Events

Vibrant religious activities in cities have received much recent scholarly attention. Yet, the gendered and bodily dimensions of the relation between religion and the city have been widely left out in existing research. This conference takes gender and the body as lenses of analysis to study urban religion.

Rather than the urban merely impacting the religious, the latter can also serve as a driving force behind urban developments. Such an intrinsic relationship between religion and the city becomes apparent, for example, in how people’s religious and urban aspirations are often closely intertwined. Bodily religious practices can be powerful means for people to work toward their urban aspirations, both on special occasions, such as life cycle rituals or religious festivals, and in urban everyday life. These practices are often highly gendered, both in the public and private sphere. This conference aims at investigating how bodily religious practices create (gendered) urban spaces, how people use their bodies to pursue their religious and urban aspirations, and how their bodies become sites of gender negotiations.

Recent scholarship on religion has undergone a shift in focus from the textual forms of religious knowledge to the material aspects of religion, including the bodily and affective dimensions. Furthermore, research on religion and gender demonstrates the importance of intersectionality in the analysis of religious practices. These important dimensions do not find much attention in existing research on the relation between religion and the city. At the same time, most research on the city in relation to gender or the body does not consider the important role that religion often plays in these relations. The mutually missing attention to these issues in the respective fields of religious, gender, and urban studies becomes especially apparent in research on Asia. The gap between the importance of the body in religious practices in Asia and its scant attention in scholarship on religion in Asian cities is striking.

This conference brings together scholars from different fields to think jointly about the role that religion plays in how people imagine, experience, live in, and appropriate the city, with a particular focus on gendered and class-inflected, bodily and sensory religious experiences. The main research questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

• What are the theoretical and methodological possibilities and implications when taking gender and the body as lenses of analysis for the study of the relation between religion and the city?
• How do bodily religious practices co-constitute the city? How do bodily religious practices contribute to how the city is imagined and experienced?
• How do bodies become sites of urban religious negotiations? For example, how do bodies of religious practitioners reflect different dimensions of negotiations of religious diversity, such as spectacle and conflict? Or how do bodily religious practices reflect time constraints of busy urban lives?
• How do bodies become sites of gender negotiations in urban religious practices? How do gendered notions of the body in rituals relate to notions of gender roles outside the ritual context?
• What can a focus on gendered and bodily religious practices tell us about the relation between private and public religion in urban contexts?

CONFERENCE FORMAT

The conference format is synchronous-asynchronous. Several weeks before the final discussion panels, paper drafts and pre-recorded presentations have been circulated amongst discussants and presenters only. Conference participants are invited to ask questions, write comments, and engage in discussions before the final discussion panels on 25-27 January 2021, to be held virtually via Zoom. On the 3 days of the online conference, paper presentations will not be featured. Each discussion panel will start directly with a discussant’s comments on the papers, followed by responses by paper authors, leaving the rest of the time for questions and answers.

CONFERENCE CONVENOR

Ms Natalie LANG
Postdoctoral Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this virtual workshop has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.