We are writing to share our Call for Proposals for the 2021 AAR, planned for San Antonio, TX, from November 20 to 23. Proposals are due by March 1 at 5 p.m. EST. As always, you are welcome to submit papers/panels on topics that do not appear in the call. This year we are using a new system (INSPIRE) for submission; instructions can be found here:

https://aar-conference.imis-inspire.com/a/page/Instructions/inspire-instructions.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to the co-chairs, Sean McCloud (spmcclou@PROTECTED) and Kristin Scheible (scheiblk@PROTECTED) with questions, especially if it is your first time applying to the AAR.

The presidential theme this year is "Religion, Poverty and Inequality: Contemplating Our Collective Futures,” and we welcome proposals on this topic. As you develop your proposals, do note that AAR will no longer hold 2.5 hour sessions. 

Here is our 2021 CFP:

- Sacrifice in the Time of Plague (potentially co-sponsored with Religion and Economy Unit). During the past year, the novel coronavirus-19 virus clearly has followed existing patterns of inequality when traveling through the social body. In this, scholars have experienced and analyzed the pandemic through a variety of critical approaches, including the study of ideology and capitalist abstraction, biopolitics and the precarity of disposable populations, utopian thinking, critical race theory, and the failure to socially mourn poor and legally and culturally disenfranchised persons. We ask: what determines who lives and who dies when worlds fall apart? We invite paper proposals for a roundtable discussion featuring diverse methodological and disciplinary vantage points that somehow analyze the role of sacrifice in our time of plague.

- A possible co-sponsorship with the Lesbian-Feminisms Unit that invites papers investigating what lesbian-feminisms might contribute to ethnographic methodologies, especially when investigating poor, queer subjectivity. Some examples would include Matt Brim’s 2020 book Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University and Casey Golomski’s 2020 article "Countermythologies."

- "Getting Back to Class: The Practical and Theoretical Poverty of Religious Studies in Dealing with Inequalities"

- “Pandemics, Autocracies, Neoliberal Logics, and the End of Ideas: What is the Role of Critical Religious Studies in a Time of Crises?”

- CTDR will also co-host (with Anthropology of Religion) a session on “Critical Terms for the Ethnography of Religion,” which was postponed from 2020 and for which we do not seek submissions.