Course calendar

BU-RVS-seminar

Nov 19-20 2019

Call for abstracts

The theme

The 2019 joint seminar between Boston University (BU) and the Research School Religion, Values and Society (RVS) will investigate the field of religion, values and social practices. The ambition of this seminar is to analyze how theories of practice enable expanded understandings of religion and values.

Within the broad field of religion, values and society the seminar looks for empirical contributions to the analysis of religion and/or values as social and material, as practice and inter-acted, and as hybrid and negotiated. This means that the seminar is open to a broad range of issues.

The 2019 seminar will investigate religion and values as social practices. By “social practice” we refer to the broad and heterogeneous tradition which understands practice as a collective phenomenon, as something more than the sum of individual actions. Practices, not the human mind, are understood as the central phenomenon in human life (Schatzki 2001). Social here also includes the material, natural and embodied.

The seminar aims at exploring different theories of practice, at different ways of theorizing practice. The broad range of practice theories come from education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and so on. This means that a typical paper will start with one or more explicit practice theory/theories and use that theory in the empirical study of a case of religion or values.

Interdisciplinary approaches are useful in practice-research in order to clarify how sociological, psychological, educational, theological and philosophical aspects interplay in the making of religion and values. Different kinds of empirical methodologies are wanted, and the papers should have a theorizing aim. This means that the focus is contemporary and empirical-theoretical.

Abstracts

At this point, we invite BU students and RVS students to submit abstract of papers. The seminar is restricted to a limited number of participants, so the abstracts are also applications for participation. The abstracts will be evaluated by the seminar committee. We encourage co-authorship with a supervisor or senior researcher – but also accept individual PhD-student abstracts and papers. The abstract should describe the theme, aim, research questions, theoretical perspectives, data material and methods and possible contribution of the research and how it is situated in existing research. The abstract should not exceed 500 words and submitted to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by April 30th.

Full papers

The full paper (6000 words) is due Oct 15.