analytical tools during the height of secularisation thesis, understanding what the thesis did not account for: there are commitments held outside of religious institutions that have as much salience to those individuals and communities (Bailey, 1997). Those commitments need to be studied within their own context by focusing on their integrating foci and their intensive concerns with extensive effects. This conference takes as its theme “integrating foci.”
Approaches to the study of religion need to be willing to step away from institutional forms of religion, colonial-settler structures of religion, and markers of religiosity that sever or ignore the connections to power, especially political power. It is just as important to engage with analytical tools that enable us to take seriously the ways in which people are finding meaning and purpose in life in arenas outside traditional religious institutions if we are to understand why they hold as much importance and value to those individuals as a traditional religious practice or belief holds for its followers. Understanding that religion is just one facet of the human experience is key to exploring the significance of integrating foci.
Integrating foci are the myriad of ways in which aspects of the commitments we hold deeply, or religiously, help individuals and groups to integrate what they stand for with who they are. Integrating foci are based on the premise of “a point of intersection between two [or more] components …implicit religion will reveal itself in those focal points that integrate wider areas of life” (Bailey, 2010: 23). Integrating foci generally reveal themselves by asking questions such as “what do people, groups, communities, professions, institutions, corporations and nations use to integrate their commitment into the rest of their life and its vagaries? In what ways are the integrating foci related to or born from the commitment?” (Stewart, 2017: 12).
Suggested areas within the theme included but were not limited to:
* Religion and colonial / postcolonial / decolonial efforts
* Integrating the future (AI, transhumanism, scientific, medical, and technological innovations in contemporary religious and implicit religious life)
* Integrating resistance and/or agency within communities; research design
* The integration, significance, and rejection / resistance to knowledge (religious, political, community, historical, medical, and legal) and knowing
* The integrating foci of music, orality and / or sound within religious communities or ‘secular’ subcultures and communities
* The integration (and / or appropriation) of Black history, Black nostalgia, Black creativity within communities, institutions, subcultures, and commerce
* Integrating LGBT, Race, Ethnicity, legal status, Disability, Gender, Class or caste into research design and analysis / understandings of the religious world(s) of individuals and communities
* Prejudice and conflict arising from integrating foci or perceptions of it
* Micro-, meso-, and macro-level studies integrating foci of religious plurality; religious meaning; activism; white supremacy; misogynoir; antisemitism; Sinophobia; climate crisis
* Integrating foci and ‘authenticity’
* Integrating foci and popular culture
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