“Power, Bodies and Regulation within the context of Religion and Spirituality” – Special Issue of Society & Social Change
Call For Papers:
Special Issue of Society & Social Change
Power, Bodies and Regulation within the context of Religion and Spirituality
Special Issue Editors: Dr Katy Pilcher (Aston University, UK) & Dr Sarah-Jane Page (Aston University, UK)
Embodied and intersectional feminist approaches have emphasised the regulation of bodies (Davis, 1997; Howson, 2004), yet far less attention has been paid to the dynamics of power, regulation and embodiment within religious and spiritual contexts (Page and Pilcher, 2021). This Special Issue seeks to address this gap, taking an intersectional focus to explore the plethora of ways in which people navigate the operation of power and regulation of their bodies within religious and spiritual contexts. In doing so, we invite papers that explore the intersections of gender, class, race and racism, disabilities, sexualities, age(ing), parenthood and childhood, across a variety of religious and spiritual beliefs, practices and spaces. We aim to build upon important work within the sociologies of religion and spirituality which centre intersectionality (Toft, 2012; Page and Yip, 2021) as a mechanism to understand people’s ‘lived’ (McGuire, 2008) experiences of religion and spirituality. We are interested in the ways that regulation may operate at the legal level; within the everyday ‘policing’ of bodies by others; and through the self-surveillance and personal regulation that people practice in relation to their own bodies. In creating this Call, we seek papers that recognise the complexities of navigating power and regulation, and which consider that people’s embodied resistance strategies may not always appear in neat, familiar packages. As Mahmood (2005) has rightly questioned – why do we only recognise embodied agency when people are explicitly resisting, particularly in religious environments?
Articles could consider (although they are certainly not limited to) the following themes:
- Religious leadership inclusions and exclusions
- Exclusion/inclusion of trans and non-binary people within religious/spiritual contexts
- Violence, abuse, coercive control
- Identity construction
- Space, time and embodied context
- Racism and resistance to racism
- Religion/spirituality as a resource or sanctuary
- Queer sexualities
- Disabilities
- Legal regulations, power and restrictions
- Pleasure and regulation
Deadline for Abstract Submission: 3rd September 2021. Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words to k.pilcher@aston.ac.uk and s.page1@aston.ac.uk
Deadline for Full Paper Submission (for accepted abstracts): 31st July 2022
Article Style Guidelines:
We are looking for original research articles, which will be subject to peer-review. If your article contains original data/fieldwork, please ensure a methodology section is present.
Articles have a maximum word count of 12,000 and may contain no more than 15 Figures/Tables.
Please see the Frontiers webpage for full information on style guidelines: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/sections/society-and-social-change#author-guidelines
About Society & Social Change journal: Society & Social Change is a new, cutting-edge, feminist journal, co-founded by Dr Sharron FitzGerald (University of Oslo, Norway/University of Munich, Germany) and Dr Anna Carline (University of Liverpool, UK). Society & Social Change is a platform for feminist academics and researchers interested in developing and supporting trans and interdisciplinary scholarship located at the intersection of law, gender and sexuality. A core component of our editorial vision entails a commitment to the feminist principles of social justice, ethics, equality and rights. Our mission is to champion innovative feminist analyses of the intersections of law, gender and sexuality at the domestic, international and transnational levels, drawing upon a range of disciplines. We aim is to publish feminist scholarship that raises new questions in the field, and that promotes new ways on ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ research. What makes Society & Social Change cutting edge is not just that it aims to advance trans and interdisciplinary feminist thinking on law, gender and sexuality analyses, but rather it is its effort to stimulate new conceptual and methodological approaches to feminist research that serve as catalysts for social justice and social transformation through our commitment to ‘good trouble’.
