AAS-in-Asia Call for Proposals

Dear all,

I'm Yukun Zeng, Postdoc Fellow at the University of Michigan. With my colleague Rafadi Hakim, Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, we are organizing a panel titled "Rethinking Religions via Social Movements in Asia". We are still looking for a panelist and/or discussant/chair. Please see the abstract below.

In 1893, a group of spiritual leaders from Asia attended the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago-a meeting that incubated a sense of commensurability across Abrahamic religions and Asian spiritual teachings, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Nevertheless, such forms of commensuration are irreducibly connected to the universalist aspiration of European perspectives (Masuzawa 2005).

In contrast to these universalizing viewpoints that view religion as a set of discrete categories, this panel recontextualizes religion within the global flow of heterogeneous social movements throughout Asia. Rather than thinking of religion as preconceived categories, it examines religions as global movements that are perpetually fluid, contested, and mutually constitutive at multiple junctures. By inviting scholars who attend to socio-religious lives throughout Asia, it investigates the lived experience of religions through the methodological lens of social movements. To do so, it first recognizes the fact that religion, broadly defined, plays a vital role in social change throughout Asia, be it through social charity, grassroots education, populist mobilization, or moralizing communicative genres. Secondly, by starting with the perspective of social movement, this panel unsettles the often presumed congruence between religion and society (Geertz 1966). What if the idea of "religion" questions and challenges social norms and prescriptive assumptions, rather than merely serving as a reflection of social structures? Third, this panel does not reduce social movements into teleologies, which emic religious readings of reform or revolution often do. It takes failures and friction across global imaginaries of religion seriously to examine how religions and social movements shape each other within and across Asia.

Please contact me at yukunz@umich.edu if you are interested.

Best

Yukun and Fadi

------------------------------
Yukun Zeng
PhD Student
University of Chicago
yukunz@umich.edu
------------------------------

Dear all,

I'm Yukun Zeng, Postdoc Fellow at the University of Michigan. With my colleague Rafadi Hakim, Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, we are organizing a panel titled "Rethinking Religions via Social Movements in Asia". We are still looking for a panelist and/or discussant/chair. Please see the abstract below.

In 1893, a group of spiritual leaders from Asia attended the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago-a meeting that incubated a sense of commensurability across Abrahamic religions and Asian spiritual teachings, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Nevertheless, such forms of commensuration are irreducibly connected to the universalist aspiration of European perspectives (Masuzawa 2005).

In contrast to these universalizing viewpoints that view religion as a set of discrete categories, this panel recontextualizes religion within the global flow of heterogeneous social movements throughout Asia. Rather than thinking of religion as preconceived categories, it examines religions as global movements that are perpetually fluid, contested, and mutually constitutive at multiple junctures. By inviting scholars who attend to socio-religious lives throughout Asia, it investigates the lived experience of religions through the methodological lens of social movements. To do so, it first recognizes the fact that religion, broadly defined, plays a vital role in social change throughout Asia, be it through social charity, grassroots education, populist mobilization, or moralizing communicative genres. Secondly, by starting with the perspective of social movement, this panel unsettles the often presumed congruence between religion and society (Geertz 1966). What if the idea of "religion" questions and challenges social norms and prescriptive assumptions, rather than merely serving as a reflection of social structures? Third, this panel does not reduce social movements into teleologies, which emic religious readings of reform or revolution often do. It takes failures and friction across global imaginaries of religion seriously to examine how religions and social movements shape each other within and across Asia.

Please contact me at yukunz@umich.edu if you are interested.

Best

Yukun and Fadi

------------------------------
Yukun Zeng
PhD Student
University of Chicago
yukunz@umich.edu
------------------------------