This interdisciplinary workshop – November 5-7, proposal deadline March 15 – invites scholars to ask what it means to make a promise in a society characterized by legal and religious pluralism. In such conditions of multiplicity, how are public promises made meaningful through appeals to varied transcendent powers and diverse traditions of material culture and embodied emotion? Read more here.
In this final workshop in the Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies project, in collaboration with the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law, we convene a comparative conversation about oaths, treaties, and covenants as speech acts or performances grounded on transcendental referents, such as God, the Creator, or a future yet to come, and enacted through ritual and material exchange. At a time of environmental devastation when making promises for the future seems both urgent and futile, this workshop examines the politics of the promise in interdisciplinary perspectives. This 2.5 day workshop brings together scholars from religious studies, law, history, politics, and anthropology, and other relevant disciplines whose research focuses on “making promises” in a range of historical and regional contexts. Swearing oaths of citizenship and allegiance, negotiating treaties as “sacred promises” between nations, and legitimizing relations of kinship through state-sanctioned ceremonies of marriage and adoption are all examples of ritualized promises in which secular politics and religious commitments conjoin.These public promises are, in fact, far more than examples: oaths, treaties, and covenants are generative sites of relationship out of which the very concepts and practices of religion, the sacred, and the secular have emerged. Working towards a book edited by the organizers, the workshop will bring new theoretical and empirical attention to public promises as authoritative discourses generated at the confluence of religion, law, ritual, material culture, and emotion. Participants will pre-circulate 5-page papers.
• Historical, comparative approaches to public promises legitimated by the state and/or sacred referents, such as oaths of citizenship or allegiance
• How legacies of Christianity and monarchy in European and North America nations have shaped the politics of public promises in multi-religious jurisdictions
• Comparative analysis of treaties as nation-to-nation-based promises emerging within networks of Indigenous and European diplomacy
• The role of public promises in debates and discourses of migration (e.g. asylum claims, public regulation of dress, material culture, in citizenship ceremonies)
• Other relevant topics are welcome!
Support for travel and accommodation is available for all accepted participants; post-docs and ABD graduate students are encouraged to apply. Please submit the following by March 15, 2020 to Dr. Gregory Fewster at greg.fewster@mail.utoronto.ca:
• 500-word abstract of paper as pdf (include relevant image if appropriate)
• 2-page C.V.as pdf
Successful proposals will be notified by March 31, 2020